Professor Billie Giles-Corti is a Distinguished Professor and a VC Professorial Fellow at RMIT University and leads the Healthy Liveable Cities Group in the Centre for Urban Research.

Liveable Cities for All: Are we there yet?

November 3rd, 2021 at 9:00am CT
With the Institute for Public Health Global Health Center

Professor Billie Giles-Corti is a Distinguished Professor and a VC Professorial Fellow at RMIT University and leads the Healthy Liveable Cities Group in the Centre for Urban Research. For over two decades, she and a multidisciplinary research team have been studying the impact of the built environment on health and wellbeing. Between
2014 and 2020 she led an NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Liveable Communities; between 2017- 2020 she was RMIT’s Urban Futures Enabling Capability Development Platform Director and between 2007-11 she was Foundation Director of UWA’s Centre for the Built Environment. She is a Technical Advisor of the Victorian Office of the Government Architect’s Design Review Panel, a member of the Victorian Planning Authority’s Precinct Structure Plan Review Committee, a member of Melbourne Water’s Liveability Panel and an Honorary Fellow of both the Planning Institute of Australia and the Public Health Association. She has published over 400 articles, book chapters and reports, and by citations, has been ranked in the top 1% of researchers in her field globally. She is Fulbright Scholar and in 2016, was awarded an NHMRC Elizabeth Blackburn Fellowship as the top ranked female NHMRC public health fellow.

For many years, Melbourne, Australia has dined out on being recognised by The Economist as the most liveable city in the world. While this global recognition is a source of great pride and an excellent marketing tool for cities across the globe that are dubbed ‘most liveable’ – is this measure of liveability fit for purpose when considering the lived experience of city dwellers? Drawing on almost a decade of research, in this talk I will consider: What is a liveable city? How are we measuring liveability? Are we creating liveable cities for all? If not, why not? And perhaps most importantly, why liveability is important if we are concerned about creating cities that facilitate healthy and sustainable lifestyles that support both individual and planetary health.

This event is part of Global Health Week.