Living Cities Forum 2022

The Living Cities Forum returns, featuring internationally renowned architects and urban thinkers exploring circular economies via the 2022 theme “Material Flows.”

The Naomi Milgrom Foundation has announced the return of its Living Cities Forum—the fifth annual assembly of leading architects and urban thinkers exploring the role of design, planning, and architecture in shaping our society—taking place on Thursday, July 21 from 9am–5pm at The Edge, Fed Square.

For as long as humanity has traded, materials have flowed. The 2022 Living Cities Forum theme “Material Flows” will examine the global material flows that underwrite our growing built environments. The Living Cities Forum will deliver its fifth program of keynote lectures, with cross-disciplinary talks over the course of the day by globally renowned thinkers including Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, Ghanaian educator, and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko, Netherlands-based architect and educator Joseph Grima, Canadian landscape architect Jane Mah Hutton, British architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs Indy Johar and Chinese architect Xu Tiantian.

The forum will explore if the current global disruptions to material flows—as a result of the global pandemic, wars, and other destabilising factors—might well be our chance to rethink the materials we have taken for granted.

Distinguished in their fields, speakers include:

Vo Trong Nghia is an award-winning architect from Vietnam whose mission is to bring greenery into all his projects to reconnect people and nature and use plants as a building material to integrate vernacular wisdom into modern architecture.

Mae-ling Lokko is an educator and architectural scientist from Ghana and the Philippines. Mae-ling’s work interrogates the possibilities of using agro-waste and biopolymer materials in the built industries. 

Joseph Grima is a writer, curator, and architect. He is the creative director of Design Academy Eindhoven and co-founder of research studio Space Caviar. 

Jane Mah Hutton is a landscape architect, researcher, and co-founding editor of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy. Jane’s research focuses on the expanded relationships of the act of building—from material flows to labour movements.

Indy Johar is an architect and founding Director of 00 and Dark Matter Labs. An architect by training, Indy is a Senior Innovation Associate with the Young Foundation and a visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield. 

Xu Tiantian is an architect from Beijing and the founding principal of DnA _Design and Architecture which has achieved a strong reputation in China for numerous cultural projects. Xu graduated from Harvard before working as a senior architect at OMA. DnA is currently featured in MOMA’s exhibition “Reuse, Renew, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China”.

Living Cities Forum 2022 is a not-to-be-missed opportunity for industry professionals, students, and anyone interested in the future of cities to network, share ideas, and workshop together.

About Living Cities Forum
Since 2017, the Living Cities Forum—an initiative of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation—has had a substantial influence on the thinking, discourse, collaboration, and policy-making that determines approaches to urban development across Australia. While including established experts, Living Cities Forum actively seeks out and invites voices from across society to take part in deep and critical analyses of our cities. The dialogues are lively, rigorous, scientific, personal, productive, and always inspirational, testing out old thinking, ushering in new perspectives, and paving the way for new, better design approaches, in all aspects of urban life.

Key information for Living Cities Forum 2022
Date: Thursday, July 21, 2022
Time: 9am–5pm
Location: The Edge, Fed Square, Melbourne
Speakers: Joseph Grima, Mae-ling Lokko, Jane Hutton (virtual), Indy Johar, Vo Trong Nghia, Xu Tiantian (virtual)
Tickets: 150 AUD (100 AUD concession) includes Living Cities Forum day-pass, with morning tea and lunch.
Information: livingcitiesforum.org and naomimilgromfoundation.org
Contact: info [​at​] naomimilgromfoundation.org