Nikos Salingaros
Bio
"Nikos A. Salingaros MA PhD is one of the pioneers who are defining a new discipline: PEER-TO-PEER URBANISM.
This innovative way of conceiving, constructing, and repairing the city rests upon three basic principles.
1) The citizens have a fundamental right to choose the built environment in which to live;
2) The users themselves should actively participate in designing and building the city;
3) Open-source urbanism relies on scientific rules for a human-scale urban fabric that are freely available for anyone to use and review.
Dr. Salingaros has been on the forefront of deriving evidence-based rules for architecture and urbanism using scientific methods and logic. These rules replace outdated working assumptions that have created dysfunctional urban regions following World-War II. A body of recently derived theoretical work underpins human-scale urbanism, and helps to link developing architectural movements such as New Urbanism, the Network City, Biophilic Design, Self-built Housing, Generative Codes, and Sustainable Architecture. This collaborative scientific approach supersedes the century-long practice where an “expert” urbanist determines the form of the build environment based upon improvable and “secret” rules, which are often nothing more than images and ideologies.
Dr. Salingaros collaborated with the visionary architect and software pioneer Christopher Alexander, helping to edit the four-volume “The Nature of Order” during its twenty-five-year gestation. In recognition of his efforts to understand architecture using scientific thinking, Salingaros was awarded the first grant ever for research on architecture by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 1997. Dr. Salingaros is a member of the INTBAU College of Traditional Practitioners and is on the INTBAU Committee of Honor. Dr. Salingaros was one of the “50 Visionaries who are Changing Your World” selected by the UTNE Reader in 2008. In Planetizen’s 2009 survey, he was ranked 11th among “The Top Urban Thinkers of All Time”. Salingaros is the author of five books: “Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction” (2004), “Principles of Urban Structure” (2005), “A Theory of Architecture” (2006), “No Alle Archistar” (2009), “Twelve Lectures on Architecture” (2010), as well as over 120 scientific papers. Both an artist and scientist, he is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and is also on the architecture faculties of universities in Mexico, Italy, and Holland.
More Information
- Gruppo Salingaros: a think tank of architects, urbanists,
sociologists and scientists, for the moment mostly active in Italy and Portugal, who are planning a new urban future for Italy and Europe.
Publications
Dr. Salingaros has published key articles on Peer-to-peer Urbanism.
- http://www.greekarchitects.gr/en/architectural-review/peer-to-peer-urbanism-id1973
- http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/urban-seeding-and-the-city-as-computer/2008/09/08
- http://p2pfoundation.net/Peer-to-Peer_Themes_and_Urban_Priorities_for_the_Self-organizing_Society