What is a city today without institutions capable of keeping pace with the economic, social, tourist and digital transformations it is undergoing? And what could an urban agency designed as a research, coordination and mediation infrastructure between public, private and civic actors look like?

The series of meetings entitled “Towards an urban agency as a new political institution” stems from these questions and offers a course of theoretical study and comparison between Italian case studies. Starting from experiences of urban governance, housing policies, regeneration and management of the commons, we will focus on the urban agency as an intermediate institution: a space capable of producing analysis in the field, building common languages between specialist knowledge and grassroots practices, and guiding public decisions towards an explicit and verifiable public purpose.

The course is aimed at those who work and research on cities – administrators, technicians, scholars, activists, professionals – and those who see the city as the place where the main democratic tensions are played out today: access to housing, tourist and commercial use of spaces, the right to mobility, conflicts over public space. The meetings combine theoretical perspectives, case studies and collective discussion, with the aim of developing conceptual and operational tools for thinking about – and experimenting with – what an urban agency can be in the contemporary context.