International keynote architects headline Melbourne and Sydney events examining housing, belonging and governance in cities today.

Presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation for its eighth edition, Living Cities Forum returns to Melbourne and Sydney this August with a line-up of international speakers exploring what it means to build cities with care. Established in 2017 as Australia’s flagship event for urban designers, thinkers and placemakers, the forum has built a reputation for cross-disciplinary programs that treat urban life as something continually negotiated by politics, economics, culture and ecology, and the everyday experiences of the people who inhabit our cities.

Headline speakers

This year’s theme, ‘Cities Made With Care’, presents three headline speakers whose practices span architecture, governance and spatial research. Celebrated architect Anupama Kundoo, whose research-oriented practice began in India in 1990, has spent decades developing people-centric architecture grounded in spatial and material research that keeps environmental impact low while remaining socio-economically beneficial.

Now a professor of architecture at TU Berlin, Kundoo has received the RIBA Charles Jencks award and the Auguste Perret Prize, and her recent monograph, Cl, argues for abundance built on ingenuity, time, skills and a sense of community, rather than the industrialised, code-based design that dominates contemporary construction.

Finn Williams has been City Architect of Malmö since 2021, having previously led public architecture initiatives at Croydon Council and the Greater London Authority. As co-founder and chief executive of the social enterprise Public Practice, Williams has spent his career embedding public-interest design into planning systems. In Malmö he now leads work on place-based architecture and civic equality. Tidskriften Rum named him the most influential individual in architecture and design in Sweden.

The third keynote speaker, Ludwig Engel, is a futurologist and spatial researcher who campaigns for HouseEurope!, a non-profit organisation advocating for socially just and environmentally fair housing rules across Europe. Through the European Citizens’ Initiative Power to Renovation, which unites more than 250 organisations, offices and universities, HouseEurope! has become the largest European campaign pushing to prioritise renovation over demolition. Engel directs the MA program Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Instituut and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

Housing as infrastructure and identity

Naomi Milgrom AC, founder of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation and the powerhouse behind Melbourne’s long-running MPavilion initiative, says cities are increasingly discussed through the language of targets, growth and delivery, when the most meaningful ones are defined instead by connection and belonging. Elaine Chia, the Foundation’s chief executive, adds that the forum does not aim to produce consensus, but to create the conditions for more ambitious public conversation about the values that will define our cities.

Drawing on Malmö’s civic experiments, European demolition debates and Kundoo’s material-led practice, this year’s program examines housing as both infrastructure and identity, treating it as a foundation of civic life that shapes how people live, move and belong. International keynote presentations will run through the morning sessions in both cities, with afternoon programming expanding on the theme through conversation, local case studies and exchange with Australian design thinkers.

Dates, venues and tickets

The Living Cities Forum will take place at The Edge, Federation Square, in Melbourne on Tuesday 25 August, and at the State Library of NSW in Sydney on Friday 28 August, with both events running from 8:30am to 6pm.

New for 2026, half-day tickets will be available for audiences wishing to attend only the keynote program. Full details and tickets are available at livingcitiesforum.org.