New Science, New Architecture… New Urban Agenda? Michael W. Mehaffy (&) School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden michael.mehaffy@gmail.com In December 2016, The United Nations General Assembly adopted by consensus a resolution titled “Implementation of the outcome of the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III),” also known as the “New Urban Agenda”. This remarkable document calls for urbanization with the core char- acteristics of traditional settlements, including walkable streets, a mix of uses, well-connected high-quality public spaces, and other familiar traditional features. It further stresses the importance of “cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, in cities and human settlements” as well as “traditional knowledge and the arts,” and calls for implementation “tapping into all available traditional and innovative sources at the global, regional, national, subnational and local levels.” Now the question remains how those involved in implementation can apply an evidence-based approach, engaging lessons from the sciences, to actually implement- ing the agenda. This task is particularly dif ficult at a time of institutional and economic dysfunctions that are acting to produce profoundly chaotic and low-quality urbaniza- tion. At the same time, bizarre rationalizations, coupled with bizarre designs, continue to emerge from the international “high design” world, and the academic institutions from which it derives much of its continued justification. We discuss herein the issues, the lessons, and the opportunities ahead. The title of my paper refers to three different but related events in the history of environmental design. One is the 1997 publication of a book by the architectural critic Charles Jencks, titled New Science = New Architecture? [1] The second is a 2004 conference organized at the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment in London, attended by Jencks as well as a number of scientists and architects, including Christopher Alexander and Bill Hillier. It was titled “New Science, New Architec- ture… New Urbanism?” [2] and it explored the urban implications of findings in the new sciences. The third reference comes much more recently, the 2016 “New Urban Agenda” developed by the United Nations in the conference called Habitat III [3]. My aim in this paper is to explore the ideas that link these three events, and what I believe is the very important new agenda that they do indeed outline for our profes- sions. I will argue that they all point toward a necessary transition that has occurred in other fields, but that is still slow to catch up – or indeed, prone to be mis-applied – in our own field of environmental design. © Springer International Publishing AG 2018 G. Amoruso (ed.), Putting Tradition into Practice: Heritage, Place and Design, Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering 3, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57937-5_2