Michael Mehaffy

Michael W. Mehaffy, Ph.D., is a researcher, author, educator, urban planner, designer, and strategic development consultant with an international practice. In addition to his work as an instructor at ASU since 2011, he is currently Executive Director of the Sustasis Foundation, an urban sustainability think tank in Portland, Oregon; Executive Director of the International Making Cities Livable conference series; and President of Structura Naturalis Inc., his consultancy.  He has held teaching and/or research appointments at ten graduate institutions in eight countries, and he is on the editorial boards of two international journals of urban design.  He is noted for his books, book chapters, research articles and professional articles on urban morphology, urban self-organization, architecture, computer science, and philosophy. He was a consultant to UN-Habitat for the Habitat III conference and its outcome document, The New Urban Agenda, and he has consulted for governments, businesses and NGOs on its implementation and related topics. Among his many leading urban-scale projects was Orenco Station, a pioneering transit-oriented development in the Portland region, for which he served as project manager and co-designer for the master developer. After graduate work in architecture, public policy, management and philosophy of science at UC Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin, he received his Ph.D. in architecture, with a focus on urban planning and design, at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.