Professor of Urban Design, Director of Urban Design Studies Unit.

Former Head of Department (2011-2014).

My overarching focus of interest is what we can do as designers to make our built environment the best possible place for people, communities, businesses and the environment, in time. Inevitably, this point of view leads to consider beauty in the built environment largely as the result of the uncoordinated efforts of people and organisations in time, one of which being design itself. Basically, it leads to reframe change in urban form in evolutionary terms: Urban MorphoMetrics is my effort to do so by comprehensive, systematic and scalable scientific analysis, rarther than purely speculatively, analogically or metaphorically. Our mission as urban designer is then established as to ensure the (spatial) conditions for those uncoordinated efforts to emerge and evolve in a way that keeps maintaining the urban system in operation (resilience), while meeting our definition of public good (sustainability).

At UDSU, we value a lot the circular relationship between teaching and research. We pull together urban morphology, environmental conventional urban planning and design analysis, advanced spatial analysis and deep community engagement practice into a comprehensive science of urban design for change.  

My research sits in three areas: 1. Urban Analytics and Morphology; 2. Construction and Therapy, and 3. Urban Design. .

In Urban Analytics and Morphology, I work on street networks and spatial centrality with physicists like Vito Latora, Luciano Da Fontoura Costa and Marc Barthelemy (http://www.udsu-strath.com/5-publications/5-1-articles/articles-2010-networks-in-urban-design-six-years-of-mca-research/).

In my most recent work, Urban MorphoMetrics (UMM), I work with geo-spatial analysists such as Martin Fleischmann, Alessandra Feliciotti and Alessandro Venerandi on the development of a digital ecosystem designed to generate a quantitative, systematic, comprehensive and scalable taxonomy of urban form. In order to do so, we measure the similarity of urban types and ultimately infer “parental” relationships between them. This brings us to value trans-disciplinary collaborations with scientists in biological evolution and morphometrics, such as Mark Pagel and Philipp Mitterhöcker. Foundational papers in this area are: a) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2399808317725075, and b) https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083211059835.

In Construction and Therapy, I work with students and communities to the real construction of buildings through a process of direct and collective design/construction inspired by the legacy of Christopher Alexander. The involvement of end-users throughout three phases (Land Exploration, Pattern Language and Conception&Construction) is a crucial step towards "healing the people and healing the land". This generates a radical re-think of architectural education, which I am testing at: www.BuildingBeauty.org.  

In Urban Design, my research links up to Urban MorphoMetrics to explore an innovative masterplanning process based on evidence-based urban design coding systems. The theoretical framework of urbanity and change, as developed through 15 years of academic work with colleagues at UDSU (http://www.udsu-strath.com), is presented in Masterplanning for Change (https://www.ribabooks.com/masterplanning-for-change-designing-the-resilient-city_9781859469262) along with a step-by-steb guide for the generation of resilient and sustainable masterplans.