Lagopoulos Alexandros

Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (since 2007) and Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens (since 2008). He received his degree in architecture from the National Technical University of Athens (1961). He holds a postgraduate diploma in Urban Planning from the Centre de Recherche d’Urbanisme, Paris (1969), and followed postgraduate studies in Urban Geography at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, VIème Section (1969), also in Paris. He holds a doctorate in Engineering (1970) and a post-doctoral academic title (Habilitation) in Urban and Regional Planning (1973) from the National Technical University of Athens, as well as a PhD (3rd Cycle) in Ethnology (Social Anthropology) from the Sorbonne. He has received an honorary doctorate in Semiotics from the New Bulgarian University, Sofia, and is Honorary President of the International Association for the Semiotics of Space.

He has been Visiting Professor at the Institute of Geography of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Germany, and Visiting Researcher in the Department of Social and Economic Geography of Uppsala University, Sweden, the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, and at the Department of Urban Planning, U.C.L.A., Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. He was elected Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens in 2008.

His research interests focus on the epistemology of space, urban and regional planning theory and urban design theory, the history of the city and urban planning, human geography, cultural anthropology, and the semiotics of space, more specifically the semiotic models of precapitalist and contemporary societies.      

He has published about 150 books, articles (mainly in accredited foreign journals) and chapters in books, including numerous edited books and special issues of journals in Greece and abroad. His work has been published in English, French, German, Russian and Bulgarian. Among his major publications are the following:

Structural urban planning: The settlement as system (in Greek, Technical Chamber of Greece, 1973); Treatise on urban planning, 3 vols. (in Greek, School of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 1977 and 1981); Mode de production asiatique et modèles sémiotiques urbains: Analyse socio-sémiotique d’agglomérations antiques du Moyen-Orient, Semiotica 53 (1-3), 1985 (pp. 1-129); The city and the sign: An introduction to urban semiotics (ed. with Μαrk Gottdiener, Columbia University Press, 1986); Meaning and geography: The social conception of the region in Northern Greece (with Κ. Boklund-Lagopoulou, Mouton de Gruyter, 1992); Urbanisme et sémiotique dans les sociétés préindustrielles (Anthropos, 1995); Heaven on earth: Sanctification rituals of the traditional Greek settlement and their origin (in Greek, Odysseas, 2002); A history of the Greek city (Archaeopress, 2009 – translation of the Greek original published by Ermis and the journal Archaeologia kai Technes); Epistemologies of meaning, structuralism and semiotics (in Greek, Paratiritis, 2004); The semiotics of the Vitruvian city, Semiotica 175 (1-4), 2009 (pp. 193-251); The symbolism of space in ancient Greece (Research Centre for Greek Society, Academy of Athens, 2012) and Theory and methodology of urban planning: From political economy to the semiotics of space (Patakis, 2017).

He has participated in dozens of applied projects in the fields of urban and regional planning and urban design, usually as project director; a number of the proposals made in this context have been ratified by law or partly realised.