Australasian Cities Leader
Arup Fellow in Masterplanning and Urban Design

Malcolm Smith is Arup’s Australasian Cities Leader and the founding director of Arup London’s Integrated City Planning (ICP) unit, which brings together design, economics and political strategy in complex master planning projects.

Malcolm’s work not only centres around the physical issues of places, but it also encompasses systems integration, resource efficiency, cultural strategy, digital transformation, meaningful infrastructure, risk and resilience, and social value.

He has advised influential non-government organisations including the World Health Organisation, Gore Foundation, UN Habitat and the World Bank. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Academy of Urbanism, and a past member of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) Review Committee in the UK.

Malcolm has reshaped and designed key districts and precincts in cities across the world: Sports Hub, Singapore, Stratford City (the metropolitan centre of the 2012 London Olympics), London, the NOMA precinct, Manchester, Zuidas District, Amsterdam, and Dontan Eco City (the first major urban project to define ecological urbanism), Shanghai.

Recent commissions include the Wellcome Human Genome Campus in Cambridgeshire, UK, and the new Mahindra World City Jaipur, Asia’s first and the world’s largest project to receive C40 Climate Positive Development (CPDP) Stage 2 Certification.

He is invited to lecture around the world on contemporary urban places, including the City of Melbourne, Sydney, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Munich and Singapore. Malcolm undertakes research into evolving issues in urbanism, and recently led a research programme on the role of open space in cities in a post-COVID context, The fifteen-minute vision: Future proofing our cities.



Presenting:

Resilient Cities are Fit for Many Futures

Our cities are changing, but they continue to be sought-after places for people to live, providing convenient access to jobs, education, entertainment, health care and community. However, our burgeoning cities are becoming increasingly vulnerable to many shocks and stresses that can impact lives and the quality of life.

How do we reduce these impacts? And how do we become more resilient? Do we need to move away from an effects based approach to an outcomes based approach? We need to plan differently and recognise that we don’t have only one future, but many possible futures. To be fit for many futures, there are three fundamental questions to ask: What disruptions do we need to plan for? How can we understand possible impacts and plan for appropriate actions? How can we prepare for responding to disruption?




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