Expertise in sustainable urban development 

Michael W. Mehaffy, Ph.D., has specialties in urban planning, architecture, philosophy and computer science, with a focus on climate change and urbanism as well as complexity and network science. He has held appointments in teaching and/or research in these fields at ten universities in eight countries. He is the author of six books, and contributing author of over twenty books. He is also well-published in peer-reviewed journals (Google Scholar h-index of 23, i10 index of 40, and 2,472 citations). He earned his Ph.D. in architecture and urbanism at the top-ranked architecture programme of TU Delft in The Netherlands, after previous graduate work at The University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin, in architecture, urban planning, design, philosophy, business administration and public affairs. Among his distinguished past roles, he served as the first Director of Education for King Charles' foundation, then known as The Prince's Foundation, where his programme served as the basis for a new Masters and Ph.D. programme in Sustainable Urbanism at the University of Oxford.  He was also Project Manager  and co-designer for the Master Developer of Orenco Station, widely recognized as one of the first large-scale U.S. projects to successfully combine walkable mixed-use design with transit access, setting a national precedent for transit-oriented development.

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Michael Mehaffy is also widely recognized for his published research and professional articles on the works of Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, urban morphology, urban self-organization, architecture, computer science, and philosophy. In the book Design for a Living Planet (co-authored with Nikos A. Salingaros), Mehaffy introduced "Place Network Theory," an urban spatial network theory, and in the book Notes on an Incomplete Architecture, he introduced "symmetric structuralism," described as a form of "neo-structuralism" to inform architecture and urbanism, and to resolve key problems in philosophy and linguistics. He is also at work on a book about what he terms "economic culturalism", dealing with problems of externality valuation and feedback in sustainable development. He is also active in developing new pattern language tools for consulting and community design, including the book A New Pattern Language for Growing Regions: Places, Networks, Processes.

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Michael Mehaffy is a Fellow of the Urban Guild and of the Congress for the New Urbanism, and Member of the INTBAU College of Traditional Practitioners. Since 2007 he has also served as Executive Director of Sustasis Foundation, a small catalytic "think and do" tank based in the Columbia Gorge, USA, and also since 1993, he has served as President of Structura Naturalis Inc., his international urban design and development consultancy.  

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