Professor Sergio Porta
Architecture
Personal statement
Graduated in Architecture and PhD in Urban and Environmental Planning at the Polytechnic of Milan (IT), visiting scholar at University of California at Berkeley (USA), associate researcher at King Fahd University of Petroleum and MInerals (SA) and Murdoch University - Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy in Perth (WA), I am former Head of Department and currently Professor of Urban Design, Director of the Urban Design Studies Unit, Course Director of the MScUD program at the Department of Architecture of University of Strathclyde.
Chair of the International Seminar of Urban Form conference 2021 in Glasgow, I am advisor to international organisations, member of editorial boards of leading journals in urban science and design, section editor of Urban Morphometrics and Design at the journal Discover Cities (SpringerNature) and regularly invited speaker to international conferences.
I published over fifty papers on international peer-reviewed journals and three monographs. My h-index is 23 on Scopus and 33 on G-Scholar (as to April 2024). My latest book “Masterplanning for Change: Designing the Resilient City” was published in 2020 by RIBA. In 2023, I was awarded two prizes as author of best papers of the year: the Mellick Medal (Institution of Civil Engineers) and the Michael Breheny Prize (journal Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science).
My research is on masterplanning the adaptive city, evidence-based urban design coding, urban morphometrics and radical community-based construction process.
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.
Prize And Awards
- Offered honorary award as "Ambassador of the University of Nanjing"
- Recipient
- 21/11/2024
- ICE Reed and Mallick Medal
- Recipient
- 6/6/2023
- Chalmers promotion case: Meta Berghauser-Pont
- Recipient
- 4/4/2023
- ARRS Slovenia: member scientific committee for peer-reviewing national research proposals
- Recipient
- 16/2/2023
- Michael Breheny Prize 2022
- Recipient
- 4/10/2022
- MIT promotion case: Andres Sevtsuk
- Recipient
- 20/11/2021
Qualifications
Professor of Urban Design, Director of Urban Design Studies Unit.
Former Head of Department (2011-2014).
Publications
- Plot-based urbanism : towards time-consciousness in place-making
- Porta Sergio, Romice Ombretta
- Dortmunder Vorträge zur Stadtbaukunst [Dortmunder Lectures on Civic Art] New Civic Art (2014) (2014)
- Networks in urban design. six years of research in multiple centrality assessment
- Porta S, Latora V, Strano E
- Network science complexity in nature and technology (2010) (2010)
- Elementary processes governing the evolution of road networks
- Strano Emanuele, Nicosia Vincenzo, Latora Vito, Porta Sergio, Barthelemy Marc
- Scientific Reports Vol 2 (2012)
- https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00296
- Optimizing urban structure: toward an integrated new urbanist model - urban nuclei and the geometry of streets: the 'emergent neighborhoods' model
- Mehaffy Michael, Porta Sergio, Salingaros Nikos, Rofè Yodan
- 17th Congress for the New Urbanism (2009)
- The network analysis of urban streets : a primal approach
- Porta Sergio, Latora Vito, Crucitti P
- Environment and planning (2012) (2012)
- Correlating street quality, street life and street centrality in Tripoli, Libya
- Remali Adel Mohammad, Porta Sergio, Romice Ombretta
- The Past, Present and Future of High Streets (2014)
Research Interests
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.
Professional Activities
- Council of Architecture India, D Y Patil School of Architecture (External organisation)
- Member
- 26/6/2025
- Design Codes and UK new towns - Expert symposium
- Organiser
- 11/6/2025
- Zhejiang University
- Visiting researcher
- 12/4/2025
- Nanjing University (External organisation)
- Advisor
- 2/2025
- Colloquia of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.
- Speaker
- 16/1/2025
- Masterplanning for Change and Urban MorphoMetrics: 15 Years of Urban Design at University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
- Speaker
- 11/11/2024
Projects
- KTP - ADAM Architecture Ltd
- Porta, Sergio (Principal Investigator) Romice, Ombretta (Co-investigator)
- 01-Jan-2023 - 30-Jan-2025
- Advancing a model for transformative cultural heritage development
- Porta, Sergio (Principal Investigator)
- Bid to H2020 "Transforming historic urban areas and/or cultural landscape into hubs of entrepreneurship and social and cultural integration" (Call: H2020-SC5-2019-2).
- 31-Jan-2020 - 31-Jan-2024
- The Urban Form Resilience Project:
- Porta, Sergio (Principal Investigator) Romice, Ombretta (Co-investigator)
- Resilience and urban form: assessing the resilience of spatial systems in cities at the neighbourhood and district scale
- 01-Jan-2017 - 30-Jan-2020
- A new dimension for data-driven urbanism: studying the form of preference
- Romice, Ombretta (Principal Investigator) Porta, Sergio (Co-investigator)
- 01-Jan-2016 - 31-Jan-2017
- Doctoral Training Center in the Built Environment Futures
- Porta, Sergio (Academic) Bradley, Fiona (Academic) Agapiou, Andrew (Academic) Clarke, Joseph Andrew (Academic) Bellingham, Richard (Academic)
- The projects achieved funding for the creation of a new Doctoral Training Center in the Built Environment Future at the Department of Architecture
- 30-Jan-2014
- L'Abitare Futuro (The Future Dwelling)
- Porta, Sergio (Academic) Vigano, Federica (Academic) Rosina, Alessandro (Academic)
- Commission from National Consortium of Construction Cooperatives of Italy for a research on the future of construction cooperatives in Italy.
- 16-Jan-2013 - 31-Jan-2014