We are living through a period in which urban living has for the first time in human history supplanted rural life. This is a momentous shift. However, cities, for all their vibrancy and liveliness, face a growing challenge of providing secure and sustainable places to live. The RMIT Global Cities Research Institute directly addresses this challenge and engages in research programs with on-the-ground impact, emphasizing questions of resilience, security, sustainability, and adaptation in the face of processes of globalization and global climate change.

Sometime in the next year or two, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in West Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will go unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecision of Third World censuses, this epochal transition has probably already occurred. (Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, London, 2006, p. 1.)

The overall task of the RMIT Global Cities Research Institute is to research the processes of global change in the urban context, both positive and problematic, with the view to planning and projecting sustainable ways of living. This involves understanding the complexity of globalizing urban settings from provincial centres to mega-cities. As a way of giving further focus to this brief, the Institute focuses on a number of carefully-chosen cities in the Asia-Pacific region, linked to RMIT’s overall strategic direction. The initial core focus will be on Ho Chi Minh City and Melbourne, as well as Chennai, Kuala Lumpur, Port Moresby and Shanghai. In summary, the Institute engages in cutting-edge and applied research that has real-world consequences.