Each year the Town and Country Planning Association Inc. (TCPA) awards the Sir James Barrett Memorial Medal to recognise the best contribution annually to town planning in Victoria. This year the award was presented at our Annual General Meeting on Friday, 19 November 2020.
The TCPA President, Marianne Richards, was pleased to present the Sir James Barrett Memorial Medal for 2020 to Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti.
Professor Billie Giles-Corti is a Distinguished Professor at RMIT University and, until September 2020, was the Urban Futures Enabling Capability Platform director at RMIT. Prior to joining RMIT in 2017, she was a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at The University of Melbourne and Director of the McCaughey VicHealth Community Wellbeing Unit.
For over two decades, Billie and a multi-disciplinary research team have been studying the impact of the built environment on health and wellbeing. Her team has mapped policy-relevant urban liveability indicators across all Australian capital cities and these are now disseminated through the Australian Urban Observatory.
Over that same period, the TCPA has focussed on the themes of walking and cycling to maintain health; and human health impacts in urban environments, particularly green/blue spaces and transport corridors.
Billie’s work has been an inspiration to the TCPA as well as many others in land use and transport planning.