Michael W. Mehaffy, Ph.D. is Director of the Future of Places Research Network, and Senior Researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is also Executive Director of the Sustasis Foundation and Sustasis Press, a research and publication NGO based in Portland, Oregon that is focused on topics of urban sustainability. Dr. Mehaffy has been a consultant to UN-Habitat for the Habitat III conference and its outcome document, The New Urban Agenda. He is also an author, researcher, educator, and practitioner in urban design and strategic urban development with an international practice. He has held teaching and/or research appointments at seven graduate institutions in six countries, and he is on the editorial boards of two international journals of urban design. He was formerly the Director of Education for the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment in London, and is currently Chair of the College of Chapters of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), a London-based NGO co-founded by the Prince of Wales. He studied philosophy of science at the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin, and architecture and planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in architecture at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where his research focused on urban form and greenhouse gas emissions.
1 Portions of this essay were drawn from an essay written for the Congress for the New Urbanism blog “Public Square”. I am grateful to editor Rob Steuteville for his assistance.
2 Portions of this essay were drawn from my earlier essay on the Katarxis3.com website, “The kind of problem architecture is.”
3 This essay is based in part on a previous essay that appeared in Planetizen in 2011. I am grateful to James Brasuell and the other Planetizen staff for the original invitation.
4 This essay is drawn in part from a “virtual roundtable” that I participated in, hosted by The Nature of Cities group in 2016. I am grateful to David Maddox for the invitation.
5 Portions of this essay first appeared in Urban Design International in 2007. I am indebted to then-editor Richard Hayward and the reviewers for its development and editing.
6 This chapter is drawn from several sources, including a talk given at the launch of the India chapter of INTBAU, the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism, generously sponsored by the Nabha Foundation. A version of the talk later appeared in the conference proceedings, New Architecture and Urbanism: Development of Indian Traditions, edited by Deependra Prashad. I am grateful to Deependra and the Nabha Foundation. Other portions are drawn from my own drafts of papers I combined with Nikos Salingaros in a series of posts that ran at the Metropolis POV website. I am grateful to Susan Szenasy and Nilos Salingaros for the development of these ideas.
7 The chapters in this section are drawn in part from a paper delivered at The Athens Dialogues, a conference organized by The Onassis Foundation, Harvard University and other partners, in Athens, Greece in 2010. I am grateful for the invitation, especially by Prof. George Babiniotis of Onassis Foundation, and Prof. Robert Harriss, my session chair.
8 Portions of this essay were also published in the book Sustainable Urban Forms: Theory, Design and Application, edited by Bashir Kazimee, published by Cognella, 2016.
9 Portions of this chapter were included my doctoral dissertation, Urban Form and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Findings, Strategies, and Design Decision Support Technologies, published by Delft University of Technology, School of Architecture and the Built Environment.
10 Portions of this essay were delivered as part of the annual Sir David Anderson Lecture at the University of Strathclyde in 2011. I am indebted to my hosts Sergio Porta and Ombretta Romice for the invitation, and for their kind assistance in securing the Sir David Anderson fellowship that year.
11 This essay is based on a talk given at Habitat Norway in Oslo, February 2017. I am indebted to Kjersti Grut of Habitat Norway for the invitation. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Razzi, Editor-in-Chief of Urban Land magazine, for the commissioning the research and development of the article on Medellín, Colombia, discussed herein.
12 Portions of this chapter were drawn from an article that appeared on The Atlantic’s CityLab website in 2012.
13 Portions of this essay were published on the CNU Public Square blog in 2017.