About us

Planum - The Journal of Urbanism
registered by the Court of Rome on 4/12/2001 under the number 514/2001
ISSN 1723-0993

• Editor
Patrizia Gabellini
patrizia.gabellini@polimi.it
• Deputy Editor
Marco Cremaschi
m.cremaschi@uniroma3.it
• Editor in Chief
Giulia Fini
fini.giulia.planumnet@gmail.com
• Editorial Board
Bertrando Bonfantini, Andrea Di Giovanni, Giovanni Ginocchini
• Editorial Staff
Claudia Botti, Salvatore Caschetto, Marina Reissner, Arman Fadaei, Cecilia Maria Saibene
planum.staff@gmail.com
• Editor of the section Movies
Leonardo Ciacci
• Past contributors
Diana Cerri ("News and Events" Section Editor), Pietro Elisei, Ariane Sept,
Petra Potz, Martina Koll-Schretzenmayr, Catherine Vandermeulen, Marta Ponti (trainee), Annalisa Gorgitano (trainee).

WHAT
Planum was the first European www and on-line journal entirely devoted to the planners and to the whole community of people involved in city development and the protection of the environment. Planum may be the ideal follower of paper journals and magazines that have been for some 90 years the sole yet unique tool for practitioners and scholars to disseminate culture, models and experiences throughout Europe. Its box of tools is still the same of scientific journals: the making up of information, critic judgements, opinions, evaluations, values, presumptions which are the foundations of public policies and actions. Planum plays the role of the virtual interface of the European town and regional planning world. It offers several services to the whole of the "actors of the city": scholars, researchers and students, consultant planners, policy-makers especially at the local and regional level, employees in planning & design firms, people in technical professions. This happens in three ways:

recovering and organising the large amount of information about cities and regions which is piled in different public and private institutions, primarily in the archives of a few eminent scientific journals
creating a forum for a highly qualified professional activity
providing a set of services disseminating information towards professional users, stakeholders and decision-makers

WHO
Planum is property of INU (Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica, Italy) and managed by an international association, the "Planum Association".

WHEN AND WHY
The proposal for an on-line European Journal of Planning was first discussed at the workshop on "Town Planning Journals and Dissemination of the Discipline", organised at the 2nd Biennial of Towns and Planners (Rome, 12th September 1997) by INU (Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica, the Association that groups Italian town planners together).

The workshop was aimed to investigate the feasibility of an electronic journal of planning which would be jointly edited by the numerous journals working in the field of planning theory and practice. The proposal was discussed by the editors in chief of the main European journals in Great Britain (TPR), France (Urbanisme), Germany (Raumplanung), Spain (Urbanismo), Portugal (Sociedade e Territòrio), Switzerland (DISP), and Italy (Urbanistica).
This meeting was been the starting point for an intensive effort which has developed the first release of "Planum" in September 1999. The project aimed to favour the cohesion among EU member states and regions, activating an exchange network of information, reviews and proposals for urban design, regional planning and city management. For that aim, in 2000 it was presented and funded by…

The partners of the original project were:

INU, Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica - Roma (co-ordinator)
DISP, Dokumente und Informationen zur Schweizerischen Orts-, Regional- und Landesplanung - Zürich
FNAU, Fédération Nationale d'Agences d'Urbanisme - Paris
IfR e.V., Informationskreis für Raumplanung e.V. - Dortmund
IEMB, Institut d'Estudis Metropolitans de Barcelona - Barcelona
TUB, Institut für Stadt- und Regionalplanung - Berlin
ST, Sociedade e Territòrio - Lisboa TPR
TPR, Town Planning Review - Liverpool

PERFORMANCE
Planum counts more than 1200 contacts a day on average (for over 9.500 pages 38.000 hits), 6.000 impressions and 15.300 view pages monthly. More than 20.500 planners (practitioners, researchers, governmental employees, local administrators, architects etc.) in over 90 countries of the world receive our periodical electronic newsletter. The Planum Internet Community consists of about 40.000 users.

TO PUBLISH
A wide and enthusiast participation is the basic condition to sustain Planum. To avoid the possibility of sending materials with a wrong editing or not publishable for technical lacks, there are some instructions for authors.
The texts proposed for publishing in the section Planum Magazine are evaluated by 2 referees chosen by the editorial board according to their expertise. The two referees are part of the accademic world and are experts in different fields relateted to the topic's articles.

• To submit an article's proposal or a new contribution please contact:
Patrizia Gabellini: patrizia.gabellini@polimi.it
Marco Cremaschi: m.cremaschi@uniroma3.it
Giulia Fini: fini.giulia.planumnet@gmail.com
Planum Staff: planum.magazine@gmail.com

• To submit proposals for:
New books or reviews, please contact: planum. books@gmail.com
News or events, please contact: planum.news@gmail.com

• For any further information please contact:
Planum Editorial Staff: planum.staff@gmail.com