Global Cities Research Institute

We are living through a period in which urban living has, for the first time in human history, supplanted rural life.  Cities, for all their vibrancy and liveliness, face the growing challenge of providing secure and sustainable places to live.

The Global Cities Institute was inaugurated in 2006 to bring together key researchers at RMIT University, Australia, working on understanding the complexity of globalising urban settings from provincial centres to mega-cities.

Our research is highly collaborative, linking with institutions and people around the world in long-term partnerships, we are directly addressing the challenge through engaged research programs intended to have significant on-the-ground impact. The emphasis of our research is on questions of resilience, security, sustainability, and adaptation in the face of the processes of globalisation and global climate change.

We focus on a number of carefully-chosen cities and their hinterlands in the Asia-Pacific region and engage in cutting-edge and applied research that has real-world consequences for communities, governments and organizations.  Our overall aim is to develop interpretations and strategies for building sustainable cities in the world today, contributing to the quality of human life and the viability of ecologies in those places.

Global Cities Research Institute is associated with the UN Global Compact Cities Programme.

More Information

• Global Cities Research Institute Annual Review 2010 (PDF 10mb)
• Global Cities Research Institute Annual Review 2009 (PDF 6mb)
• RMIT Global Cities Research Institute website (this link will take you away from the RMIT website)