Maud Cassaignau

Dr Maud Cassaignau’s research, teaching and practice focus on the adaptation of metropolitan areas to challenges of climate, biodiversity loss, growth, and economic change. She uses optimistic, multi-scalar propositions to engage with stakeholders and communities through multiple modes, including teaching, research, exhibition-making, report-writing, and publishing, to achieve discussion, altered attitudes and real change.

Maud has collaborated with industry partners and stakeholders on projects that overlap with her research focus, including CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, the City of Melbourne, RMIT Place Lab, Brimbank City Council, Eurobodalla Shire Council, City of Kunshan, the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, Environment Education Victoria, ETH Zurich, Realm Studios, Aspect Studios, E2A Studios, Salad Dressing Landscape Architecture, and colleagues from different disciplines.

Hybrid mapping, design approaches integrating transdisciplinary input, narrative visualisations, and haptic models are key tools, used to engage with diverse audiences, convey future possibilities, and induce dialogue around sustainable futures.

 

Maud’s most significant projects include: Building Mixity!, a co-authored book and project arising through a 10-year engagement in Cremorne and that resulted in new zoning and more inclusive planning frameworks; the transdisciplinary Kunshan Projects in China, which contributed to the implementation of water sensitive strategies, a prize for Innovation in Research by the Australian Federal Government, and Kunshan receiving the label ‘Sponge City’ in China; a teaching-, research-, exhibition- and community engagement-based project in Bateman’s Bay, which successfully advocated for Council’s inclusion of water sensitive and flood adaptation strategies within their masterplan; engagement with Melbournian schools to adapt their outdoor spaces to climate change and generate educational landscapes; and a research collaboration with RMIT Place Lab and Salad Dressing Landscape Architects, that aims to develop and physically test rewilding strategies within the City of Melbourne. Maud’s PhD reflected on her methodology, which uses academia as platform to engage with stakeholders and communities through multiple modes to achieve change of attitudes and planning towards more inclusive and sustainable futures. Her practice, XPACE architecture + urban design, has realised works in Australia and Europe, which have been published internationally.