Michael Mehaffy

Michael West Mehaffy (born October 24, 1955 in Beaumont, Texas) is an architectural theorist, urban philosopher, researcher, educator, and executive director of Sustasis Foundation^[1] based in Portland, Oregon USA. He is also Chair of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU) College of Chapters,^[2] a patronage of the Prince of Wales, and he is the former Director of Education of The Prince's Foundation for Building Community in London, UK.

Books

Mehaffy is the coauthor of the 2014 book Design for a Living Planet,^[3] a critical analysis of the failures of conventional architectural practice and, as he argues, its wider context of a failing technology. He is also the co-author and editor of A City is Not a Tree, the 2015 book version of architect Christopher Alexander's landmark 1965 paper by that title, also including new commentaries by prominent colleagues in urban planning, architecture and other fields. He is also the author of Urban Form and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Findings, Strategies, and Design Decision Support Technologies, his Ph.D. dissertation published as a book by Delft University of Technology.^[4] Mehaffy is also a contributing author of over twenty books, including The Oxford Conference: A Re-Evaluation of Education in Architecture^[5] and New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future^[6]

Ideas

Mehaffy is noted 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.^[7] Together with Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wiki, he wrote a paper arguing for the importance of wiki as a "curated" process of acquiring and improving knowledge, and explaining its relationship to pattern language methodology.^[8] He has also worked extensively with Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros, and jointly developed new concepts of "generative codes" and urban self-organization.^[9] In the book Design for a Living Planet Mehaffy introduced "Place Network Theory," which he describes as a "grand unified theory of urbanism" synthesizing the ideas of Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Alfred North Whitehead, Rene Thom, Bruno Latour and others.^[10] In philosophy, Mehaffy has also argued for a "neo-structuralism" to inform architecture and urbanism, and to resolve key problems in philosophy and linguistics. He argues that abstractions should be treated as structures like any other, but that they are distinctive only in the symmetric relationships that humans exploit to gain relevant information about parts of the world that are of interest—what he terms a "symmetric structuralism".^[11]

Practice, Teaching and Research

Mehaffy is also a practicing urban planner and designer, with a key role in a number of noted projects including Orenco Station, a walkable mixed-use transit-oriented development on the Portland, Oregon light rail line.^[12] He has also been active in developing a number of urban design innovations including "sprawl retrofit"^[13]—reconfiguring sprawling, fragmented suburban developments into complete, walkable neighborhoods—and "generative codes," design codes that promote greater self-organization and adaptive form.^[14]

Mehaffy has also held appointments in teaching or research at the University of Oregon, Arizona State University, the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK, the University of Trento in Trento, Italy, and Tecnologico de Monterrey in Querétaro, Mexico.^[15] As Director of Education at The Prince's Foundation for Building Community, he developed an education curriculum that formed the basis of a new Masters of Science in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford.^[16][17]

Education

Mehaffy studied music composition and the arts at California Institute of the Arts for his first two years of college study, before transferring to The Evergreen State College where he received his Bachelor of Arts in liberal arts, science and architecture in 1978. He studied philosophy of science at the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin, and architecture and urban planning at The University of California, Berkeley, before earning his PhD in architecture at Delft University of Technology. As a member of the Faculty of Architecture at Delft, he worked on urban form and climate change, pattern languages, and new wiki technologies in design.

Personal life

Mehaffy was the youngest of six children. He has three daughters with his former wife Pamela Mehaffy, and five grandchildren.^[18]

References