Democracy and Urban Design - A Dukakis lecture at Reworks Agora

On September 13, 2017, the Dukakis Center and the US Consulate General of Thessaloniki co-sponsored the keynote event in this year’s Reworks Agora event, a Dukakis Lecture by Elizabeth Barry on "Reports from the Frontiers of Democracy: Implications for Urban Design. "

In her capacity as co-founder of Public Lab (publiclab.org) and co-founder of TreeKIT (treekit.org), Liz Barry develops geographic tools and civic science methods for collaborative cities. Her background is in urban landscape design, and she teaches at Columbia University, Parsons the New School for Design, and Pratt Institute. Previously, she worked at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill planning international new cities and campuses, at Durham Inner-city Gardeners (DIG) coordinating youth urban horticulture enterprise, and has travelled around the country catalyzing interaction among strangers with a "Talk To Me" sign - a project that received international press including the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, Oprah, and NPR's This American Life.

Ms. Barry's Thessaloniki lecture took place at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall and was part of the 17th annual Reworks contemporary music festival.

Reworks Agora is a cross-thematic forum of the Reworks festival, aiming for a forward-thinking approach to the future vision for creativity, presenting emerging topics, initiatives and artists that inspire the dialogue on the development of culture, entrepreneurship and technology. Agora sessions showcase the most innovative developments in music industry, digital culture, creative economy and art, contributing to their growth in Greece. Two other sessions featured a discussion on contemporary music by organizers of leading European music festivals, and a forum on the phenomenon of fake news by leading journalists and students of social media, among whom Pavlos Tsimas, Elena Papadimitriou, Eliza Vozenberg, and two young scholar-activists.