In 1960 after 4 thousand years of civilisation, the world’s population reached 3 billion people, only 52 years later in 2012 we have more than doubled this and reached 7 billion people worldwide. Currently Asia amounts to about 60% of the world’s total population. It has some of the world’s densest and most impoverished cities. Africa and North Africa are also rapidly expanding in extremely different ways. Huge economic gaps divide rich and poor and many areas that are expanding faster than current planning modules or political landscapes can compete with. We have a humanitarian crisis. An urban crisis.

We would like to initiate an Urban debate on cities and what the future of the city is and even if our current idea of the city is redundant. To do this we will be discussing Cities in their most simple element: the street. From Morocco to Shenzhen and New York to Limerick.

Andrew Griffin is a Director of JDS Architects leading the Copenhagen Headquarters on a day to day basis. Andrew is responsible for JDS Architects’ International projects and its expansion into the Asian market including its Shanghai office. Andrew specializes in Master-plans, Hotels, Sports, Residential, Office, Mixed Use and Public Buildings. Andrew is currently leading JDS Architects projects in China with and a number of project throughout Europe and southeast Asia.

Born in Ireland, Andrew graduated at the top of his class from the Dublin School of Architecture, DIT with 1st class honours. He also received the Opus award for Best Graduate in Ireland and Best In Show in London. He was President of the Architectural Students Association from 2003-2004 and has been consistently active in many Architecture associations across the world both in an advisory capacity and as member. Before joining JDS Architects as Partner in 2006 he worked for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture/ Rem Koolhaas (OMA) in Rotterdam on the CCTV project in Beijing and was part of the winning team for the White City Master plan in West London. Andrew has also worked at FKL Architects in Dublin and PLOT in Copenhagen.

Maxim Laroussi: Born in Fez, Morocco and moved to France at an early age. He graduated from PUC Campinas, Brazil and UCD, Dublin with a B.Arch. He lived and worked as an architect in various countries including UK, France, Brazil and Ireland before setting up Architecture Republic in Dublin 2005. He was president of the Architectural Association of Ireland from 2005-06 and currently teaches at the School of Architecture University Limerick.

Architecture Republic with offices in Dublin (Ireland) and Lyon (France) operates in the fields of architecture, urbanism and landscape design. In the past few years, Architecture Republic received numerous awards for excellence in architectural design including numerous AAI Awards, Irish Concrete Society Award and received a nomination for the prestigious Mies Van Der Rohe Awards in 2011 as well as being awarded as one of top 40 European architects under 40 by the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.