Uwe S. Brandes is professor of the practice, faculty director of the Urban & Regional Planning Program, faculty director of the Georgetown Global Cities Initiative and affiliated faculty in the Science, Technology, and International Affairs program at the Walsh School of Foreign Service.
He is principal of BrandesPartnersLLP.
Professor Brandes is a distinguished scholar-practitioner in the field of urban design and sustainable urban development, with more than 25 years of experience in the planning, design, and development of new buildings, the public realm, and development partnerships. As a practitioner, he has authored plans in New York City, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Berlin, Buenos Aires, Panama and South Korea. As a public official in Washington, D.C., he oversaw the creation of the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative (AWI), the award-winning urban partnership to re-imagine and transform the most polluted river in the Chesapeake Bay into a model of socially-inclusive and sustainable urban development. The AWI invented a new civic paradigm for 21st Century Washington which embraced participatory urban planning, innovative partnerships and has attracted over $10 billion of investment in neighborhoods which had previously received none for over a generation. As senior vice president for new program initiatives at the Urban Land Institute, he created and directed ULI’s climate change program and co-authored research publications celebrating ULI’s 75th anniversary.
Projects and plans directed by Professor Brandes have won global awards from the World Bank and the Urban Land Institute; and national awards from the American Planning Association, American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the Environmental Design Research Association. Professor Brandes has testified before Congress and has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Wired magazine. He serves on the District of Columbia Climate Change and Resilience Commission, and the advisory boards of the Urban Land Institute Center of Sustainability and Economic Performance, and the World Economic Forum’s Cities and Urbanization Initiative.
Professor Brandes holds a Master of Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a Fulbright Scholarship at the Technical University Dortmund Institute of Spatial Planning, a MIT Paul Sun Fellowship at the Tsinghua University Institute of Urbanism, and A.B. in Engineering Science from Dartmouth College Thayer School of Engineering.