Daniel is currently Associate Professor in Sustainable Architecture & Cities (with deep interest in equitable green-economies as well) at the School of Architecture & Planning, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is an architect and urban environmental policy planner focusing on sustainability and the built environment. With research and consultancy interests focused on developing countries, his core interest is the understanding and applied resolution to the dilemma of achieving socio-economic development for all within the tightening eco-limits of our planet. Daniel’s key interests is the coupling of green innovations to socio-economic development priorities such as jobs/skills and eco-entrepreneurship. One of the newly emerging themes of his research interest is the transitioning to sustainable cities and how a better understanding of assumed human behavior models could enhance humanity’s transitioning endeavors, especially when based on emerging insights from neuroscience, and especially neuro-phenomenology as conceptualized by pioneer scholars such as Francisco Varela, Roberto Maturana, and Gregory Batson.
Daniel has earned academic and professional merit awards including a Fulbright Scholarship for his Masters studies in the US, Certificate of Merit on a competition-entry on Eco-Village and Eco-Coastal Settlements organised by the International Federation of Young Architects (IFYA) in 1993. A Solar Academy for Southern Africa (organised at Wits in collaboration with International Solar Energy Society in Germany and Sustainable Energy Society of Southern Africa) was awarded the SESSA Renewable Energy Project of the Year Award for 2002.
