The highly anticipated event took place in Melbourne on 18 September at The Edge, Fed Square, before coming to Sydney on 20 September with an impressive line-up of speakers from all around the globe.

Presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, Living Cities Forum is Australia’s flagship annual event for urban designers, thinkers and placemakers. The global program features cross-disciplinary speakers who share inspiring, actionable ideas to improve the cities of today and tomorrow.

Moderated by Program Director Andrew Mackenzie and centred on the theme of ‘Common Interests’, this day-long series of international keynotes and conversations in Melbourne and Sydney will spotlight progressive ideas and solutions from across the globe, all trained on the future of the public realm.

Why are public spaces crucial in architecture? Because “street patterns survive longer than buildings,” says Nathalie de Vries, who came all the way from Rotterdam (Netherlands). Keynote speaker and a visionary architect, urbanist and co-founder of Dutch architectural firm MVRDV, she is known for designing innovative, unexpected, and joyful mixed-use buildings that transform urban spaces.

The real question according to Jill Desimini, American associate professor and landscape architect exploring the design possibilities of vacant lots and residual spaces as sites of public amenity and climate justice is: “How can we do to undo the immense harm that we’ve done?” One thing is sure, according to Desimini: It starts with us, here and now.

To that question, the answers are protean, according to Professor Lesley Lokko OBE (Ghana/Scotland) – a leading voice in architecture, academic, educator, best-selling novelist and founder of the African Futures Institute. 

Named on the list of the 100 most influential people of 2024 by Time Magazine, Lokko is adamant: it is all about “how to fashion a future in common, without having much in common”. She also highlights and interrogates the importance of language and what the words “public” and “common interest” really entail.

For landscape architect pioneering low-cost, large-scale green infrastructures in Catalonia Martí Franch, it’s a question of perspective: “beauty is powerful, and values can be very academic or can be very cold, or can be very rational, but if we turn values into beauty, then they call emotions and experiential, they are much more powerful.”

Hacker mama, coder, scholar, and artist/designer combining feminism Catherine d’Ignazio from the US concurs: the power of data lies in our hands. Pioneer of feminist technology, she says that when it comes to feminicides in the public space, there is a climate of impunity.

“These deaths are allowed to happen without punishment, without accountability,” d’Ignazio says.

“But when the database takes over space,  it is very powerful, and the databases are behind the maps [of these public spaces].”

For her, data is like a narrative, and it comes with a context.

“Behind each of the maps is usually a very helpful spreadsheet, not typically very aesthetic. But when we interviewed the activists who work on this, we realised that the databases are authors of these spaces.”

Kabage Karanja (Kenya),  architect and co-founder of Cave Bureau, explores architecture's role in urbanism, nature, and culture.

Karanja is adamant: the architects have a key role and responsibility when it comes to rethinking and anticipating the role of public spaces in the common interest.

“We have to use our architectural training to think about complex conditions, such as geological processes, and where the nation state is going,” he says.

“But how will that happen? And how will we transmit it is a key question.”

Image: Kabage Karanja, Nathalie de Vries, Lesley Lokko and Martí Franch/Michael Pham.