Cultivating Future Urban Atmospheres

Drawing on his work across Europe, Australia and Asia, Professor Marvin will examine how atmospheric control is being used to enclose, create and secure specific indoor and outdoor environments for humans, plants and animals and explores what this means for how we use urban space now and into the future.

The thirty-minute lecture will be introduced with a short talk from Professor Lauren Rickards, Director of the Urban Futures Enabling Impact Platform on emerging shifts in the external global atmosphere and related dangerous changes in climate – which is a rapidly evolving situation increasingly being used to justify the radical alteration and extension of our internal atmospheres.  

Speakers

Professor Simon Marvin holds fractional appointments in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney and the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. Simon's long standing research interests focus on socio-technical change and the urban condition. His latest book with Andres Luque-Ayala Urban Operating Systems: Producing the computational city is published by MIT Press in 2020 as a freely available open access publication. His more recent work has focused on the development of urban climate control for human and non-human life charting the increasingly strategic role of technologically mediated climates constructed to ensure survivability in a period of climate turbulence. This work has focused on the extension of 'interior' climate control for food production and strategic conservation as well as the modification of the 'exterior' atmosphere to provide comfortable and safe outdoor spaces.

Professor Lauren Rickards is Director of the Urban Futures Enabling Impact Platform at RMIT University, and a human geography researcher on climate change in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, College of Design and Social Context. She has a M.Sc. and PhD from Oxford University.

This lecture is part of RMIT University's Urban Futures Symposium, presented by the College of Design and Social Context in collaboration with the Urban Futures Enabling Impact Platform.