Living Cities Forum 2024 — Sydney

Buildings often separate people, while open public spaces act as the great leveller, where diverse and competing interests intersect.

With Melbourne and Sydney on track to become megacities by 2050, reimagining our public spaces amid population growth and a warming planet has never been more vital.

Join us for a day-long series of international keynotes and conversations, spotlighting progressive ideas and solutions from across the globe, all trained on the future of the public realm.

From transforming neglected urban areas into thriving green landscapes in and reimagining vacant lots as sites of public amenity, to data activism that’s building more inclusive open spaces online and offline.

Tickets are inclusive of fees. Lunch and light refreshments will be served on the day. We have a limited number of Early Bird tickets on offer until booked out. Register now to save $55 off full-price tickets.

This event is ticketed by the Living Cities Forum. For general enquiries, please contact info@naomimilgromfoundation.org.

Presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation


Catherine D’Ignazio is a hacker mama, scholar, and artist/designer who focuses on feminist technology, data justice and civic engagement. D’Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab. She has run women’s health hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. Her 2020 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Her second book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press, 2024) is an extended case study about grassroots data activism to end gender-related violence.

Kabage Karanja is an architect and co-founding director of Cave_bureau, an architectural and research studio based in Nairobi that he started alongside Stella Mutegi in 2014 developing design strategies for resisting and healing, restoring the rights and practices of indigenous communities. He leads the research and aesthetic direction of the bureau and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning & Preservation. He is a curator of the British Pavilion for the upcoming Biennale Architettura 2025. Since 2017 he has led the research project titled “The Anthropocene Museum”, that has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, and at the Biennale Architettura where Cave_bureau received a special mention in 2021 for the installation "Obsidian Rain”. In 2023 he co-curated and participated in the final series of “The Architects Studio” solo show featuring the works and collection of Cave_bureau at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.

Martí Franch is the founder and principal of EMF landscape, and design professor at the Landscape Master in ETSAB Barcelona. Franch’s interest focuses on the infrastructural potential of landscape by exploring the instrumental niches for ‘Time-grounded Design’. EMF's research explores how the time dimension can be operationally introduced in the design process. The ultimate goal being to prefigure landscapes which have the capacity to change and adapt at several spatial and temporal scales. Franch holds an Honorary Doctor of Design from the University of Greenwich where he studied Landscape Architecture. He also holds Horticultural Engineering Degree from ESAB, Barcelona. Franch has been awarded an ASLA Honor Award and the VII Landscape Biennial Rosa Barba Prize in 2012 and the Landezine awards in 2016, 2020.

Jill Desimini is a landscape architect, program director, and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Connecticut. Desmini’s work focuses the critical intersection of social and climatic threats over time, to identify potentials for land reform to spread wealth and enable reciprocal human and non-human relationships. Her projects address abandoned landscapes and devalued property, land banking, wildness in cities, climate adaptation, non-linear models of time, cartographic methods, alternative narratives, and data generation. She is the author of Cyclical City: Five Stories of Urban Transformation (UVA Press, 2022), From Fallow: 100 Ideas for Abandoned Urban Landscapes, (ORO 2019) and co-author of Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary (PAP 2016). Previously, Desmini was an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked at Stoss Landscape Urbanism, Atkin Olshin Schade Architects, Wallace, Roberts, and Todd, KieranTimberlake, and the City of New York.