Dissertation – Such a Terrifying Word

My dissertation proposal is due tomorrow.

Our topic is anything within the scope of town planning, which is vast. There are so many topics that I find interesting or that I feel I can provide original research to. Personally I would love to write a dissertation which is worth spreading outside of the markers room, to publish something as a white paper and that provides influence, of any degree, within the built environment would be such a great feeling. My voice as a writer at this stage, I would imagine, comes without much merit. Perhaps the importance of quoting some of the 'big guns' in social science may give it more weight?

I have to produce a dissertation on mixed topics. To stick to a single topic would leave me constantly wanting to work on topics out with the questions remit. Ideally it would be a mix of the following:

• Politics and planning are so closely linked that a dissertation highlighting the connections would be fairly simple, yet the courses we have completed in the past have strayed away from this. The major exception is the battle between left wing and right wing approaches to planning. Is this what a traditional planner marking it would want to read or find worthy of a good grade.
• Urban utopias are fantastic from the likes of Ebenezer Howard and La Corbusier though they are as far connected to modern policy as possible. The growth in urban design is something which has not been applied to these utopias.
• An interesting theme which I think will have great resonance on whatever topic I choose came from our housing lecturer last week. Basically the failures of high rise construction was because it was a large solution to a large problem. Taken from a purely macro-economic perspective the justification for this approach seems infallible, though consequently failed. Hence a mix between macro-economic and micro-economic approaches to our built environment inequalities would cover the vast plethora of issues and problems a macro solution brings up.
• Polarization of income groups in an area, for me, is the death of the integrated community. I have a gut feeling that this polarization was planned in Livingston. Through the course of the dissertation I want to find out if this is true and then try to establish how urban design can be used to retrofit a community with more of a social mix.
• Local, regional and national policies are a hotbed of proposals and quantities of offices and houses that need produced. A perfect resource for incentives to push towards whichever side of development requested.
• The balance between economic, social and environmental issues is crucial in such a large project. Perhaps break the whole thing into 3 main chapters? I will need to consult the textbooks...
• The RTPI Assessment of Professional Competence is another factor in this, reading through it with a view to how I could improve it in future is probably a great habit to get into. Hopefully this will improve the quality of my writing overall. It should also make the actual APC in 3 years time that little bit easier.

Cutting all that down into a single well worded sentence is going to be a herculean task. At least I am not struggling to find things to write about. Whether my lecturers will simply scoff and disagree with my approach is a different matter. Removing the proverbial digit from ones aperture is the key!

Dale