City Building Seminar - September

Presented by Professor Joerg Baumeister, Head of Griffith Architecture and SeaCities Leader at the Cities Research Institute

Griffith University’s Cities Research Institute has identified coastal cities and resilience as one of its strategic research priorities and, as such, is interested in exploring Gold Coast’s interface between Water and Cities.

While this interface includes new vulnerabilities associated with the impacts of anthropogenic climate change, it offers also great prospects for new urban built forms. Examples from overseas like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Hamburg demonstrate how to recognise the amenity of river and canal frontage. Valuing these canal and river waterways and combining water features with higher urban densities could improve the urban diversity and suit at the same time our outdoor lifestyle and sub-tropical climate. Will this be relevant to Gold Coast’s future?

Joerg Baumeister has been researching, practising, educating and exploring Urban Design and Architecture for more than 20 years in Europe, Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Asia. This cross-cultural experience is combined with the approach to fuse research, higher education, and implementation in order to create feed-back loops for future developments to evolve the fields of Urban Design and Architecture.

Before Joerg’s start at Griffith University one year ago he was Director of the Australian Urban Design Research Centre, UWA and has attracted multi-million dollar industry grants for multi-disciplinary projects with government institutions and several research institutions which have been implemented, published in books, government reports and journal articles.