Curated & Moderated by:
Anna-Kynthia Bousdoukou

Ares Kalandides

Urban scholar and Academic Advisor at New York University, Berlin

Ares Kalandides is academic advisor at New York University (NYU), Berlin, and a guest lecturer at the Urban Management programme of the Technical University (Berlin).

He is founder and Managing Director of Inpolis Urbanism, an international Berlin-based consultancy in urban and regional development policy. He has implemented numerous projects in Europe (Germany, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, France, UK) and consulted various districts, cities, and regions around the world, including South Africa, Colombia, and Australia.

Born in Athens (Greece) in 1965 Ares Kalandides graduated from Romance Studies, completed a post-graduate master’s programme in Urban and Regional Planning and holds a PhD from the National Technical University of Athens. His current research focuses mostly on the topic of urban citizenship and citizen participation in urban development.

His fields of research include Citizen Participation, Urban Governance and Policy, Urban tourism, Sexuality & Space, Conceptualizations of Place and Space.

He is also a certified conflict mediator and a fluent speaker of numerous languages (English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Turkish).

We need to understand libraries, books and knowledge as a public good. Public goods are under a very serious threat. And as an urban planner, I also see libraries as a public space. A public space does not need to be an open space. It can be, but that’s not the idea. The library has two characteristics; it’s open for everybody and it’s free, you don’t have to consume.