Joris Komen

Joris Komen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture’s Design and Computation Group, and is pursuing the Advanced Urbanism concentration with the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.

Joris's research is framed by human-wildlife interaction, adaptive behavioral wildlife biology, ecological literacy and the critical role wildlife will play in defining the future city. His investigations explore how computational frameworks can help the distribution of wildlife habitat and human settlement pattern reconcile with design theory, particularly though questions of authorship and emergence. His work evaluates the convergence of behavioral wildlife ecology and urban development practices in postcolonial communities of sub Saharan Africa in an effort to understand the socio-spatial influence of wildlife populations on emergent human settlement practices.

Joris holds a Masters of Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has worked for Architects, Design Researchers, National Parks and Wildlife Rehabilitation Centers in Namibia, Ghana, Brazil and the U.S.A. In 2017, Joris founded humaneLABS, a wildlife architecture praxis with ongoing projects in Southern Africa and the U.S.A.