HOPE 2024 marked the second edition of the Housing, People and Environment (HOPE) platform, following its successful launch in 2023. Held in March 2024 under the patronage of HH Dr. Mona Fahad Al Said, the event focused on sharing evidence and lessons learned from the PABE (Physical Activity and Built Environment) pilot studies conducted in Nizwa and Barka — two of Oman’s designated Healthy Cities.
Bringing together national and international researchers, planners, decision-makers, and local communities, HOPE 2024 highlighted strategies to improve quality of life through people-centered urban design.
The event featured three main components:
Key objectives included:
Emerita Professor Billie Giles-Corti has published over 400 articles, book chapters, and reports, and is ranked in the top 1% of researchers globally in her field based on citations. She is an Honorary Fellow of both the Planning Institute of Australia and the Public Health Association, and a Fulbright Scholar. In 2016, she was awarded an NHMRC Elizabeth Blackburn Fellowship as the top-ranked female fellow in public health, and in 2020, she received the Town and Country Association's Sir James Barrett Memorial Medal.
She is currently a VC Professorial Fellow. From 2016–2020, she was an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow. Between 2017–2020, she served as RMIT’s Urban Futures Enabling Capability Platform Director, and from 2011–2016, she was a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne and Director of the McCaughey VicHealth Community Wellbeing Unit.
For more than two decades, Billie and her multidisciplinary research team have been studying the impact of the built environment on health and well-being. From 2014–2020, she led the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Liveable Communities and worked closely with local, national, and global policy-makers and practitioners in Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane, and across Australia. Since 2014, she has been a Chief Investigator at the Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, responsible for collaborating with sectors outside of health. She also led its National Liveability Study, which initiated the Australian Urban Observatory (https://auo.org.au), a platform that maps and disseminates policy-relevant urban liveability indicators for Australia’s 21 largest cities, available for use by local government and the broader community.
The HOPE 2024 Exhibition, held at the Science Museum, GUtech, showcased applied design studies responding to real challenges in Omani neighborhoods. These studies reimagined residential environments using walkability principles, integrating fieldwork data and strategies developed through the PABE project.
Highlights included:
The exhibition served as both a learning tool and a policy inspiration, bridging research with design practice and public engagement.
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