The Return of the future:  democracy and political planning in the age of emergencies

Final conference of the PRIN 2022 ReFuture project January 16 2026

(Find here the project’s page)

Aula Altana, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze

The seminar presents the results emerged from the research conducted within the PRIN 2022 project Refuture. After decades in which politics was mainly interpreted as day-to-day administration, an era of impending emergencies brought the need to plan the future back to the core of the political agenda.
Refuture investigates this return of the need for political planning and its role in revitalising democratic governance. The project does so by focusing on the Italian case and via an interdisciplinary perspective. First, via the lenses of intellectual and political history, it investigates the role of political planning in European liberal democracies in the first part of 20th century, its crisis in the neoliberal era, and its current state in the intellectual and political debate. Second, through the lenses of economics, it assesses the impact of the planning policies put in place through National Resilience and Recovery Plan. Third, through the lenses of social movement studies, Refuture explores how social movement actors see and plan the future. All in all, the event aims to present the project’s results across different disciplinary spheres and to reflect on the broader role of planning in sustaining democracies’ capacity to act and to plan in the face of successive, epochal emergencies.

The program:

10.30-12.30 Keynote speech, Christoph Sorg, Humboldt University Berlin

14-16 Presentation of the results of the project

The concept of planning in intellectual and political history
Michele Filippini, Università di Bologna
Olimpia Malatesta, Università di Bologna

Planning in economics: the impact of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan
Maria Chiara d’Errico, Università di Perugia
Tommaso Bechini, Università di Perugia

Planning from below: how social movements see and plan the future
Lorenzo Zamponi, Scuola Normale Superiore
Federica Guardigli, Scuola Normale Superiore

16-18 Roundtable and discussion

Francesca Gabbriellini, Fondazione Feltrinelli

Emanuele Leonardi, Università di Bologna

Chiara Pollio, Università di Ferrara