URBANA. International Journal of Urban Policies and Studies

Urban@it – Centro Nazionale di Studi per le Politiche urbane (National Centre for Urban Policy Studies), was established in 2014 with the aim of building a dialogue between Universities and policymakers, so as to offer cognitive support to the development of policies for and by cities. The center was immediately characterized by an intense publishing activity, the main subject of which is the Annual Report on Cities.

Around Urban@it and the working groups that have been formed by connecting researchers from different Universities and disciplines, many opportunities for discussion and reflection have been created. While they feed into the Center’s statutory activities – first and foremost the production of the Report – they also help to establish a heritage of shared dialogues and experiences and open up new research perspectives.

With the aim of enhancing and disseminating these experiences as much as possible, we decided to transform the Working Papers, which we have been publishing since 2016 on a semi-annual basis, into a Series open to contributions from the broadest spectrum of disciplines – and people – active in the field of urban policy studies.

Now that the Working Papers Urban@it Series has a defined editorial format and frequency (https://www.urbanit.it/rivista-online/), we think it is time to take up a new challenge.

In a time such as the one we are living – very stimulating from the perspective of the implementation of urban policies and projects, but surely not without uncertainties and great contradictions – the engagement of Universities in the realization of the “great change” stimulated by European and national policies is intensified and the time for reflection and sedimentation of experiences is fatally shortened, in the urgency of implementing the right ecological transition. In such a unique situation (as rich in stimuli as it is limited in the possibilities for self-reflection) we deem it useful to open a space capable of connecting the strongly “operational” tradition of the Urban@it network with the possibilities for perspective exploration.

With this intention, “URBANA. Journal of Urban Policies and Studies” was born.

A journal that Urban@it opens to the contribution of studies and research on urban policies applied to the transformation of cities.

The focus will be Italian cities and territories, with a particular attention to the transformations of metropolitan cities, “inner areas”, urban and social peripheries, in a perspective of openness and comparison towards the international scene. This solicits the contribution of a much wider network than the 16 member Universities of Urban@it.

URBANA therefore proposes to “return to the city,” prioritizing reflection on the operation of public policies: requirements, effectiveness, forms of governance and tools as enablers of innovation and decision-making change. This ideally closes the trajectory that Urban@it has pursued to date, in which cities are the starting point and indeed the very premise of the association’s existence.

The journal aims to set out to investigate how cities work, who owns them, what is the influence of public policies on the dynamics of urban transformation, what contribution Universities formulate in such processes, gathering input and reflections on the ability of cities to respond adaptively, innovatively and effectively to the challenges and changing nature of a now structural crisis.

Through a series of Call for Papers and thematic sections, URBANA will provide a space for reflection on the ideas, policies, projects, actors and practices that continuously produce the city. The ambition of the journal is also to establish a platform for knowledge exchange that brings together academics from different disciplinary backgrounds, policymakers and practitioners, consolidating and expanding as much as possible the collaborative network that Urban@it has been implementing throughout the years.

Therefore, we invite you to follow Urban@it’s website and information channels to stay updated on new calls and topics and to contribute to our reflections around the common cause of Cities.

Valentina Orioli
Nicola Martinelli