About Daniel Black

Daniel is a research director with 20 years professional experience in a wide range of knowledge domains in urban development, corporate governance and planetary health. He is currently: Programme Director of a 5-year £10m research consortium, which aims to Tackle the Root causes Upstream of Unhealthy Urban Development (TRUUD); and co-lead of a 3-year £1m project on the food-energy-water nexus with partners in South Africa, Brazil, Netherlands, Norway and the US. He speaks regularly at events on healthy and sustainable urbanisation. 

Key competencies are:
  • ​​Drawing on breadth of experience to distil insight from complexity
  • Pushing boundaries and bridges specialisms, academia and the real world
  • Conceiving, co-creating and coordinating ideas and opportunities through holistic, creative problem solving
  • Building partnerships between funders, knowledge leaders, and industry to achieve balanced decision-making.​​

Affiliations

History of db+a
Current affiliations:
  • University of Bristol, Population Health Sciences, Medical School (Programme Director, TRUUD) 
  • University of Reading, Henley Business School - Real Estate and Planning (Visiting Research Fellow)
  • Healthy Polis (Scientific Advisory Committee Member)
  • Advisor, Centre for Thriving Places

Former affiliations:
  • Urban Land Institute
  • Urban Design Group
  • Royal Town Planning Institute
  • Advisor, Liveable Cities (Research Programme)
  • Bristol Steiner School (Governor)
  • MARCH Mental Health Network for Community Assets  (Advisor)

In addition to the affiliations above, Daniel works closely with multiple other universities, academics and consultants, particularly at the Universities of Bath (economics, management, policy), Coventry (agro-ecology and water), and UWE Bristol (Health and Applied Sciences). ​

Alongside this, he spent fifteen years as a director of a commercial property development company, Clipper Estates, with long experience in institutional property investment and high quality mixed-use development, including Great Bow Yard.​

From 2016 - 2021, Daniel was a Governor and Chair of Governors for a school with excellent teaching, but significant management and governance issues, helping to steer it out of insolvency and orchestrate a successful turnaround to Ofsted Good. 
​Since setting up his own practice in 2012, db+a, Daniel has co-led research bids with academic partners to win c. £12m in funding from a wide range of funders including the UK Prevention Research Partnership (led by Medical Research Council), Wellcome Trust, InnovateUK, Natural Environment Research Council, the Urban Land Institute, New Climate Economy, and the Belmont Forum/JPI Europe.

db+a’s research spans multiple disciplines including: urban planning, public health, corporate decision-making, climate change, food, energy, water, waste. Research projects can be found here.

Having spent many years learning about processes and detail downstream in a range of urban disciplines including transport, urban design, building construction and community engagement, Daniel now leads research into decision-making that takes place upstream: governance, partnerships, corporate strategy, risk management. 

DB originally studied economics then urban planning/design before working in a range of technical professions in built infrastructure development and impact assessment, including transport, community engagement, building construction.

Projects timeline and headline knowledge domains

Headline areas of investigation + areas of specialism employed in our research

Daniel can perhaps be best described as a 'specialist-generalist', 'IS2 Team Leader' (Bammer, 2013) or 'tree-shaped' (as opposed to 't-shaped' or, perhaps, 'X-shaped'). He is certainly not expert in all the areas listed below, but has a good working knowledge of most, deeper in some areas than others. His role is to 'stitch and knit', coordinate and liaise between, always with an eye to the evolving theories of change and the main prize: planetary health outcomes.

Urban Health

  • Public Health
  • Complex Research Operationalisation
  • Inter-, Trans-, Post-Disciplinary Research
  • Post-Normal Science
  • Complex Intervention Design and Evaluation
  • Philosophy, Language & Plural Understandings
  • Public Health Ethics
  • Interview Design and Analysis (Large-Team)
  • Intervention Selection
  • Stakeholder Analysis
  • Critical Co-Production
  • Public Policy
  • Law
  • Environmental Economics
  • Health Economics
  • Logic Models vs Theories of Change
  • Psychology, Decision-Making & Power
  • Behaviour Change
  • Spatial Planning
  • City-Region Transport Planning

Impact Assessment
(Health / Sustainability)

  • Health Impact Assessment
  • Sustainability Appraisal (SA/SEA)
  • Environmental Impact Assessment
  • BREEAM for Communities
  • Marketing
  • Business Development

Urban Design (MA)

  • Impact Assessment (Masterplanning)​
  • Eco-Development Design / Appraisal
  • Urban-Rural History / Development
  • Masterplanning
  • ​Town Planning
  • Architecture
  • Landscape Architecture
  • Aesthetics
  • Public Realm Design

Food-Energy-Water Systems

  • Urban Living Labs
  • Complex Research Operationalisation
  • Urban Food Systems
  • Urban Water Systems
  • Phosphorous Recovery
  • Participatory Scenario Planning
  • Societal Impact Evaluation
  • Systems Dynamics Modelling
  • Systems Thinking Approaches
  • Environmental Economics
  • Macro-Economics
  • Design Thinking

Real Estate Investment

  • Real Estate Investment / “good density” (urban design)
  • Global Data Identification, Gathering and Analysis
  • Urban Design

Commercial Property Development

  • Viability Appraisal
  • Land acquisition
  • Options Appraisal
  • Procurement
  • Investment / Borrowing
  • Self/Custom Build - Business Development

Planning Consultancy

  • Spatial Planning​
  • Planning Policy
  • Urban Design
  • GIS (Geographic Information Systems)
  • Employment Appraisal
  • Viability Appraisal
  • Retail Impact Assessment

Economics (BSc)

  • Macroeconomics
  • Taxation
  • Microeconomics
  • Foreign Debt

 Urban Health

  • Urban Development​
  • Public Health
  • Systematic Reviews
  • Environmental Economics
  • Interview Design and Analysis
  • Research Operationalisation
  • Inter-disciplinary vs Trans-disciplinary Research
  • Societal Impact Planning & Monitoring
  • Public Engagement / Science Communication

Climate Risk Valuation
​& Corporate Decision-Making
​(Social Housing + Healthcare)

  • Environmental Economics​
  • Systems Mapping of Unintended Consequences
  • Climate Modelling (for Buildings)
  • Problem Structuring
  • Climate Risk / Scenarios
  • Business Models
  • GIS Platform Development

Sustainable Building Construction

  • Sustainable Building Construction
  • Low Impact Materials
  • Environmental Assessment Methods / Certification (BREEAM, Code for Sustainable Homes, Passivhaus)
  • Climate Modelling (for Buildings)​
  • Supply chain & skills (construction)

Sustainable Transport Planning

  • Transport Planning
  • Street Design
  • Walking and Cycling Infrastructure
  • Community Engagement
  • ​Social marketing / behaviour change