Dr Libby Porter, Senior Research Fellow

Dr Libby Porter

Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
RMIT University

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Dr Libby Porter:

My name's Libby Porter. I'm based in the Centre for Urban Research and my research is about urban studies and urban geography and the way we manage cities.

My research is about cities, how they function and how we manage them and I'm especially concerned and interested about the ways – the choices we make managing cities and the ways that that causes displacement and dispossession. So people lose their homes, lose their livelihoods, lose their land base and this results in all sorts of injustices in cities. And I'm particularly interested in the ways in which that process unfolds for Aboriginal people in cities and how we can make a better agreement and recognition of Aboriginal people whose territory is now urbanised.

I do what I do because I'm really passionate about the questions that I address. I think the questions about how cities develop, how we manage them and how they can benefit everybody, addressing questions of social and ecological justice are really, really important for our times. So I get out of bed in the morning because this is what drives me.

My research has impact in the world around the questions of social and ecological justice in cities and this is really important because most of the people in the world live in cities nowadays and are projected to into the future.

So if we don't get our cities right, if we don't address some of the profound challenges that we face in regards to urbanisation today we're going to have more and more problems in the future and that's why I see my research as having impact in the world.

RMIT's Centre for Urban Research has some of the leading educators and researchers in my field in Urban Studies, Planning, Urban Geography and Sustainability. I wanted to join that team and I'm inspired to and honoured to be involved.

Undertaking the VC's fellowship will help my career enormously I think. At the end of four years I hope that I have a good standing in the field, I've been able to make a really good contribution by having the space and resources and commitment of the university to support me in my work.

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I'm really impressed by RMIT's commitment to its researchers. The ways in which it's provided research funding, start-up funding and the commitment to its researchers to do what they do best I think is really impressive. I'm also really impressed by how RMIT is committed to the things that it does really well to applied research, to the problems that we face in the world today and I want to be part of that change.

RMIT is really well placed to be a leading innovator in education and research around cities, urbanisation processes and especially the relationship that cities have and institutions in cities have with Aboriginal people on whose land they are operating.

RMIT is really well placed to make this contribution and I'm inspired and honoured to be part of that.

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