Michael Piper is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream of Urban Design and Architecture at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on how design knowledge can impact city building and urban planning policy. His interests include suburban retrofits, infill housing, community partnerships, learning from existing cities, and merging typological and systems thinking with social and cultural research. He is passionate about communicating with broad audiences and creating new forms of media that make complex ideas engaging and easy to understand.

Piper is also Co-Founder and Director of Research at ReHousing, a design-forward nonprofit that develops tools, research, and partnerships to enable new models of infill housing. Together with Executive Director Sam Eby and Co-Founder Janna Levitt, the group applies design approaches to policymaking and housing delivery. Piper has led successful funding applications, including one to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), resulting in a multi-year project to develop an online platform that provides design scenarios and cost analyses for small-scale citizen developers. He also leads research and consultation work with municipalities, including design research for zoning policy for the City of Toronto, for which ReHousing received the CMHC President’s Medal for Outstanding Housing Research.

His cultural research and service include Engage-Design-Build, an outreach and access program he co-coordinated with Sneha Mandhan in partnership with the Toronto District School Board. The program connects with high school youth to develop design, art, and construction projects within their own communities. This work continues through an undergraduate community partnership course that Piper coordinates at the University of Toronto.

He is also a Co-Founder and Director of tuf lab, a research group that brings together urban design and urban planning faculty at the University of Toronto to study complex problems of contemporary urbanization. The group’s research explores the relationship between design knowledge, the analysis of built form, and the social, political, and economic contexts that shape cities. Piper was previously a founding partner of dub studios, a design practice based in Los Angeles.

His courses cover topics including urban design, housing design, urban analysis, visualization for urbanism, and graduate thesis advising. These courses align with his research, emphasizing typological design, infill housing, policy analysis, and the ways designers can engage with lived experience in cities. His writing has been published in JAPA, Thresholds, Scapegoat, MONU, and 306090, and his design work has been exhibited at the Seoul and Rotterdam Biennales.

Piper holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.