Daniel D’Oca

Daniel D’Oca is Associate Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

At Harvard, Daniel coordinates the required second-semester urban planning studio, leads interdisciplinary, client-based option studios about housing in the US, and teaches seminars about community engagement. His studios invite students to think creatively about the intersection of design, policy, and implementation, and develop outside-the-box solutions to real problems. Daniel’s last three option studios focused on the housing shortage in Los Angeles. In these studios, students were asked to identify unconventional development sites in Los Angeles, propose prototypical housing developments for those sites, then tell a story about how these developments might happen–resulted in compelling ideas for developing golf courses, gas stations, power line rights-of-way, and several dozen other sites.

Daniel is the co-editor of The State of Housing Design, which was published in 2023.

Daniel is also principal and co-founder of the New York-based urban design and planning firm Interboro Partners, where he leads plans at a variety of scales, park and open space projects, and community engagement campaigns, which deploy creative and fun engagement materials (including interactive models, games, graphic novels, pop-up furniture, and even an ice cream truck), to help reach audiences that might not otherwise participate in conventional planning and design processes. With Interboro, Daniel has also curated a number of exhibitions, and has written extensively about urbanization in the US. Interboro’s book The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion–now in its second edition–was published in 2017. With Interboro, Daniel has won many awards for Interboro’s participatory, place-based projects, including the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award, and the New Practices Award from the AIA. Most recently, Interboro’s Campau/Davison/Banglatown Neighborhood Framework Plan in Detroit won both a Regional and Urban Design Award from the American Institute of Architects and a Gold Achievement Award from the American Planning Association.