ANTONIO RACITI

Antonio Raciti is an urban planner and scholar whose academic career bridges Southern Europe and the United States, with a long-standing commitment to community-engaged research, planning theory, and the study of governance in contexts of social and environmental change. He is currently Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the School of Architecture, Sapienza University of Rome.

He received his PhD in Urban Planning and Design from the University of Catania, where his doctoral research conceptualized design as a social practice through participatory action-research experiences in the Simeto River Valley. His formative training as an architectural engineer and planner, combined with early exposure to community-based design in Southern Italy, laid the foundation for a scholarly approach that integrates theory, practice, and civic engagement.

His academic career developed primarily in the United States, beginning with research and teaching appointments at the University of Memphis. There, his early scholarship focused on community design, advocacy planning, and participatory action research in disinvested urban neighborhoods, particularly in Memphis and other cities of the American South. This period produced foundational work on public housing struggles, grassroots organizing, food justice, and the role of universities as partners in community-led planning processes. These experiences shaped his long-term engagement with planning as a political and institutional practice rather than a purely technical one.

In 2017, he joined the University of Massachusetts Boston, where his research agenda expanded and evolved. While continuing to work through community–university partnerships, his scholarship increasingly turned toward questions of governance, power, and institutional coordination in metropolitan regions. During this period, his work shifted toward the analysis of climate adaptation as a planning challenge, examining how environmental risk, inequality, and entrenched coalitions shape decision-making processes in cities and regions. His research in Metro Boston, Gloucester, Chelsea, and East Boston has been supported by federal and state funding, including projects funded by the National Science Foundation, NOAA, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Across these phases, his scholarship has been published in leading international journals such as Planning Theory & Practice, Journal of Planning History, Journal of Planning Education and Research, and Cities, as well as in edited volumes with major academic presses. His work contributes to debates on collaborative governance, advocacy planning, institutional power, and the role of planning in contexts of social and environmental uncertainty. In parallel, he has authored and co-authored numerous planning reports and community plans that translate research into actionable knowledge for public agencies and civic organizations.

Teaching has been a central component of his academic identity. He has taught core and advanced courses in urban planning, urban design, planning theory, ethics, and community development at both graduate and undergraduate levels. He has also supervised and served on numerous PhD and master’s thesis committees across planning, environmental science, and public policy programs. A distinctive feature of his teaching is the integration of research, pedagogy, and practice through long-term, place-based engagement.

Since 2015, he has been the co-founder and co-director of the Community Planning and Ecological Design (CoPED) international program, an action-research summer school operating in Sicily that brings together students, faculty, local governments, and community organizations to co-produce plans and strategies for territorial development. This program exemplifies his approach to international planning education as a space of encounter between knowledge, institutions, and lived experience.

In addition to research and teaching, he has played significant leadership and service roles within academia. At UMass Boston, he served as Graduate Program Director and later as Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Community Development. Internationally, he is Associate Editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research. He is actively involved in professional and scholarly networks, including AESOP (Association of European Schools of Planning), ACSP (Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning), and SIU (Società Italiana degli Urbanisti), and currently serves as ACSP’s representative to AESOP.

Through his career, Antonio Raciti has consistently worked at the intersection of theory and practice, foregrounding planning as a civic, institutional, and political endeavor. His current work at Sapienza builds on this trajectory, connecting long-term U.S.-based experience with European debates on governance, planning systems, and the role of universities in public life.