About us

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 Research Institute was inaugurated in 2006 to bring together key researchers at RMIT University, Australia, working on understanding the complexity of globalizing 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 globalization 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.