Short Biography:
Uwe S. Brandes is an award-winning urban planner and designer with 30 years experience planning and building new neighborhoods, buildings, infrastructure and parks. He is an expert in the civic and business partnerships necessary to build sustainable communities. As founder and principal of Brandes Partners LLP, he brings his extensive knowledge and experience to the service of public and private clients.
Brandes is professor of practice at Georgetown University and the founder and director of the graduate program in Urban & Regional Planning and the director of the university-wide Georgetown Global Cities Initiative. He is chair of the District of Columbia Commission on Climate Change & Resilience and chair of the NoMa Parks Foundation.
Full Biography:
Uwe S. Brandes is an award-winning urban planner and designer with 30 years experience planning and building new neighborhoods, buildings, infrastructure and parks. He is an expert in the civic and business partnerships necessary to build sustainable communities. As founder and principal of Brandes Partners LLP, he brings his extensive knowledge and experience to the service of public and private clients.
Throughout his career, Brandes has balanced professional practice with research, teaching, and civic engagement. His work reimagines and expands the public realm of cities in a manner that integrates social, economic and environmental development goals.
He has testified before Congress and has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Wired and many other media publications. He has twice been distinguished as a citizen diplomat by the United States Department of State to both Germany and India. In 2022, he received the Distinguished Educator award from the Lambda Alpha International Society of Land Economics.
His recent work leverages place-based partnerships to advance comprehensive urban development goals. Collaborating with the newly created city planning department in the Municipality of Panama City, Panama, he authored “Por Los Próximos 100 Años,” Panama’s first urban revitalization plan, which establishes a new cultural district adjacent to Panama’s Casco Viejo UNESCO World Heritage Site. The plan combines historic preservation, public realm design guidelines and a new zoning strategy to create a transit-oriented and walkable neighborhood.
He served as advisor and urban designer to the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank on the ambitious neighborhood strategy to “formalize” informal neighborhoods across the city and province of Buenos Aires, including the infamous Barrio 31 neighborhood adjacent to the historic neighborhood of Recoleta.
Other large-scale master planning work has included a new special economic zone dedicated to leisure economies along the coast of Jeolla Namdo Province in South Korea and the Próspera Economic Development Hub, an innovative public private partnership creating a semi-autonomous zone on the Caribbean coast of Honduras.
In addition to his international work, Brandes continues over 20-years of dedicated advising and management to the District of Columbia on the urban design and development of the Anacostia Waterfront, most recently overseeing the aesthetic design of the New Frederick Douglass Bridge and reformulating the place management strategy for the Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District.
Brandes is professor of the practice at Georgetown University and founder and faculty director of Georgetown’s graduate degree in Urban & Regional Planning and the faculty director of the Georgetown Global Cities Initiative, a university-wide research network exploring the significance of global urbanization across a variety of academic disciplines. His research explores urban innovation associated with climate change, the practice of place management as a professional specialization and cross-cultural knowledge management, including having served as knowledge manager of the World Economic Forum’s Cities & Urbanization initiative.
Brandes previously served as Senior Vice President at the Urban Land Institute (ULI) where he directed international programs on climate change and sustainable urban development. He is the author and executive editor of The City in 2050: Creating Blueprints for Change (ULI, 2008), What’s Next? Real Estate in the New Economy (ULI, 2011), and What’s Next? Getting Ahead of Change (ULI, 2012) as well as research reports on climate change, including Risk and Resilience in Coastal Regions. He created ULI’s Climate Change Land Use and Energy (CLUE) program, authored ULI’s first statement on climate change (ULI, 2008) and supported the formation of the ULI Greenprint Center for Building Performance, a market-driven building performance index tracking the carbon performance of commercial real estate assets.
Brandes previously served in the public sector as Vice President, Director of Capital Projects and Planning for the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation and Associate Director, District of Columbia Office of Planning, where he managed the multi-agency Anacostia Waterfront Initiative. Over $3 billion of public and private investment was catalyzed during his eight-year tenure. Brandes managed the creation of seminal urban planning documents including the Anacostia Waterfront Framework Plan (2003), Hill East Small Area Plan (2004) and the Southwest Waterfront Small Area Plan (2004), which received multiple national awards. He managed the urban design, re-zoning and public approvals of hallmark urban development projects, including the new U.S. Department of Transportation headquarters, the Arthur Capper Hope VI housing project, the Washington Nationals ballpark, new waterfront parks and the rezoning of hundreds of acres of waterfront lands. Under his stewardship, the District of Columbia completed the largest land exchange with the federal government since the establishment of the District’s home rule in 1973, including the transfer of ownership of Reservation 13 and Poplar Point to the District of Columbia.
Prior to public service, Brandes practiced architecture and urban design in New York City. Large-scale projects completed under his design direction include the Bronx Museum of Art, the Buffalo Inner Harbor Project and the master plan for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. As a young professional, Brandes coordinated the urban design of new neighborhood schools in Karow Nord, the very first new town to be built outside of Berlin on land in the former East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Mr. Brandes is a Fulbright Scholar and earned the Master of Architecture from Harvard University and an A.B. in engineering science from Dartmouth College. He completed fellowships at the TU University Dortmund and the Institute for Urbanism at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
He serves on the boards of several civic and non-profit organizations, including serving as chair of the District of Columbia Commission on Climate Change & Resilience.