mehaffy is noted for his published research and professional articles on the works of christopher alexander, jane jacobs, urban morphology, urban self-organization, architecture, computer science, and philosophy. together with ward cunningham, the inventor of wiki, he wrote a paper arguing for the importance of wiki as a "curated" process of acquiring and improving knowledge, while explaining its relationship to pattern language methodology. he has also worked extensively with christopher alexander and nikos salingaros to jointly develop new concepts of "generative codes" and urban self-organization. in the book "design for a living planet", mehaffy introduced "place network theory," which he described as a "grand unified theory of urbanism" synthesizing the ideas of christopher alexander, jane jacobs, kevin lynch, alfred north whitehead, rene thom, bruno latour and others. in philosophy, mehaffy has argued for a "neo-structuralism" to inform architecture and urbanism, and to resolve key problems in philosophy and linguistics. in philosophy, mehaffy argued that the abstractions of language should be regarded as physical structures in the world, no different in nature from the structures they represent, but that they are distinctive only in the symmetric relationships that humans exploit to map experience and to guide action. he has referred to this theory as “symmetric structuralism”.