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.