AESOP is looking for candidates willing to organise the AESOP Lecture Series in 2026.
The application has to be from an Academic on behalf of an AESOP member institution.
The Lecture Series was initiated in 2012 as part of AESOP’s Silver Jubilee Year celebrations. Since then, a series of Lectures has been regularly organised with prominent ‘urban thinkers’, both academics and practitioners. The idea has been to attract not only the local academic community, but also a wider audience of politicians, community leaders and organisations, businesses and the media, to promote Planning as a discipline that can contribute to urban justice and environmental quality, help find new tools of urban governance, and function as an effective mediator between all the stakeholders involved.
Based on a careful selection of (usually) one keynote speaker, the Lecture is open to a wider audience and is rounded off with questions and answers and a discussion. The whole session is recorded and, after the necessary editing, uploaded to the AESOP website and made available to the entire AESOP Community. In this way, an interesting and useful archive of selected Lectures is steadily being built for future memory, reflecting the thoughts and lessons of influential academics and planners, as well as the evolution of the main planning issues and challenges faced by our rapidly changing societies.
The proposed Lecture should be organised in the months following the 2026 HoS meeting in As.
AESOP provides a financial provision of up to €2000 (two thousand Euros) to support the organisational costs involved.
Candidates are kindly asked to send their applications to the Secretary General (
The application shall contain:
(a) The proposed Lecture theme/topic
(b) The proposed date for the Lecture
(c) Information about the speaker(s) and the moderator
(d) Information about the host institution and the venue
(e) A provisional budget
Please keep in mind that applicants should approach their intended speaker before applying in order to secure the willingness to give the lecture should the proposal be accepted. Securing the proposed speaker's willingness does not guarantee that the proposal will be accepted.
A fundamental and necessary condition for eligibility is that the candidate’s home institution must be in good standing with AESOP, having fully paid its membership fees up to the year preceding the application.
