William J. Mitchell (Dec. 15, 1944 - June 11, 2010) was a Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, holds the Alexander W. Dreyfoos, Jr. (1954) Professorship and directs the Media Lab's Smart Cities research group. He was formerly Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning and Head of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, both at MIT.

Before coming to MIT, he was the G. Ware and Edythe M. Travelstead Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Design Studies Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He previously served as Head of the Architecture/Urban Design Program at UCLA's Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, and he has also taught at Yale, Carnegie-Mellon, and Cambridge Universities. In spring 1999 he was at the University of Virginia as Thomas Jefferson Professor.

Among his publications are:

• Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City (MIT Press, 2005)
• Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (MIT Press, 2003)
• e-topia: Urban Life, Jim—But Not As We Know It, (MIT Press, 1999)
• High Technology and Low-Income Communities, with Donald A. Schön and Bish Sanyal (MIT Press, 1998)
• City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (MIT Press, 1995)
• The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (MIT Press, 1992)
• The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition (MIT Press, 1990)