Blog Post 1. Analyzing My Audience.

    I’m publishing this blog post after having just settled on a topic to write about this quarter: urban redevelopment in the San Francisco Bay Area with a particular focus on the projects occurring at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and the Leona Quarry. My next course of action is to consider the audience for my work.

    It would probably be best to start at the top and narrow my audience down from there, getting more and more specific as I go along, just as we did in class. At the top level, the people with a stake in this topic are residents of the United States. I am fairly certain that the laws surrounding urban redevelopment are commonplace all around the nation, so people living in urban areas all across the country should be able to find common ground on this topic through their shared experiences with city development. At the level below that, a big portion of my audience would have to be folks living in the Bay Area. There’s a good chance that, if you live in the Bay, you live in close proximity to a large, busy, densely populated, highly-developed urban agglomeration. Maybe you live closer to the outskirts, or maybe you live in the suburbs. But no matter what, for most people, interaction with one of the Bay’s towns or cities is a large part of your day-to-day life, even if this interaction just involves traveling through. 

    And at last, the final layer of my audience. This would consist of ordinary San Francisco Bay Area residents who live near a city, have a limited understanding of the history and practice of urban redevelopment in the region, and may be wary of the potentially shady machinations of real estate companies. I would consider myself one of these people. That’s right, I don’t understand all there is to know about urban redevelopment in the Bay myself. But that’s part of why I drafted my writing proposal on this issue. Investigating it and learning about it is part of the journey I’m embarking on in this class during this quarter.

    This topic has a wide range of expertise, for sure. There are students, journalists, researchers, and consultants who engage with city policy, social sciences, urban planning, land management, and real estate speculation for their careers or degrees. Then, there are folks like my parents. They’ve seen their fair share of construction sites, they’ve talked to their city councils to have projects approved, they’ve been living in the Bay Area for a few decades, and they know a little about urban redevelopment. Then there’s me. I probably know less than that, but have read an article or two and have been around the block a little bit. And then there are folks who know even less than that and may or may not care much about any of it. My goal is to inform, teach, and persuade, and my target audience is everyone who doesn’t know a ton more than I do. This topic has a wide range of expertise, but I’m aiming to enlighten merely a section of the people whom this topic affects.

    Lastly, I’d like to drop the link for an excellent blog in here. I brought it up back in my proposal, but I’m going to go into more detail on it here. The author of this blog, Andrew Alden, is a former KQED Science Correspondent and lifelong native of Oaktown. He’s written about the earth sciences for various outlets and he treks all around the city to observe geologically interesting locations, snap photographs, and update his blog. It’s fair to say that he’s well-versed in geology, having spent his whole life writing about it. However, he’s also spent his whole life here in the East Bay, documenting the changes that the city undergoes throughout the years. He’s an ordinary resident of the city like the rest of us. What makes this relevant is the fact that he’s paid close attention to the Leona Quarry as it’s evolved and developed for the many decades he’s lived here, and has picked up a healthy dose of knowledge on how urban redevelopment has altered the quarry, and how things might change next. The comments on this post, and on other related posts, give us a tiny glimpse at some of the people talking about this topic. They’re ordinary folks. People who live in Oakland. They’d used to ride bikes up on the hill before houses got plopped down on top of the quarry’s ridge. They’d used to walk the trails down near the aqueducts, like me. They’re worried about the risk of landslides and runoff down below the quarry. They’ve probably seen a good amount of urban redevelopment in their day, but they’re normal citizens, with some background info and some questions and concerns about the redevelopment effort.

    It’s pretty interesting, isn’t it? His blog is primarily focused on the geology of Oakland and the East Bay, and his audience is full of Oaklanders who are also interested in geology, but because he has quite a few posts about the Leona Quarry, where urban redevelopment is taking place, we get to see his view on a topic that isn’t really directly related to geology—and get to see the commenters, his own audience, ordinary residents of the city, chime in as well. I thought it was pretty interesting how that happened.