SHORT (academic) BIO

Associate Professor at the Polytechnic of Turin. 

My educational path covers Urban Engineering, Science of Cities, Economic Assessments (Polytechnic of Turin), Urbanism (University of Campinas), Anthropology (University of Oxford). 

Head of Urban Environment, Sustainability and Climate Change at the Erasmus University Rotterdam till 2018, I was a visiting researcher at, among many, the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge and ETH Zurich. 

I worked in projects for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Commission, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and currently for a Grand Challenges Small Grant (Future Urban Growth Lab) from University College London. 

My 14 years academic employment life across continents, subjects, teams, and roles, gave me the privilege - despite focus, temporally and personally costly - to build up a colored touch in my work, thinking and teaching. 

After 10 years abroad, in December 2017, I (not easily) decided to resign from my Dutch permanent full time position (senior academic stuff, scale 12.7) as Head of Urban Environment (Erasmus University Rotterdam) to return to my Alpine mother region and for personal necessities to be between England and Northern Italy. 

I lived 10 years across Ireland, France, Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Brasil, Scotland, Uruguay, England, experiencing an enriching variety of social, physical and working environments.

Vietnam, Malaysia, USA, Italy, Ireland, France, Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Brasil, Scotland, Uruguay, England, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark: I have, so far, experienced 4 continents and life from megacities to hamlets enlarging my understanding behind books. 

Research output:

I keep a balance between theoretical and empirical research, as well as single and co-authored outputs and between humanistic and quantitative-technical contents. 

I published, among many, in the following journals: Environment and Planning B; Humanities and Social Sciences Communications; Chaos, Solitons and Fractals; SoftwareX; City, Culture and Society; Mind & Society; Journal of Environmental Management; Spatial Cognition & Computation; Journal of Urban Design; Cities; Landscape and Urban Planning; Social Indicators Research; Futures.

Within my publications indexed on SCOPUS (85% as single author, and 15% as first): 

87% are within the top 25% most cited documents worldwide, and 90% within top 25% journals. 

Research interests:

My work revolves around human settlements enhancing quality of life, intended as individuals and societies achieving healthier, happier and longer lives.  How our type of villages and cities can affect this goal?

My personalised educational path, ranging from engineering, economics, urbanism and mathematics to anthropology, gives me a poliedric touch to study such question. It allows me to engage with equal interest in empirical analysis or theoretical thoughts in both hard and soft sciences somehow related with human quality of life.

I am leading the e-centre for Urban Evolution Morphology: www.urem.eu. 

In the recent years I am particularly involved in how the size and form of cities influence our mental health and personal-societal progress. I have developed a new way to quantify national well-being and progress and a new type of city idea called isobenefit urbanism which is recently gaining attention.

I am currently involved in researches about urban scaling and relationships among urbanicity level, urban allometry, urban forms and psycho-socio-economic-environmental costs/benefits, and about new possibilities for urban morphogenesis futures.

Some of my latest and near-future studies also partially explore the link between evolutionary psychology and urban living under various perspectives, and where people are mentally healthier within the continuum rural-urban contest.  

Being didactically engaged in various academic disciplines such as the chair of economic (and beyond) evaluations of plans and projects, sustainable investments, adds an economic appraisal hint in my research interests: the way how we conceive values, evaluate plans and investments is what ultimately has the power to literally change our lives.