Urban Agencies and New Institutions: The Arendt Center at the SIU 2025 Conference

From June 18 to 20, 2025, the XXVII National Conference of the Italian Society of Urban Planners (SIU) was held in Milan, dedicated to the theme Publicness: The Challenges of the Public Dimension in Cities and Territories.

The “Hannah Arendt” Research Center took part with a presentation by Giacomo Mormino, research fellow and member of the Center, within the thematic session Institutional Participation.

The talk, titled Urban Agencies as New Institutions of City Politics, explored the genealogy of the concept of “institution” from Aristotle to Roberto Esposito, before grounding itself in the concrete tensions of contemporary cities: governance, conflict, public space, democracy.
It offered a reflection on how urban agencies, often perceived as technical tools, are in fact political spaces where the relationship between public and private, between citizens and administrations, between decision-making and participation, is reorganized.

For the “Hannah Arendt” Center, reflecting on institutions means interrogating the spaces where politics takes shape, is contested, and negotiated — even, and especially, within the often-invisible mechanisms of urban planning.