Ricerc@Sapienza

Following out recommendations of Italian planning scholars
and professionals alike, we explored the work of thirty planning
practitioners who promised to be diverse, thoughtful and experienced,
given their long involvement in urban and regional practices2.
We then selected the fourteen profiles and stories collected
in this book: detailed struggles over projects or cases that our
Italian interviewees selected themselves as revealing the actual
challenges and opportunities of their work.

Based on a collaboration of Italian and U.S. scholars, this book presents co-generated, grounded practice stories, or “profiles of practitioners” in the emerging 21st Century Italian context. In the last twenty years, John Forester has argued that first person voice, practice-focused oral histories can make significant contributions to undergraduate and graduate education, in both urban studies and professional planning programs.

This chapter focuses on the need to maximize the education and training of young Italian urban planners in relation to the major challenges connected to the present condition of the country as a place with a strong level of corruption, malfeasance, and Mafia influence . As has been demonstrated in previous research by the author (see references from 2008a to 2016b), these phenomena create strong and illegal imbalances of power that inevitably influence the work of planners in that they affect urban practices in different ways.