The Italian Journal of Planning Practice (IJPP) was founded in 2011 by Prof. Paolo Scattoni and Prof. Enzo Falco (then a PhD Student) with a clear mission: to open up Italian planning discourse to a broader, international audience and to make scholarly research more accessible to all.
From the very beginning, IJPP has been a 100% open access journal, long before open access became a widespread requirement. This decision stemmed from a strong belief in academic inclusivity — ensuring that researchers from all over the world could publish and access research without financial barriers. No publication fees, no paywalls — just open, free knowledge.
A defining feature of IJPP has been its commitment to younger scholars. As the first planning journal in Italy to adopt an “online first” publishing model, IJPP has consistently offered emerging researchers a more transparent and faster route to publication — helping them share their work with the academic community early, effectively and free of charge.
A pioneer in the Italian academic landscape, IJPP was the first planning journal in Italy to publish exclusively in English, making Italian planning scholarship more visible in the global debate. At a time when Italian urban and regional planning was largely underrepresented in international journals, IJPP provided a much-needed platform for showcasing Italian planning research and practice to a worldwide audience.
Over a decade later, IJPP continues to champion open dialogue, academic equity, and international discourse in planning practice, having grown to an international outlet indexed in Scopus, ESCI Web of Science and DOAJ. With a growing global readership and contributor base, the journal remains committed to the vision that inspired its founding: opening up the debate on planning practice in a free and readily accessible way.