Michael West Mehaffy (born October 24, 1955, in Beaumont, Texas) is an urbanist, architectural theorist, urban philosopher, researcher, educator, and executive director of Sustasis Foundation,[1] based in Portland, Oregon, USA.
[3] He is also coauthor, with Nikos Salingaros, of the 2014 book Design for a Living Planet,[4] a critique of conventional architectural practice and, as they argue, its wider context of a failing technology.
[5] Mehaffy is a contributing author to over twenty books, including The Oxford Conference: A Re-Evaluation of Education in Architecture,[6] and New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future.
[9] He has also worked extensively with Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros to jointly develop new concepts of "generative codes" and urban self-organization.
[12] Mehaffy is 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.
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.