Joe Hajdu is an author, academic, teacher, and avid traveler. As an urban and cultural geographer he has spent a lifetime looking at towns and cities with great passion and insight.

In 1964, as a student he made his first visit to Berlin. He was enthralled by the past dynamism and contemporary plight of that divided city. Regular visits over the next half century followed, and more recently these included discussions with prominent Berliners such as Richard v. Weizsäcker and Eberhard Diepgen. The association with Berlin culminated in the writing of the book Berlin Today (published in 2010).

An earlier fascination with Australia’s truly post-modern city, the Gold Coast, led to the writing of Samurai in the Surf. It is a study of the new rich Japanese and their companies and the culture clash their arrival provoked.

Most recently, he has gone back to the country of his birth, Hungary, to research and interview people about its capital city, Budapest. This resulted in a book , Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe, to be published in mid-2015.

Over a long academic career, largely at Deakin University and its antecedents in Melbourne, Australia, Joe has also written numerous academic articles and texts, whose themes range from the teaching of geography in high schools, the need to make city centres more pedestrian friendly, foreign ownership of urban property in Australia to the effect on people’s lives of the Iron Curtain that divided East and West Germany until 1989. During his long career Joe has been an active member of the Institute of Australian Geographers, Town and Country Planning Association of Victoria, Australian Institute of Urban Affairs and the Australian Geography Teacher association.