And the Winner is…..

We are thrilled to announce that last night, Professor Ester Cerin (ICHEN Leader, ACU), Professor Billie Giles-Corti (RMIT), Carl Higgs (RMIT), Jonathon Arundel (RMIT), and Dr. Melanie Lowe (University of Melbourne) were awarded the prestigious 2023 national Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) Award for Planning Research Excellence. The award, presented in Adelaide, was accepted on behalf of the team by Professor Giles-Corti.

In November 2022, the team received the PIA Planning Research Excellence Award for Victoria, which placed them in contention for the national accolade this May. Their winning project, ‘Benchmarking Healthy and Sustainable Cities Globally,’ is a groundbreaking initiative aimed at enhancing the health and sustainability of cities around the world.

This major collaborative research project, part of the Global Healthy and Sustainable City-Indicators Collaboration established in 2018, seeks to develop measurable, comparable health-related policy and spatial indicators across cities globally. The collaboration spans 25 cities in 19 countries across six continents, involving more than 80 experts from around the world.

For more information about the team and their research, please visit the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities.

Prof. Billie Giles-Corti accepted the award on behalf of the team.