ACRN Committee

Wendy Steele

Professor Sustainability and Urban Policy
Centre for Urban Research
RMIT University, Melbourne

Wendy is is Co-Convenor of the Australasian Cities Research Network and co-convenor of the Critical Urban Governance Research Program in the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT (with Libby Porter). Her research focuses on cities in climate change with a particular emphasis on questions of equity, justice and resilience at the local scale, and the implications for sustainability-led policy and planning. She has led ARC projects on critical urban infrastructure and social innovation for climate adaptation in the Australian city context and was a previous recipient of the Peter Harrison Memorial Award. Her books include ‘Planning Wild Cities: Human-nature relations in the urban age’, ‘Quiet Activism: Climate action at the local scale’, and ‘The Sustainable Development Goals and Higher Education: A transformative Agenda?’

Iain White

Professor of Environmental Planning
School of Social Science
University of Waikato

Iain is Co-Convenor of the Australasian Cities Research Network and before moving to the University of Waikato in New Zealand in 2013, he was a planning academic at the University of Manchester and the Director for the Centre of Urban and Regional Ecology there. He is committed to engaging beyond the discipline to researchers, practitioners and communities to generate real world impact. This focus typically spans the science-policy-practice interface, from theory all the way through to outcomes. He has recently applied this approach to analysing why systemic change is so difficult, in particular with regard to new forms of spatial development, climate change adaptation, and addressing the housing crisis.

Paul J. Maginn

Assoc Professor (Urban/Regional Planning)
Dept of Geography and Planning
University of Western Australia

Paul has previously served as Co-Convenor of the Australasian Cities Research Network and was Co-chair of the 2019 and 2009 State of Australian Cities conference, and Chair of the 2011 World Planning School Congress. He is Editor-in-Chief of Urban Policy and Research and is on the Board of Sexual Health Quarters in Perth (WA).

Paul’s research focuses on:

(i) strategic planning and planning reform;
(ii) social and cultural aspects of suburbia;
(iii) representation and multiculturalism; and
(iv) geographies and regulation of the sex industry.

He is the author/co-editor of 6 books including: Disruptive Urbanism (2020); (Sub)Urban Sexscapes (2015); and, Planning Australia (2012).

Carl Grodach

Professor and Director, Urban Planning and Design
Urban Planning and Design
Monash University, Melbourne

Carl is Foundation Professor and Director of Urban Planning and Design at Monash University. His research focuses particularly on community and economic development challenges. Current work concentrates on urban manufacturing economies and how zoning and other planning mechanisms shape industry development, interaction, and agglomeration. He is also part of a multi-university team working to establish iHUB- a nationally networked digital infrastructure platform for built environment research and engagement.

He is author of the book Urban Revitalization: Remaking Cities in a Changing World (Routledge, 2015) and editor of The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2013).

Gabriela Quintana Vigiola

Senior Lecturer
School of Built Environment
University of Technology Sydney

Gabriela joined UTS in 2012 and since 2019 is the Course Director of the Planning programs at the School of Built Environment at UTS. In addition to being an academic, she also works as a planning and urban design consultant, currently collaborating with the Australian State of the Environment Report 2021 contracted by the DAWE. Her practice and research focus on current issues such as place-making, participatory planning and design, and informal settlements and housing for vulnerable populations.

Ashraful Alam

Lecturer
School of Geography
University of Otago

Ashraful Alam is Lecturer in Planning and Environmental Management at the University of Otago, where he leads the Master of Planning Programme. He is interested in migrant politics of housing, home and homelessness in gateway cities in Australia, New Zealand and South Asia. His most recent work examines how migrant owner-occupiers negotiate risks and informality in shared housing premises in Greater Sydney suburbs. He often uses experimental methodologies to analyse the contributions of non-humans in producing housing infrastructures. At present, he is leading a University of Otago Center for Global Migrations funded project. The project examines Muslim immigrant women’s politics of access to urban services in two New Zealand cities.

Sebastien Darchen

Senior Lecturer
School of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of Queensland

Dr. Sébastien Darchen joined the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences (SEES) at the University of Queensland in 2011 after being affiliated with the Faculty of Environmental Studies (York University, Toronto) from 2009 to 2011. He was a Faculty member of the City Institute in Toronto. Previously, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Canada Research Chair on the Socio-Organizational Challenges of the Knowledge Economy (Teluq-UQAM, Montreal) from 2007 to 2009. He holds a PhD in Urban Studies obtained in 2008 from INRS, Urbanisation, Culture et Société (Montréal, Canada).

Dr. Darchen studies the political economy of the built environment with a focus on the strategies of urban stakeholders involved in the provision of the built environment. His main research area is the urban regeneration of city centres and inner-city suburbs (Canada, U.S, France and Australia). Dr. Darchen also studies creative economy policies and their effects on the localisation of creative economy firms as well as the emergence and development of local music scenes in cities.

Laurence Troy

Senior Lecturer
Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning
University of Sydney

Laurence Troy is Lecturer in Urbanism in the School of Architecture Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. His current research focus on relationship between precarious employment, housing and citizenship, and the implications for patterns of urban settlement. Laurence’s wider research focusses on urban renewal, the governance or urban change, the role of the higher density multi-unit residential development sector in Australia in driving urban change, and funding models for social affordable housing.

Rewa Marathe

PhD Candidate
Melbourne School of Design
University of Melbourne

Rewa is currently a PhD student in the urban planning discipline at the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne. She has a Bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Rajiv Gandhi University of Technology of Madhya Pradesh and a Masters degree in urban planning from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Prior to moving to Melbourne for her PhD, Rewa worked with the National Institute of Urban Affairs (Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs) in Delhi as part of the NIUA-CIDCO Smart City Lab.

Crystal Legacy

Associate Professor Urban Planning
Architecture, Building and Planning
University of Melbourne

Crystal Legacy is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia where she is also the Deputy Director of the Informal Urbanism Research Hub. She resides on Wurundjeri Country where she writes, teaches and works with communities on issues related to urban transport politics, public participation and the post-political city. She publishes in a range of academic journals, provides critical commentary on local and national media outlets, and works in solidarity with a range of community-based groups seeking climate just outcomes in transport planning. Crystal is an Editor of two journals Planning Theory and Practice and Urban Policy and Research and is the inaugural chair of the Australasian Early Career Urban Research Network.

Mirjam Schindler

Senior Lecturer
School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences
Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington

Mirjam Schindler is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Luxembourg and her research focuses on how urban form relates to how humans and more-than-humans interact in urban areas. Her particular interest lies in exploring how the spatial composition of natural and built environments relates to human and environmental health and wellbeing in our cities. Mirjam was a co-chair of the first State of the Australasian Cities Conference hosted in Aotearoa in 2023.

Rebecca Kiddle

Director
Te Manawahoukura Rangahau Institute
Te Wānanga o Aotearoa

Rebecca has a background in urban design and urbanism. Her work focuses on Māori identity and placemaking/placekeeping in Aotearoa New Zealand urban settings and the nexus between community creation, social processes, and urban design. She holds a Marsden entitled Making Aotearoa Places: The Politics and Practice of Urban Māori Place-making and was an Associate Investigator (now Kāhui member) on another focused on Nature-based Urban design for Wellbeing and Adaptation in Oceania. She is the co-author of the award-winning, best seller – Imagining Decolonisation and co-editor of the Our Voices series with First Nations academics and architects – Kevin O’Brien and Patrick Luugigyoo Stewart.