Course General Description

The Master of Urban Design focuses on designing for healthy city futures by embracing creative and speculative design thinking; cross-disciplinarity; alongside engagement with people, data and advanced technologies. Cities are growing at an unprecedented rate with over fifty per cent of the world’s population now living in cities. This mass urbanisation presents urgent challenges, such as accommodating dense populations, responding to climate change, public health, housing affordability, urban mobility, and growing spatial complexity. These challenges cannot be addressed using traditional twentieth century urban planning methods – new multi-dimensional approaches are needed by professionals that embrace three-dimensional space, big-data along with change over time, temperature, humidity, shade, air quality, land-use, safety, alongside economic, environmental, social and cultural aspects of the city.

School General Description

Established as a university in 1992, Swinburne University of Technology is a world-class, multidisciplinary institution leading the way in science, technology, business, design and innovation. The university’s strengths build on the founding principles of equal opportunity, student-focused learning and industry engagement. Swinburne has an agile and forward-thinking understanding of global business and government which means it responds effectively to the changing needs of industry. The university provides students with access to high-quality teaching, exposure to high-impact global research, and active engagement with both industry and the community. Swinburne invests heavily in providing our students and researchers with state-of-the-art facilities and equipment. Significant recent developments include the $100 million Advanced Manufacturing and Design Centre (AMDC) and the $140 million Advanced Technologies Centre (ATC) at our Hawthorn campus. The ATC houses leading-edge research facilities including the Smart Structures Laboratory, the first of its kind in Australia.