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 based in Portland, Oregon USA. He is also Chair of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU) College of Chapters, 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.

Mehaffy is the coauthor of the 2014 book Design for a Living Planet, 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. Mehaffy is also a contributing author of over twenty books, including The Oxford Conference: A Re-Evaluation of Education in Architecture and New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future

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. He has also been active in developing a number of urban design innovations including "sprawl retrofit"—reconfiguring sprawling, fragmented suburban developments into complete, walkable neighborhoods—and "generative codes," design codes that promote greater self-organization and adaptive form.

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. 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.

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