Dr. Sergio Porta is Professor of Urban Design at the Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, where here he teaches the MSc course in Urban Design.

Sergio Porta's research is mainly oriented to the definition of procedures, attitudes and tools for sustainable/human/adaptive urban analysis and design, ranging from GIS-based space analysis to sustainable community design, transportation planning and traffic calming techniques to strategies for safety and liveability in the public domain. In particular Dr. Porta has recently been leading a joint research with Dr. Vito Latora of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics of Catania, Sicily, aimed at developing tools for the network analysis of urban spatial systems, including those of streets and intersections. The tool allows for mapping centrality in urban spaces and establishing correlations with relevant dynamics such as land-use, vehicular or pedestrian flows, crime rates. Moreover, a new frontier of research is currently under study that involves a quantitative approach to urban morphology, i.e. the statistical characterization of different types of urban fabrics taken from the history of cities in order to infer “parental” relationships between them in an urban evolutionary perspective. Because of the biologic analogy that sustains it, this new branch of studies can be termed “urban morphometrics”.