Fernando Lugli, an engineer and scholar of urban history, collaborates with the Centro Studi “Gina Fasoli” for urban studies at the University of Bologna. An expert in territorial planning and local development, he has long worked on projects aimed at enhancing human resources and supporting small businesses, with particular attention to historical contexts and local communities.

In 1984, he developed one of the first international projects applying CAD technologies to the study of historical sources, producing a fifteenth-century map of Carpi derived from contemporary census data.

This work led to the development of a new discipline that investigates the history of cities by extracting historical information from the geometry of urban forms and infrastructure networks. Using this method, numerous Italian cities have been studied, and a report was presented at the Expo 2015 Milan. Since then, he has continued to explore the relationship between technological innovation, urban memory, and social transformation, publishing several essays on local development and the use of technology in historical data analysis.

He has also contributed to the cartography of the Historical Atlases of Italian Cities within the activities of the Commission Internationale pour l’Histoire des Villes, promoting a culture of history oriented toward active citizenship.