ABSTRACT
My personal intellectual journey is that of a self-taught man who trained as a planner through practical experience. The tools I believe served me most during my formative years were “learning by doing” and the behaviour of “the refl ective practitioner”. Professional practice made me face problems that had theoretical implications, and my theoretical concerns helped me to frame and reconstruct any problematic situations. Together with an uninterrupted interface with professional practice, another leading factor in my personal development proved to be the relationship I entertained with politics. My impression is that taking part in political action, as a member of a political party, helped me a great deal in appreciating the bonds that tie planning to its contexts and to the stakeholders involved. More to the point, my active engagement in politics assisted me in recognising the advantages and limits implicit in the application of participative processes, before such themes became the subject of intense theoretical and practical debates.
