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 (...), Spain (...), 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

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 (see the sections "archive"and "journals")
• creating a forum for a highly qualified professional activity (see the section "topics")
• providing a set of services disseminating information towards professional users, stakeholders and decision-makers and becoming a specialised search engine (see the sections "web compass", " news" and "showspace").

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

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 to download (click here to read them).
The texts proposed for publishing in the section "Topics" are evaluated by 2 referees chosen by the editorial board according to their expertise.