Living Cities Forum invites leading thinkers to help make sense of the transformations shaping our built environment. In this Q&A, we spoke with Andrew Mackenzie, Program Director of the Forum, about the ideas driving this year’s program, and why public discourse around architecture and urbanism matters now more than ever.
Naomi Milgrom Foundation (NMF)
What sets Living Cities Forum apart from other industry events?
Andrew Mackenzie (AM)
While LCF sits within an annual program of what might be called ‘industry’ events, the forum has always embraced the freedom to look beyond any one industry, discipline or territory. The diversity and range of speakers that this opens up is the key thing that makes this event different from most. Listening to designers, philosophers, engineers and economists, from very different parts of the world, all discussing the city and what it means to live in it, forms a kind of microcosm of what a city is. A place of collision and collaboration.
NMF
What makes a city feel truly alive to you?
AM
A city is truly alive when it is shared. This relates both to how we share the city as a community of people with different needs, means and interests, but also how we share the city with our non-human kin: the birds and animals, plants and bugs, rivers and forests, that create a healthy world for us all.
NMF
What’s one thing you think all growing cities should prioritise, and why?
AM
All growing cities should prioritise how to grow without treating the land that surrounds it as either a bank to raid, or a dump to fill. For too long the prosperity of a city has been in inverse proportion to the depletion of everything that is not city. This was never sustainable, and is now no longer acceptable.
NMF
How have you seen the idea of ‘Critical Mass’ playing out in cities – either recently or historically? Were there any particular examples that inspired this year’s theme?
AM
Some cities are shrinking, some have plateaued, others (including most Australian major cities) are expected to grow. What matters most is not size or numbers, but a range of complex factors that translate different population densities and intensities into different qualities of life outcomes. Some places have helped catalyse this theme, including the transformation of central Paris into an almost car-free city, or the positive and confident leadership role that public agencies play in many Scandinavian cities that is anathema to most Australian cities, or the ways in which a city like Tokyo can allow innovative urban infill and incremental redevelopment in a manner that avoids the old tropes of gentrification or overdevelopment.
NMF
Why is this a timely theme for the Australian urban context in 2025?
AM
This is a timely moment to consider the Critical Mass of Melbourne, as the city anticipates growth in the coming decades. What does this mean for our housing and mobility, environment and society. It often feels like we are still working with 19th Century principles, as evidenced in our bankrupting obsession with endless road expansions, or our almost complete abdication of housing as a social obligation. Meanwhile the world has, and continues to, change radically. We need more expansive thinking, more joined up thinking, and we need to stop making the same mistakes we have been making for over two centuries.
NMF
How do you hope this theme will challenge or shift thinking among architects, designers and planners in Australia?
AM
I hope LCF25 will help explore the many ways that innovative thinking from around the world is adapting to a new way of working and thinking about the urban metabolism. There are lessons to be learned and shared with our audience, about how to design cities that are less extractive and less carbon intensive, while being more socially cohesive and supportive of diverse ecologies.
To learn more about this year’s theme watch this interview with Elaine Chia and Andrew Mackenzie.