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, based in Portland, Oregon, USA. Mehaffy has held teaching and/or research appointments in architecture, urban planning and philosophy at eight graduate institutions in seven countries. He is currently Faculty Associate at Arizona State University. He is the former Director of Education of The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment in London, UK, and advisor to the former Prince of Wales (now King Charles III). Books Mehaffy is the author of Cities Alive: Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander and the Roots of the New Urban Renaissance. The book explores the ideas behind the United Nations’ “New Urban Agenda” to which Mehaffy contributed as a consultant to UN-Habitat. He is also coauthor, with Nikos Salingaros, of the 2014 book Design for a Living Planet, a critique of conventional architectural practice and, as they argue, its wider context of a failing technology. He is also the lead author of A New Pattern Language: Places, Networks, Processes, a followup to the 1977 book A Pattern Language: Towns Buildings, Construction, by Christopher Alexander and associates. The new book is described as “a new collection of 80 patterns (that) emerged in part from a five-year collaboration with UN-Habitat to address new urban challenges, including rapid urbanization, slum upgrading, sustainable urbanism, (and) emerging technologies...” Mehaffy is the editor of A City is Not a Tree, the 2015 book version of architect Christopher Alexander's 1965 essay by that title, including new commentaries by Mehaffy and other prominent colleagues in urban planning, architecture and other fields. He is 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 a contributing author to over twenty books, including The Oxford Conference: A Re-Evaluation of Education in Architecture, and New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future. 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. 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, while explaining its relationship to pattern language methodology. He has also worked extensively with Christopher