Lecture: Born and Not Made: Designing the Productive City

Lecture by Greg Keeffe, Head of the School of the Natural and Built Environment, Queens University Belfast
Hosted by the Urban Energy Institute
Date: October 14, 2020
Time: 4-5pm CET
Moderator: Andy van den Dobbelsteen

The lecture looks at a range of projects designed by the author that develop the idea of the city as a living super-organism.  This new living city will see waste as food; energy as ubitiquity;  mutate itself according to the prevalent and changing forces around it; and develop synergies of program that create resilient and profitable futures for its inhabitants.  This will be achieved through not only the use of new renewable technologies, but also the imaginative use of urban form and programme.  

About the Speaker

Greg Keeffe is an academic and urban designer with over 30 years experience in sustainability, energy use and its impact on the design of built form and urban space. He is Professor of Architecture + Urbanism and Head of the School of the Natural and Built Environment at Queens University, Belfast, UK, which is a large interdisciplinary school, concerned with investigating the complex problems of the anthropocene. Previously he held the Downing Chair of Sustainable Architecture at Leeds School of Architecture, UK.

Greg has extensive experience of working closely with architects, engineers and planners to develop exciting ways of re-invigorating the city through the application of innovative sustainable technologies, informing his work on the sustainable city as synergistic super-organism.  In this way, he has sought to develop a series of theoretical hypotheses about our future existence on the planet, through a series of technological and spatial interventions.  Most of his work comes out of a free-thinking open-ended discussion about how things could and should be.

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