An architect with a Master in Mathematics and Physics, a PhD in Economics and a PhD in Art History, Serge Salat is a former student of Ecole Polytechnique and ENA. He has thirty years’ experience in urban studies and city planning. Serge Salat is President of the Urban Morphology and Complex Systems Institute in Paris. He is professor of Urban Morphology in Paris, Singapore, and New York. He is a lead expert for United Nations Environment and UN-Habitat, and for the World Bank. He is a member of UN International Resource Panel; and an author of IPCC Assessment Reports on Climate Change.
Serge Salat work bridges the gap between advanced research on cities as systems of systems, and policy making and investment decisions. He provides strategic, science-based expertise in the field of systems optimization, urban planning, urban energy, spatial economics and urban investment. His research is based on complex systems and graphs theory. He investigates universal mathematical scaling regularities in urban systems and in the linkages between urban sub-systems. He models and predicts the potential long-term outcomes of urban infrastructure investment decisions for real-estate price increases forecast and for systems cross-cutting efficiency.
A 35-year specialist of China, a Mandarin speaker and reader, author of two influential books published in Chinese with a foreword by Chinese Ministers, Serge Salat has authored, as lead author, several flagship reports of the World Bank to Chinese Prime Minister and city leaders of Chinese megalopolises like Shanghai and Chongqing. He is a lead author of the latest IRP Report on The Weight of Cities, Resource Requirement of Future Urbanization (2018) and of the Urban Sustainability Framework (2017) of the Global Platform for Sustainable Cities – a 1.5 billion USD program involving 28 cities worldwide.
Serge Salat has authored books on urban morphology, such as Cities and Forms, On Sustainable urbanism, published in 2011, and, in 2017. He has been lead author of Transforming Urban Space with Transit-Oriented Development, published by the World Bank, of Economic Foundations of Sustainable Urbanization, A Study on Three-Pronged Approach: Planned City Extensions, Legal Framework, and Municipal Finance, the global reference book of UN-Habitat economic branch (translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Arabic). He has lectured in more than one-hundred international conferences, including the Nobel Laureates 4th Conference on Climate Change in 2014, and published sixty scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. Considered internationally as the global expert on spatial planning and complexity theory of cities, his country experience includes extensive work in China, Vietnam, Malaysia, India, and South Africa. In 2017, he received in the United Nations in New York the Global Human Settlements Outstanding Contribution Award for his work on urban sustainability.