Overview of 2018 Activities
 

ABOVE:  Executive Director Michael Mehaffy interviews Board Member Ward Cunningham on the invention of Wiki, pattern languages of programming, Agile, and other innovations, as part of the Building Beauty course curriculum in Sorrento, Italy, in association with the office of Christopher Alexander and the Center for Environmental Structure.


Report by Michael Mehaffy, Executive Director

This year the focus of Sustasis’ work moved increasingly toward broader topics of systems and transitions, with a special focus on collective knowledge and action systems.  We have participated in collaborations with the International Society for the Systems Sciences, Pattern Languages of Programming, and the Ax:son Johnson Foundation.  Research, education and publication has continued to focus primarily on global urban challenges including the current era of unprecedented urbanization.  At the same time,  work has expanded to explore the additional insights that are available to us from the sciences, as well as from cultural innovations like wiki (and Wikipedia) and pattern languages. 

One of the most important projects now under way is an ambitious new edition of patterns tentatively titled A Pattern Language for Growing Regions: Economy, Technology, Quality of Life. The book is planned to launch a new repository of shareable and editable patterns. (You can download a preview copy here.)

An additional project now under way is to expand on the first short film about Christopher Alexander, Life in Buildings, with a full series of six “chapters,” each of which can stand alone as an Internet short, or be combined into a feature-length film.  The current short will be lightly edited to become the third of the series.

Executive Director Michael Mehaffy has also helped to develop new curricular materials for a new Masters program in architecture and urbanism at Sant'Anna Institute in Sorrento, Italy, in partnership with the University of Strathclyde in the UK.  As part of those materials, he interviewed Board Member Ward Cunningham, exploring the history of pattern languages and wikis. The video is available on the Sustasis website, and has been shared widely on social media.

Michael Mehaffy also gave several talks surrounding the launch of Sustasis Press’ latest book, Cities Alive: Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander and the Roots of the New Urban Renaissance, co-published with our partner, the Centre for the Future of Places at KTH University in Stockholm.  The book continues to receive very positive reviews.  Gerald Erion, professor of philosophy at Medaille College in New York, said “Mehaffy’s discussion of Jacobs, Alexander, and complexity science is tantalizing, and his attention to distinctively philosophical issues seems especially noteworthy...Such weighty philosophical issues may seem abstract, but in Mehaffy’s writing, they become key underpinnings for his more pragmatic advice. In fact, his book includes practical suggestions for design professionals and urbanists of all kinds. His section on the United Nations New Urban Agenda may be especially instructive here, as are the photo essays and interviews of his final chapter. Thus, Cities Alive demonstrates both the urgency and the potential benefits of an urbanist philosophy as we confront a range of global challenges in the decades to come.”

Reviewer Emily O’Brien, writing in Traditional Building magazine, described the book as “an alluring and thought-provoking read for students, government officials, architecture professionals and more, Cities Alive will have you nodding your head as you read along, offering an intricate and intelligible understanding of city structure as it examines essential philosophical ideas about cities and what they offer their inhabitants...What’s most remarkable is that in the latter half, Mehaffy pulls from his curated pot of somewhat rather abstract ideas, garnered from Jacobs and Alexander, and transforms them into solutions that can be implemented in very tangible, realistic ways.”

You can order the book here.


ABOVE: Author Phil Langdon with a buyer and Executive Director Michael Mehaffy at the IMCL conference in Ottawa.

Our earlier books Design for a Living Planet and A City is Not a Tree: 50th Anniversary Edition are also available in print or eBook - you can order them here.  Work continues on several new books, including the aforementioned A Pattern Language for Growing Regions, and What is a City? – a kind of textbook on urbanism – as well as a book on “place network theory,” helping to explain how good-quality public space can be made and maintained.

We also continued our collaboration with the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, KTH University, and the Centre for the Future of Places, further developing ongoing partnerships with UN-Habitat, Project for Public Spaces, CNU, and other key allies. We also continued our implementation work for the New Urban Agenda, completing a Memorandum of Understanding between our partner the Centre for the Future of Places and UN-Habitat. 


ABOVE:  Michael Mehaffy (left) completes the MOU with UN-Habitat and the Centre for the Future of Places, a collaborator with the Sustasis Foundation.  Pictured are Shipra Narang Suri, head of urban design and policy unit at UN-Habitat (center) and Saidou N’Dow, head of the legal office for UN-Habitat (right).

Keynote Speaking and/or Co-organization of Conferences, Symposia and Meetings
(By Executive Director Michael Mehaffy, unless otherwise noted)

• “Public space in the New Urban Agenda: Research into Implementation,” co-organizer and    moderator/speaker, World Urban Forum, Kuala Lumpur, February 2018
• Video interviews of key participants, International Urban Conference of the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa, February 2018
• “New Science, New Architecture… New Urban Agenda?”  Keynote lecture at 50th anniversary conference of Urban Design Programme at Aalto University, Turku, Finland, March 2018
  
• “The Gentrification Challenge,” keynote at Cities for All conference, KTH, STIPO and Project for Public Spaces, Stockholm SE, April 2018
• “Coding Beauty,” lecture to the Building Beauty school, Sorrento Italy, April 2018
• “Open Data and the New Urban Agenda,” keynote at the University of Salzburg conference, GIS and the future of Data, May 2018
• “Humanizing Cities,” keynote speech to “Humanizing Cities” conference, Madinah, Saudi Arabia, May 2018
• “Best practices in new public space projects,” moderator and presenter for Dubai International Awards, Dubai UAE, May 2018
• “Lessons from Orenco Station,” presentation at Vivre en Ville conference, Montreal, CA, May 2018 (presented in absentia)
• “Implementing the New Urban Agenda: Changing the ‘Operating System for Growth’", keynote lecture at International Making Cities Livable conference, Ottawa CA, May 2018
• “New Urbanism and the New Urban Agenda: Partners for action,” co-organizer, presenter and moderator at session on the New Urban Agenda, Congress for the New Urbanism, June 2018
• “Quantifying the Commons: Developing Indicator 11.7.1,” co-organizer and presenter at UN High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, side event co-organized with UN-Habitat, ISOCARP, European Commission Research Office, City of Johannesburg, and the World Bank.
• “New science, new architecture, New Urban Agenda?  How the new sciences are changing the game for the built environment,” co-organizer, moderator and presenter of session, “The Math and Science of Architectural Beauty,” at 2018 Traditional Building Exposition and Conference, Princeton, NJ.
• “Pattern languages as systems tools: An exercise in applied mereology,” presentation at 2018 International Society for Systems Science, Corvallis OR, July 2018.
• “Distilling Lessons Learned: Defining how city-wide public space strategies are articulated with city development plans.”  Presentation at UN-Habitat Expert Group Meeting on implementation of the New Urban Agenda, ““From Site to System: City-Wide Public Space Strategies,” Engelsberg, Sweden, September 2018.
• Participated in Jheronimus Academy of Data Sciences seminar, “Data Challenges on Spaces and Places,” Engelsberg, Sweden, September 2018.
• “Public space in the New Urban Agenda: A global perspective on our common urban future.” Presentation at the Venice Biennale, September 2018.
• “Implementing the New Urban Agenda.” Lecture for Strelka Institute, in Novosibirsk and Kaliningrad, Russia, October 2018.
• “Curating new main streets: Lessons from Portland, Oregon.” Presentation at University of Chicago, conference on “Does Main Street have a future?” October, 2018.
• “A pattern language for rapid urbanization: Launching a digital pattern language repository.” Presentation and panel discussion at Pattern Languages of Programming (PLoP) conference and Portland Urban Architecture Research Laboratory (PUARL) 10th Anniversary Conference (joint event), Portland OR, October 2018.
  
• “Tools and strategies to combat the decline of green and public spaces in Africa,” and “Creating safe, inclusive and accessible public space in urban Africa: From inventory to implementation,” presentations at AfriCities conference in Marrakesh, Morocco with UN-Habitat and the City of Johannesburg, November 2018.
• “Why public space matters: Research on the economic, social and environmental benefits” and “Placemaking for healthy cities: Research into practice.” Presentations at Placemaking Conference in Wuhan, China, hosted by UN-Habitat and Wuhan Municipal People’s Government, December 2018.
• “Understanding (our) urban nature: The role of nature and urban green space in sustainable cities.” Delphi Conversations, video series at KTH University, December 2018.

ABOVE: Participants at a workshop on implementing the public space provisions of the New Urban Agenda, moderated by Michael Mehaffy (top rown, center right) at the AfriCities conference in Marrakesh.

Research Publications

• Research paper, "From the Charter of Athens to the New Urban Agenda: Implications for Urban Form and Public Space." (In press)
• Research paper, "Neighborhood Choice Architecture: A new tool for lower-emissions urban planning?"
  
• Research paper, "Evaluating Landscape Urbanism: Evidence from Lafayette Park, Detroit."
  

General Publications

• Blog, Livable Portland, livableportland.org, in partnership with IMCL (numerous posts on issues of Portland livability)
• Blog, Future of Places Research Network, foprn.org, in partnership with Ax:son Johnson Foundation and the Centre for the Future of Places (numerous posts on implementation of the New Urban Agenda)
• “The neuroscience of architecture: The good, the bad – and the beautiful,” Traditional Building, February 2018 (with Nikos Salingaros)
• “Five key takeaways from the World Urban Forum,” Planetizen, March 2018
• “The ‘Jacobs Curve’ and Gentrification,” CNU Public Square, April 2018
• Book, A Pattern Language for Growing Regions, Sustasis Press (TBC)
  
  

We welcome your questions, comments, or proposals for collaboration – and as always, we are grateful for support in all forms!