Connected Cities Lab

We work with key stakeholders in urban governance to provide evidence, build capacity and offer advice on the global dynamics shaping the leadership of cities. We offer reliable and innovative sources of applied urban research, producing both policy material, practice-oriented education and scholarly reviews. Connected Cities Lab specialises on the ways networks, international processes and information influence urban governance, and strives to link academic research to practical needs.

The way we govern cities, and in turn the way cities contribute to addressing global challenges, is key to ensuring the long-term sustainability of humanity. Yet cities are now confronted with a rapidly changing landscape of international politics, interconnected infrastructures, and shifting economies. Cities can no longer be thought in isolation from each other and the business of deciding who gets what, when, and how in urban development has become a global affair.

Focusing on these networked challenges for city leadership, the Connected Cities Lab is an experimental hub tackling the complexity underpinning urban governance with a focus on information and connectivity. Located within the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning (ABP), and the Melbourne School of Design (MSD), the Lab aims at research that is inherently impact-driven, interdisciplinary and collaborative to address pressing city leadership challenges in and between cities. The Lab is characterised by a focus on urban governance and policy.

Lab research and education programmes engage with the ways decisions about the present and future development of cities are shaped by information flows and more-than-local networks. It is supported by an interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners, and well-established links into industry and government. The Lab's research program is geared towards developing a scholarly and international appreciation of urban politics in both academia and practice. The Lab does so by encouraging evidence-based policymaking and focusing on comparative and applied urban research, working with key voices in the built environment to ensure scholarly advancement translates into urban innovation, and vice-versa.

Recent outputs

Trundle, A. (2020). Resilient cities in a Sea of Islands: Informality and climate change in the South Pacific. Cities, 97, 102496.

Acuto, M. (2020). Engaging with global urban governance in the midst of a crisis. Dialogues in Human Geography 10(2): 221-224.

Jon, I. (2020). A manifesto for planning after the coronavirus: Towards planning of care. Planning Theory, 19:3.

Rogers, D., Herbert, M., Murray, K. et al. (2020). The city under COVID: Podcasting as a digital methodology. Journal of Economic and Social Geography, 111: 434-450.

Acuto, M. (2020). COVID-19: Lessons for an Urban (izing) World. One Earth, 2(4), 317-319.

Jon, I. (2020). Scales of Political Action in the Anthropocene: Gaia, Networks, and Cities as Frontiers of Doing Earthly Politics. Global Society, 1-23.

Hensley, M., Mateo-Babiano, D., Minnery, J., & Pojani, D. (2020). How diverging interests in public health and urban planning can lead to less healthy cities. Journal of Planning History, 19(2), 71-89.

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  Professor Michele Acuto, Lab Director and Professor of Global Urban Politics
• 
  Kate Murray, Lab Coordinator
• 
  Jessie Briggs, Research Fellow in Urban Sustainability
• 
  Geoffrey Browne, Postdoctoral Research Fellow In International Urban Development
• 
  Stephanie Butcher, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in International Urban Politics
• 
  Jennifer Dam, Project Coordinator on Botnar Evidence to Action
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  Kazi Nazrul Fattah, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in International Urban Politics
• 
  Pablo Fuentenebro Alonso, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in International Urban Politics
• 
  Paris Hadfield, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Urban Innovation
• 
  Thomas Jacobs, Project Officer in SDGs Cities Challenge and Innovate4Cities
• 
  Ihnji Jon, Lecturer in International Urban Politics
• 
  Hyung Min Kim, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning
• 
  Anna Kosovac, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in International Urban Politics
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  Inderlina Mateo-Babiano, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning
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  Daniel Pejic, Research Fellow in International Urban Migration
• 
  Alexei Trundle, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sustainable Urban Development

Enterprise Fellows

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  Joyati Das, Enterprise Principal Fellow in International Urban Development
• 
  Cathy Oke, Melbourne Enterprise Senior Fellow in Informed Cities

Lab Visiting Fellows

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  Kris Hartley, A/Prof. in Public Policy at Education University of Hong Kong
• 
  Andreina Seijas, Urban Night Researcher, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Project Researchers

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  Shelby Bassett, Research Assistant in Urban Policy
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  Rebecca Clements, Research Assistant on Innovate4Cities
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  Ariana Dickey, Research Assistant in Urban Innovation
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  Giorgia Fornari, Research Assistant on SDGs for Melbourne
• 
  Julia Henly, Research Assistant in Global City Leadership

Doctoral Researchers

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  Sombol Mokhles - "Climate Change Experimentation in International City Networks” University Graduate Research Scholarship
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  Caitlin Morrissey - “Making Up the Global City” Dual Melbourne-Manchester PhD Award
• 
  Daniel Pejic - "City as Group Agent in Global Migration Governance" Lab Scholarship
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  Jana Perkovic -"Form Follows Finance: Redesigning Housing Markets" Lab Scholarship

• 
  Argentine Council for International Relations
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  Barcelona Centre for International Affairs
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  The Business of Cities, The Comparative Imagination
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  Chicago Council on Global Affairs, City Diplomacy, Great Powers and Urbanization Project
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  Department for International Development
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  The Economist Intelligence Unit, The Comparative Imagination
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  Economic and Social Research Council
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  Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
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  Fondation Botnar, Evidence to Action
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  Global Challenges Research Fund
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  Global Covenant of Mayors, Innovate4Cities
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  International Science Council
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  International Sustainability Unit, Science and the Future of Cities
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  Nature Sustainability, Science and the Future of Cities
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  Perry World House
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  University College London, Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality
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  UCL Grand Challenge for Sustainable Cities, Science and the Future of Cities
• 
  University of Oxford
• 
  World Bank

We deliver education that builds upon Lab research to inform the next generation of city leaders and encourage research-led education.

Get in touch: urban research is an inherently collaborative endeavour!

Cities are on the frontlines of the current coronavirus pandemic crisis.

COVID-19 has imposed exceptional measures of unprecedented impact in recent history and is shaking the foundations of our daily lives, from social interactions to economic relations and everyday wellbeing, in major centres the world over. It is the very ‘connected cities’ nature of our urbanised planet that facilitated the global spread of COVID-19 and foregrounds some of our biggest challenges, but city leaders are also stepping up to the test posed by the coronavirus whilst digital, social and political connections are being recast in settlements in the Global North and South.

Building on existing efforts in the areas of urban policy and health, as well as wellbeing and cities,  the Connected Cities Lab is engaging in a number of ways in the current response to COVID-19, advocating for an evidence-based, equitable and inclusive, and innovation-oriented approach to the crisis. On this page, you will find a repository of these engagements.

We also encourage consulting the work of the University’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, at the forefront of COVID-19 response.