The Excellence Project

The Excellence Project aims at maximizing the department capacity to answer to the UN Agenda 2030 challenges (“Transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development”, 2015) and, in specific, to contribute to reach the objectives of the Sustainable Development Goal 11: “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”.

The DIST department, among the 180 funded, possesses peculiar features that will help to reach the objectives of the Excellence Project:

• It is an interuniversity department, whose multidisciplinary perspective is the combination of SSH (Social sciences and humanities) and STEM sciences (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)
• It has a new Departmental Strategic Plan (2020-2023), being among the first departments to draft a strategic plan already in the 2014-2020 period.

The urban question has changed in radical and unforeseen ways, placing living, production, consumption and mobility practices in a framework where they intersect new fragilities, opportunities and risks. Demographic dynamics, climate change, migrations, new forms of industrial production, and the unexpected challenges of COVID-19 need to be newly interpreted and better understood to face ongoing changes, to promote action and to provide effective answers. These issues cannot be considered separately, since there are several economic, social, political and environmental problems that call for a greater innovation in the way research is organized, favoring interdisciplinary collaboration and interaction between basic and applied research, as well as a better understanding of forms and contents of teaching activities, to adapt to the deep changes in knowledge production and dissemination. It is important to promote a mutual transfer process of knowledge and information across the whole of the society, radically changing the way in which problems are recognized and tackled.