Greg Keeffe

Greg Keeffe is an academic and urban designer with over 30 years of experience in sustainability, energy use, and its impact on the design of built form and urban space. He is a professor of architecture and urbanism at Queens University, School of Architecture, Belfast, UK. Previously he held the prestigious Downing Chair of Sustainable Architecture at the Leeds School of Architecture.

Greg has extensive experience working closely with architects and planners to develop exciting ways of re-invigorating the city through the application of innovative sustainable technologies, informing his work on the sustainable city as a synergistic super-organism.  In this way, he has sought to develop a series of theoretical hypotheses about our future existence on the planet, through a series of technological and spatial interventions.  Most of his work comes out of a free-thinking open-ended discussion about how things should be.

Academic Research/Specialty Areas

  • Architectural design
  • Architectural practice 
  • Infrastructure planning
  • Land use/spatial planning
  • Landscape architecture
  • Suburban neighborhoods
  • Sustainability
  • Urbanism
  • Urban design
  • Urban resilience
  • Urban agriculture
  • Sustainability
  • Productive cities
  • Food Energy Water Nexus

Related Links

Related News

Classes (Selected)

  • ARCH 3101 Design VDesign and development of complex architectural projects situated in urban contexts and developed with regard to program, site, building, and representation.

Awards, Grants, and Fellowships (Selected)

  • Smart and Sustainable Built Environments, Sydney. Paper of the Conference (2018)
  • Queens University Societal Impact Prize – CityZEN (2017)
  • Winner:  Ebbsfleet Garden City competition, with AECOM and MacCreanor Lavington (2015) 
  • Green Genius Award.  UK Government Technology Strategy Board (2013) 
  • Passive and Low Energy Architecture Conference 2013, Munich – Paper of the Conference (2013) 

Exhibitions and Presentations (Selected)

  • TEDx 2021. Accelerating the Decarbonisation of Neighbourhoods.
  • Born and Not Made: Designing the Productive City. Smart and Sustainable Built Environments, Sydney December (2018)
  • Hardware, Software, Interface: A Strategy for the Implementation of Urban Agriculture. Association of European Schools of Planning Finding Spaces Conference.  November (2014)

Publications (Selected)

  • Roggema, Rob; Tillie, Nico; Keeffe, Greg; Yan, Wanglin. / Nature-Based Deployment Strategies for Multiple Paces of Change: The Case of Oimachi, Japan. In: Urban Planning. 2021 ; Vol. 6, No. 2. pp. 143-161.
  • G.P.Keeffe & Cullen S.  Northern Neitherland.  Queens Architectural Press 2020 109 p.
  • Han, Qiyao; G.P. Keeffe; Caplat, P; Simson, A.   Cities as hot stepping stones for tree migration. in: NATURE: Urban sustainability, Vol. 1, No. 1.

Selected Work

  • The interior of a sketchbook.

    Messy sketchbook, Nicosia Cyprus 2020

  • Digital rendering of a red and cyan diagram consisting of a series of small squares.

    Roselare, Belgium. Carbon descent diagrams for CityZEN 2019

  • The interior of a building whose left wall consists of a series of windows with plants suspended in front, and left a series of fish tanks built into the wall.

    Biospheric Project - Elevated aquaponic food system, Manchester UK

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