Giovanni Allegretti (Cagliari, Italy, 01/07/1970) is an architect, planner and senior researcher at the Center of Social Studies, an excellency structure linked to the Coimbra University, Portugal. From 2001 to 2006, he has been assistant professor in Town Management at the University of Florence, where he got his Ph.D in Town and Territorial Planning. He studied in Brazil, Denmark and Japan with scholarships of the Ministry of Foreign affairs.Since 1997 his mainly research topics have been Participatory Budgets and techniques for citizens’ participation to urban planning, topics on which he published several articles, essays and books in different languages. He has been scientific director of two EU projects in the field of Participation: “Participando” and “INCLUIR – Participatory Budget as a tool for fighting social exclusion”. He is co-director of thePh.D. course “Democracy in the XXI century” and coordinator of the PEOPLES’ Observatory on Participation, Innovation and Local Powers. For the World Bank he worked as a resource person in training (in SouthAfrica and Senegal) and as an evaluator (Congo RDC), and is consultant of the Swedish Associations of Municipality and Regions (2007-2012) to support the first experiments of participatory budget in that country. He has been consultant of the world association of Cities (UCLG) for the Observatory of Inclusive Cities, and – at present – for a research on Citizens-based Monitoring of Public Policies.