Italian planning overview and perspectives through stories and profiles. Notes from a critical pragmatist research on planning practices

Applying Forester’s method (Forester, 1999; 2009; 2013; Laws and Forester, 2015) for creating ‘profiles of practitioners’ and gathering ‘practice stories’ in the Italian context, we explored complex, grounded examples of the work of thirty practitioners recommended to us as diverse, thoughtful and experienced, practitioners differently involved in urban and regional practices ranging from environmental and community mapping, information systems, master planning and neighborhood planning to urban design and landscape plan making. Our first result has been to produce a rich repertoire of profiles and stories about carefully designed processes that have been able to respond to real problems in surprisingly successful ways: ways that are inclusive, responsive, efficient, well-informed. In particular, the profiles combine and integrate each practitioner’s background, training, early work and situated tasks in the work at hand; the stories of practices reveal details about ‘the hows’ of dealing with practical challenges, opportunities, successes and failures.