Speakers join international lineup for Living Cities Forum 2018

The Naomi Milgrom Foundation has announced three more international speakers listed to attend the Living Cities Forum 2018. Jane Hall and Audrey Thomas-Hayes of London-based creative collective Assemble, winners of the 2015 Turner Prize, and renowned Dutch-American sociologist Saskia Sassen are the latest esteemed speakers to be revealed.

With more speakers still to be announced, the three new additions will join celebrated Barcelona-based architect and educator Carme Pinós, designer of MPavilion 2018, for a day-long gathering of leading architects and design thinkers at Deakin Edge, Federation Square, in Melbourne on Thursday 26 July.

An initiative of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, this year’s forum investigates the theme ‘Shaping Society’, interrogating how design transforms communities and contributes to social wellbeing.

Established in 2010, Assemble has built a reputation for championing collaborative working practices, and in particular working with the public as participants in a range of ongoing design projects. Working across the fields of art, architecture and design, Assemble were the unexpected winners of the 2015 Turner Prize, Europe’s most prestigious contemporary art prize for their ongoing project Granby Four Streets, which was described by the jury as “a ground-up approach to regeneration, city planning and development in opposition to corporate gentrification”.

Saskia Sassen is a Robert S Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a member of its Committee on Global Thought, with eight published books translated into over twenty languages. Her research and writing focuses on immigration, global cities (including cities and terrorism), the new networked technologies and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. Saskia will also be appearing at the Housing Futures Forum in Sydney, on Friday 27 July.

Other attending speakers include:

• Carme Pinós (Barcelona): Founder of Estudio Carme Pinós and recipient of the prestigious Berkely-Rupp Architecture Professorship and Prize (2016). Carme is the designer of MPavilion 2018.
• Nicholas Lobo Brennan (London): Co-founder of architecture, design and research collective Apparata, constructing buildings, furniture and books with an interest in communities and landscapes.
• Liam Young (Sydney): Architect, filmmaker and performer concerned with imagining future urbanisms, and founder of the think tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today.
• Ryue Nishizawa (Tokyo): Tokyo-based architect and the youngest-ever recipient of the Pritzker Prize.

Living Cities Forum 2018 is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Development Victoria and is presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation in partnership with Open House Melbourne with the assistance of Melbourne School of Design, Monash University, RMIT University and Australian Institute of Architects.

For further details and program announcements, please visit forum.naomimilgromfoundation.org