Michael W Mehaffy
Biographic Data
| ID | 6931513 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael W Mehaffy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael W |
| FAMILY NAME | Mehaffy |
| SIGNATURE | MEHAFFY M W |
| AFFILIATIONS | KTH Royal Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1766-3631 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Urban Heritage as Embodied Intelligence
Urban heritage structures are most commonly understood as memorial artifacts, tourism assets, or redevelopment resources. While this common view acknowledges cultural and economic value, it overlooks a deeper function of heritage within the long evolution of human settlements. This paper advances a counter thesis: in addition to its historic contingencies and power relationships—which are real, but only part of the picture—urban heritage embodies…
Achieving Humanist Cities
As planners and urbanists continue to debate urban reforms needed to achieve humanist ideals – including just forms of sustainability – several different schools of thought are vying for influence, including cultural urbanism (celebrating the everyday, temporal, occasional, and timeless), pluralist urbanism (aiming for a co-produced city that is more democratic, participatory, and open-ended), and inclusive urbanism (focusing on the right to the …
Introduction
Christopher Alexander, who died in March 2022, was undeniably one of the most influential, if sometimes controversial, urban thinkers of the last half-century. From Notes on the Synthesis of Form , his first book and Harvard PhD thesis, to the landmark “A City is Not a Tree,” to the classic best-sellers A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building , to his more difficult and controversial magnum opus, The Nature of Order , Alexander has le…
Patterns of Growth
Christopher Alexander was often characterized—and sometimes seemed to characterize himself—as “sui generis,” a radical and perhaps even eccentric thinker on architecture, technology, culture, and nature. That perception in turn has led many to dismiss Alexander’s work as too idiosyncratic to be operationalized in the pragmatic world of planning and building. Here we show, however, that Alexander’s core ideas have strong parallels in contemporary …
Symmetry in architecture
Opportunities and Challenges of Geospatial Analysis for Promoting Urban Livability in the Era of Big Data and Machine Learning
Urban systems involve a multitude of closely intertwined components, which are more measurable than before due to new sensors, data collection, and spatio-temporal analysis methods. Turning these data into knowledge to facilitate planning efforts in addressing current challenges of urban complex systems requires advanced interdisciplinary analysis methods, such as urban informatics or urban data science. Yet, by applying a purely data-driven appr…
New Urbanism in the New Urban Agenda
We present evidence that New Urbanism, defined as a set of normative urban characteristics codified in the 1996 Charter of the New Urbanism, reached a seminal moment—in mission if not in name—with the 2016 New Urban Agenda, a landmark document adopted by acclamation by all 193 member states of the United Nations. We compare the two documents and find key parallels between them (including mix of uses, walkable multi-modal streets, buildings defini…
What Still Matters in a City. The Covid-19 Pandemic Offers a “Teachable Moment” Illustrating that Public Spaces Must Simultaneously Connect us, and Protect us too
Various commentators have sought to assess the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban form and public space, with predictions ranging from “the end of urban density,” to a new impetus for auto-encapsulated sprawl, to exacerbation of the effects of urban inequality, to an explosion of digital surveillance, to a return to relative normalcy with new protective strategies. Here we tease out a more basic lesson about public space: that it …
Public Space in the New Urban Agenda. A Global Perspective on Our Common Urban Future
This article is a report on the work of our group, the Centre for the Future of Places at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and its role as an outgrowth of the Future of Places initiative – a partnership of UN-Habitat, the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, and the Project for Public Spaces. The original Future of Places initiative was a series of high-level conferences that brought together over 1,500 researchers, professionals, government…
Assessing Alexander’s Later Contributions to a Science of Cities
Christopher Alexander published his longest and arguably most philosophical work, The Nature of Order, beginning in 2003. Early criticism assessed that text to be a speculative failure; at best, unrelated to Alexander’s earlier, mathematically grounded work. On the contrary, this review presents evidence that the newer work was a logically consistent culmination of a lifelong and remarkably useful inquiry into part-whole relations—an ancient but …
The resurgence of public space
This paper serves as an introduction to the December 2018 edition of The Journal of Public Space, and a reflection on the new importance of public space in international research, policy and practice. Nowhere is that more evident than in the New Urban Agenda, the ambitious new international agreement for the normative goals of urban development in the next two decades and beyond. In that document, public space is treated in no fewer than nine par…
Public Space in the New Urban Agenda. The Challenge of Implementation
The New Urban Agenda – the landmark 2016 agreement for sustainable urban development that has now been adopted by consensus by 193 nations – contains no fewer than nine paragraphs extensively discussing the importance of public space. Among other things, the document describes public spaces as “drivers of social and economic development,” “enhancing safety and security, favoring social and inter-generational interaction and the appreciation of di…
Urban Heritage as a Generator of Landscapes
At this historical moment, the urban planning and design professions are confronted with the twin challenges of unprecedented rapid urbanization on the one hand, and declining post-industrial regions on the other. In this environment, there are many different and often conflicting ideas about urban heritage and its relevance for contemporary urban planning and design. In this paper, we look for commonalities and a way forward from among a range o…
Urban Form and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The research reported in this dissertation contains three complementary and overlapping parts: One, “findings”: It assesses the factors of urban morphology that contribute to increased rates of greenhouse gas emissions per capita, and the ways they interact. It finds a significant but underrepresented set of factors, distinct from but relating the factors at the individual building scale and the scale of regional transportation systems. Two, “str…
Poststructuralist fiddling while the world burns
We critique the current crisis for the environmental design professions: facing urgent ecological, social and economic imperatives, key leadership has become mired in the confusions of do-nothing postmodernist artistic doctrine. The result is a self-made state of paralysis, leaving the egregious mistakes of the past to be endlessly repeated, while it only matters that they are cloaked in ever more aesthetically extravagant artistic garb. We argue…
Poststrukturalisti križem rok opazujejo svet v plamenih
Urban Heritage as a Generator of Landscapes
At this historical moment, the urban planning and design professions are confronted with the twin challenges of unprecedented rapid urbanization on the one hand, and declining post-industrial regions on the other. In this environment, there are many different and often conflicting ideas about urban heritage and its relevance for contemporary urban planning and design. In this paper, we look for commonalities and a way forward from among a range o…
Poststructuralist fiddling while the world burns
We critique the current crisis for the environmental design professions: facing urgent ecological, social and economic imperatives, key leadership has become mired in the confusions of do-nothing postmodernist artistic doctrine. The result is a self-made state of paralysis, leaving the egregious mistakes of the past to be endlessly repeated, while it only matters that they are cloaked in ever more aesthetically extravagant artistic garb. We argue…
Poststrukturalisti križem rok opazujejo svet v plamenih
Urban Form and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The research reported in this dissertation contains three complementary and overlapping parts: One, “findings”: It assesses the factors of urban morphology that contribute to increased rates of greenhouse gas emissions per capita, and the ways they interact. It finds a significant but underrepresented set of factors, distinct from but relating the factors at the individual building scale and the scale of regional transportation systems. Two, “str…
The resurgence of public space
This paper serves as an introduction to the December 2018 edition of The Journal of Public Space, and a reflection on the new importance of public space in international research, policy and practice. Nowhere is that more evident than in the New Urban Agenda, the ambitious new international agreement for the normative goals of urban development in the next two decades and beyond. In that document, public space is treated in no fewer than nine par…
Public Space in the New Urban Agenda. The Challenge of Implementation
The New Urban Agenda – the landmark 2016 agreement for sustainable urban development that has now been adopted by consensus by 193 nations – contains no fewer than nine paragraphs extensively discussing the importance of public space. Among other things, the document describes public spaces as “drivers of social and economic development,” “enhancing safety and security, favoring social and inter-generational interaction and the appreciation of di…
Urban Heritage as a Generator of Landscapes
At this historical moment, the urban planning and design professions are confronted with the twin challenges of unprecedented rapid urbanization on the one hand, and declining post-industrial regions on the other. In this environment, there are many different and often conflicting ideas about urban heritage and its relevance for contemporary urban planning and design. In this paper, we look for commonalities and a way forward from among a range o…
Public Space in the New Urban Agenda. A Global Perspective on Our Common Urban Future
This article is a report on the work of our group, the Centre for the Future of Places at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and its role as an outgrowth of the Future of Places initiative – a partnership of UN-Habitat, the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, and the Project for Public Spaces. The original Future of Places initiative was a series of high-level conferences that brought together over 1,500 researchers, professionals, government…
Assessing Alexander’s Later Contributions to a Science of Cities
Christopher Alexander published his longest and arguably most philosophical work, The Nature of Order, beginning in 2003. Early criticism assessed that text to be a speculative failure; at best, unrelated to Alexander’s earlier, mathematically grounded work. On the contrary, this review presents evidence that the newer work was a logically consistent culmination of a lifelong and remarkably useful inquiry into part-whole relations—an ancient but …
Opportunities and Challenges of Geospatial Analysis for Promoting Urban Livability in the Era of Big Data and Machine Learning
Urban systems involve a multitude of closely intertwined components, which are more measurable than before due to new sensors, data collection, and spatio-temporal analysis methods. Turning these data into knowledge to facilitate planning efforts in addressing current challenges of urban complex systems requires advanced interdisciplinary analysis methods, such as urban informatics or urban data science. Yet, by applying a purely data-driven appr…
New Urbanism in the New Urban Agenda
We present evidence that New Urbanism, defined as a set of normative urban characteristics codified in the 1996 Charter of the New Urbanism, reached a seminal moment—in mission if not in name—with the 2016 New Urban Agenda, a landmark document adopted by acclamation by all 193 member states of the United Nations. We compare the two documents and find key parallels between them (including mix of uses, walkable multi-modal streets, buildings defini…
What Still Matters in a City. The Covid-19 Pandemic Offers a “Teachable Moment” Illustrating that Public Spaces Must Simultaneously Connect us, and Protect us too
Various commentators have sought to assess the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban form and public space, with predictions ranging from “the end of urban density,” to a new impetus for auto-encapsulated sprawl, to exacerbation of the effects of urban inequality, to an explosion of digital surveillance, to a return to relative normalcy with new protective strategies. Here we tease out a more basic lesson about public space: that it …
Symmetry in architecture
Introduction
Christopher Alexander, who died in March 2022, was undeniably one of the most influential, if sometimes controversial, urban thinkers of the last half-century. From Notes on the Synthesis of Form , his first book and Harvard PhD thesis, to the landmark “A City is Not a Tree,” to the classic best-sellers A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building , to his more difficult and controversial magnum opus, The Nature of Order , Alexander has le…
Patterns of Growth
Christopher Alexander was often characterized—and sometimes seemed to characterize himself—as “sui generis,” a radical and perhaps even eccentric thinker on architecture, technology, culture, and nature. That perception in turn has led many to dismiss Alexander’s work as too idiosyncratic to be operationalized in the pragmatic world of planning and building. Here we show, however, that Alexander’s core ideas have strong parallels in contemporary …
Achieving Humanist Cities
As planners and urbanists continue to debate urban reforms needed to achieve humanist ideals – including just forms of sustainability – several different schools of thought are vying for influence, including cultural urbanism (celebrating the everyday, temporal, occasional, and timeless), pluralist urbanism (aiming for a co-produced city that is more democratic, participatory, and open-ended), and inclusive urbanism (focusing on the right to the …
Urban Heritage as Embodied Intelligence
Urban heritage structures are most commonly understood as memorial artifacts, tourism assets, or redevelopment resources. While this common view acknowledges cultural and economic value, it overlooks a deeper function of heritage within the long evolution of human settlements. This paper advances a counter thesis: in addition to its historic contingencies and power relationships—which are real, but only part of the picture—urban heritage embodies…
Sociology (12 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis (8 works) · Urban planning (7 works) · Architecture (6 works) · Geography (6 works) · Architectural engineering (5 works) · Law (5 works)