Daniel is an architect and urbanist who is passionate about working with cities and towns of all sizes around the world to create vibrant, urban visions that reinforce the unique character of a place and that support local economies. 

The thought leader is a regarded expert in Missing Middle Housing, which intelligently responds to the dramatic shift in demand for walkability, changing household demographics, and affordable housing options. (A recent Next City article referred to Daniel as “that guy” who coined the term.) Dan’s noteworthy Missing Middle projects include Santa Fe GreenWORKS Courtyard Housing, which received a CNU Charter Award Honorable Mention and a Green Builder magazine award, and a collection of mews townhouses in Daybreak, Utah, which reinvents the traditional townhouse floor plan by literally turning the plan on its side. 

Daniel is also at the forefront of rethinking the way we zone our communities to foster more compact, walkable, and vibrant places. In 2007, he co-authored the book Form-Based Codes, which describes and demonstrates a new way of regulating walkable places through building form over use. He is a founding board member of the Form-Based Codes Institute, an organization dedicated to reforming zoning to remove barriers for urban development, and a former board member of TransForm, which promotes walkable communities with transportation choices to connect people of all incomes to opportunity. 

Daniel’s innovative zoning work has resulted in projects worldwide that have and continue to transform communities small and large. In 2013, as part of a larger sustainable growth strategy in partnership with the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community, he wrote the first development code for Gabon, Africa, which won APA’s 2016 Pierre L’Enfant International Planning Achievement Award. He also worked with the City of Cincinnati to create a citywide Form- Based Code and implement a Comprehensive Plan vision for the thriving re-urbanization of 42 neighborhoods. (The project won the 2014 CNU Charter Award Grand Prize.) Dan is currently collaborating with Austin, Texas on CodeNEXT, a large-scale effort to rewrite the city’s existing Land Development Code. 

His love of good design and great places comes from a childhood spent roaming the small town of Columbus, Nebraska, on his bike.