The Aldo Della Rocca Foundation is a non-profit organization on Urban Studies founded in 1954, by decree of the President of the Republic of Italy.
The main goal of the Foundation is to improve urban studies in Italy by encouraging and supporting dialogue between researchers, technicians and scholars.
The discipline of town planning has been opening up to diverse contributions from the cultural debate on the city and its countryside.
Recently, a new theoretical and methodological approach emerges from the cultural dimension of the Foundation’s activities and a wide range of technical instruments have been and are being developed, such as plans and programmes. This new approach is related to a change of scale from national to international dimensions.
The Foundation’s aims includes supporting cooperation between universities and public and private research centres, not only national.
In the last ten years the principal issue of the Foundation has been the inter-ethnic intercultural and increasing technological city as one of the solutions of the urban crisis.

Principal activities are:

• Promoting research programmes on town and country planning;
• Advancing relevant scientific debate through the organization of conferences, seminars and other kinds of meetings and brain-storming sessions;
• Developing an educational programme, dedicated to scholars and young professionals, which includes idea contests and pilot post-graduate courses on European Inter-ethnic City Management.
• Assembling  a collection of archives of documents, plans, papers, draft of Italian town planners (in progress).

The publishing activity is organized in four series:
Urban Studies
Proceedings and Celebrations
Research activities and Documentation
Photolithographs