“What drives me is making cities better places that are more sustainable,” says Dr Ann Maudsley.

Dr Maudsley has a PhD in Architecture, Building and Planning from the University of Melbourne. Her research examined how the grid-based city plan has been used throughout history.

She received a living stipend through the Melbourne Research Scholarship to support her during her PhD.  She also received a travel scholarship that allowed her to travel to Türkiye. There, she saw the ruins representing some of the world’s first grid plans.

Are grid-based city plans adaptable?

“We need to continue to change our cities for new infrastructure, or for climate change purposes, or for accessibility. And we must have street patterns that allow for that,” she says.

“My aim was to identify the attributes of the grid in comparison to other street patterns, and their adaptability to accommodate change for retrofitting and delivery of infrastructure, which is a critical part of any town and city.”

Historically, the grid has been convenient for British colonisers to replicate city plans – without care for the land’s topography and certainly not for its Indigenous peoples.

Dr Maudsley looked at how cities like Melbourne, Hong Kong and Dunedin developed during the industrial revolution. At that time, cities began to grow and needed to accommodate new types of transport.

“The grid is very adaptable,” Dr Maudsley says.

Today, urban planners can adapt grid-based cities to be more resilient and sustainable.

“It’s easier to change streets from cars to trams to pedestrian streets,” Dr Maudsley says.

“And when these changes need to occur, movement in the whole city isn’t blocked off. The other streets are able to absorb the traffic, because they're all similar.”

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Choosing to do a PhD at the University of Melbourne

Dr Maudsley had been working as an urban planner at Melbourne Water since the first year of her bachelors in urban planning at the University of Melbourne.

Dr Maudsley works as a Senior Research Officer at Formas, a research council for sustainable development in Sweden.

“We develop calls for research and innovation and related initiatives based on what our stakeholder community sees that we have a need for,” she says.

Researchers and other actors then apply for funding through Formas to fulfill the research and innovation requirements in the calls.

One initiative Dr Maudsley is working to coordinate is the Driving Urban Transitions Partnership. It is an intergovernmental research and innovation program addressing key challenges of urban transitions, funded by around 28 countries and the European Commission.

Dr Maudsley uses her research skills in building these calls. Her PhD also made her familiar with many different city plans around the world. This helps her understand different communities’ needs.

For a while, Dr Maudsley hadn’t known where she wanted to work after her PhD.

“During your PhD, the holy grail is a job in academia. There's this prestige that you need – like you've succeeded only if you end up in academia,” she says.

“For me it was this choice between academia or practice, and there was nothing else. I had to choose between one and the other.”

Dr Maudsley has since realised that PhD graduates can take many different career paths. But how do PhD candidates find out about these job opportunities?

“I'm part the alumni mentoring program at the University of Melbourne. I've had students who may be interested in similar career paths connect with me through that platform,” she says.

“My advice to graduate researchers and students is to use those kinds of platforms that are available.”

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