Associate Professor
Mirko Guaralda

Biography

Dr Mirko Guaralda (Ph.D., MHEd, DArch) is internationally recognised for his research in architecture and urban design, grounded philosophically in the people centred approach promoted by the United Nations-Sustainable Development Goals and the UN-Habitat New Urban Agenda. Dr Guaralda enquires the complex issues of urban morphology, place quality, and community involvement, investigating the creation of adaptive, positive, and responsible urban environments through a distinctive coaching approach. He is a passionate HDR supervisors and has so far supervised to completion more than 20 HDR candidates, most of whom are currently employed in leading research institutions.

Dr Guaralda is Associate Professor at the Queensland University of Technology; he currently collaborates with the Universitas 17 Agustus 1945-Surabaya (Indonesia) on a number of research and educational projects. He has also ongoing collaborations with Lodz University of Technology, (Poland); Universidad de los Andes (Colombia); and Chiang Mai University (Thailand). He was visiting professor at the Jiangxi University of Science and Technology in 2018 and 2019; at the Thammasat University of Bangkok, Thailand, in 2017. He was researcher at the United States Study Centre of Sydney (USSC) in 2012 with a study on the relationship between urban form and social behaviour. Since 2016, Dr Guaralda has been collaborating with UN-Habitat promoting people-centred design, delivering workshops and training events based on placemaking and community engagement. Before joining academia full time, Dr Guaralda worked in industry and local government; he has been involved in a wide range of projects at different scales, from small dwellings and gardens, to new estates and urban strategic planning.

Dr Guaralda’s research provides alternatives to the way cities are designed, serving to guide the future of urbanisation, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, where rapid urbanisation still follows unsustainable development models. In the last 10 years, he has been working on smart cities and Knowledge Innovation spaces in collaboration with leading academics in the sector, contributing his experience to enquire the physical outcome and morphological implications of digital technologies. It is critical today for architects to engage with citymaking and placemaking at a sophisticated level if they are to solve the challenges of our modern cities. Dr Guaralda’s people-centred methodology for urban design means he investigate the quality of urban environments avoiding cultural compartmentalisation, embracing the strength of technological innovations, and overcoming the limitation of the business-as-usual model of development. His research approach serves to deliver cities that are designed for wellbeing, prosperity, and happiness in a positive, sustainable, and equitable way.

Dr Guaralda areas of activity can be broadly organised in two main avenues of enquiry:

Urban Morphology and Building Typologies

Our cities are becoming more and more complex and it is necessary to approach their enquiry as an integrated ecosystem. Cities are today recognised as the cause of contemporary challenges such as climate adaptation, pandemics, or economic downturns. Cities are also recognised as the possible solution to these challenging, moving the focus of development towards a positive human-centred approach. Dr Guaralda investigates typo-morphological processes to understand current urban environment and guide the development of our future cities, with a particular focus on medium-density, medium-rise mixed used development.

Sense of Place and Community Involvement

The experience of our cities is an intrinsic element is supporting the development of healthy and resilient communities. People-place interaction can take different forms that requires customised approaches to understand their dynamics. People’s sentiments towards cities can develop and evolve through a variety of daily interactions, such as adoption of mobile technologies, structured and unstructured engagement with public spaces, or the simple casual exploration of the urban fabric. Dr Guaralda investigates tangible and intangible factors supporting the development of a sense of place; community involvement is also investigated as a strategy to foster sense of place and provide agency to communities in shaping their environment.