Raffaella Yvonne Nanetti University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Raffaella Y. Nanetti is professor of urban planning and policy (UPP) in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, having served as the UPP director in the 1990s at the time of the creation of the new College. She was a member, with Robert D. Putnam and Robert Leonardi, of the study team that carried out the twenty-year longitudinal study of Italian regional and local institutions from which the concept of “social capital” was empirically derived (Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, 1992). Since the mid-1990s she has worked on the application of the concept of social capital to the field of urban planning, focusing on social capital–building strategies to improve institutional performance and to promote and sustain local and regional development.