Kristof Van Assche, born in Belgium, spent nine years in the Netherlands before moving to Minnesota in 2005. He studied art history (MA), philosophy (BA) and anthropology (MA) at Leuven University, landscape architecture (MsC) and spatial planning (PhD) at Wageningen University, where he also taught. He is currently Associate Professor at the PLanning and Community Development Program (Department of Community Studies) at St Cloud State University, a part of Minnesota State Universities and Colleges.

He is interested in the cultural, political, institutional embeddings of urban planning and design, on which he published widely. Geographically, his work covers Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, the Low Countries, and the US. Among other things, he published on social memory and planning, on heritage planning and design with heritage, on environmental planning, planning culture, institutional change, in various journals, among which can be noted Planning Theory, Ethnologia Balkanica, Memory Studies, Anthropology of Eastern Europe Review, Middle Eastern Technical University JFA, Studia Sociologia.

He wrote many book chapters in edited volumes, edited a book on City planning and City culture in Georgia, with Joseph Salukvadze and Nick Shavishvili (Mellen Press, 2009), and wrote a book on heritage planning (Signs in Time, Wageningen 2004). He is a regular contributor to Dutch landscape planning and design journal Blauwe Kamer, a visiting scholar at Wageningen University, and president of Silk Road Research, a foundation based in the Netherlands, established to stimulate research on space and culture in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

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