The second Open Lecture in the Honours programme series “City Science for Transformative Urban Futures” helps to strengthen a critical and practical perspective on the role of knowledge in urban governance processes. 

Tommaso Vitale, Full Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po Paris and Dean of the Urban School, will deliver a lecture on the relationship between government, governance and knowledge production in contemporary urban contexts. His work focuses on how institutions, collective actors and social practices contribute to constructing, legitimising and mobilising knowledge in decision-making processes, significantly influencing public policies and urban development trajectories. 

Within the Honours Programme, this lecture plays a key role: it offers students conceptual tools to understand that knowledge is never neutral, but is the result of relationships, institutionalmechanisms and power dynamics. Understanding how knowledge is produced and used therefore becomes essential for those who intend to operate at the interface between research and urban policy.