Piano Progetto Città (PPC) is conceived as a venue for advanced scholarly debate on the transformations and challenges that contemporary conditions pose to the various disciplinary fields engaged in the design of the city, of architecture and of the territory.
Piano Progetto Città was founded in 1984 within the Department of Architecture of the University "G. d'Annunzio" of Chieti-Pescara, and is rooted in a well-established tradition of studies on urban design, on the landscape of infrastructure, and on the long-standing relationship between city and countryside.
Over time, the journal has provided a space for reflection and research aimed at strengthening the relationship between theoretical enquiry and design experimentation, recognising design as a privileged instrument for the understanding and interpretation of urban transformations and their contexts. Within this perspective, PPC operates as a platform for discussion and research capable of bringing different design approaches and cultures into dialogue, giving equal weight to the convergences and to the critical distances that currently traverse the field of architecture and urbanism. This exchange takes as its starting point the central and pressing issues that concern contemporary urban settings and landscapes — domains in which the design disciplines (architecture, urbanism, technology and design) are called upon to redefine their tools, their languages and their cultural genealogies.
PPC orients its editorial philosophy along a number of strategic axes that today are reshaping the culture of urban and architectural design, building on the cultural and thematic identity that has long been upheld as the legacy of the Pescara school, while maintaining a privileged and central focus on design.
At the same time, the journal seeks to open a new horizon of attention towards issues that are pivotal to a number of contemporary design agendas. Among these are the impact of climate change, the environmental fragilities of contemporary contexts and the new challenges posed by energy transitions on settlement patterns, urban forms and public spaces, as well as on design and planning practices. In dialogue with emerging technologies, the journal also intends to address questions concerning the evolution of artificial intelligence as a cognitive infrastructure that is reshaping knowledge, methods and design processes, and that holds together and nurtures a new material and immaterial dimension of the design project, examined from the perspective of architectural space at its different scales.
Piano Progetto Città aims to explore this frontier by giving priority to research capable of integrating methodological rigour and applied experimentation, theory and practice, established knowledge and technological innovation.
Within this framework, a privileged focus on design as an instrument of research, interpretation and experimentation will remain central to the journal, in recognition of its pivotal role in the understanding and transformation of contexts, cities, public space, architecture and the contemporary landscape. The journal welcomes contributions that critically interpret such transformations, combining innovation with disciplinary continuity and cultivating a scholarly approach grounded in the tradition of design. In doing so, PPC intends to contribute to the construction of a scientifically grounded body of knowledge, capable of guiding professional practices and urban policies towards more resilient, sustainable and equitable models of development.
Within this horizon, the journal fosters dialogue among distinct yet converging disciplinary approaches, recognising that the complexity of contemporary urban challenges demands sustained exchange between architecture, urbanism, technology and design. Without relinquishing the specificity of each disciplinary field, Piano Progetto Città configures itself as a space for transdisciplinary elaboration, in which complementary competences may cross-fertilise, generating new interpretive categories and operational tools commensurate with the transformations currently under way.