Verena Brehm

Partner | Prof. Dr.-Ing. Architect AKNDS BDA DASL SRL

Planning, Consulting, Research, Strategic Urban and Neighborhood Development

Verena is a founding partner of CITYFÖRSTER architecture + urbanism and managing partner of the office in Hannover. Her field of work encompasses urban transformation processes. She puts a focus on projects that promote a socially and functionally mixed environment, "DiverCity," and sustainable mobility, "Mobil(C)ity," as well as works that address circularity in urban design and architecure, "Circular City." Verena works at the scale of architecture and urban design, and she oversees the firm's research-based projects. Since 2022 she is professor for urban design at the University of Kassel.

Verena Brehm studied architecture and urban design at Leibniz University Hannover, TU Berlin, and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Afterward, she worked for a number of firms, including David Chipperfield Architects in Berlin, Henning Larsen Architects in Copenhagen, and Beyond Green Design in London.
She has been active in research and teaching since 2007. In 2017–19, she was a visiting professor at the University of Kassel in the Department of Urban Interventions and, before that, she assumed the adjunct professorship in the Department of Urban Planning for the term 2015/16. She also taught at Leibniz University Hannover (2007–14), at the School of Architecture in Bremen (2012–15), and at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (2011, 2014). In 2013 she completed her doctorate on "Complex Morphology in Contemporary Architecture" (Leibniz University Hannover / TU Berlin). Verena Brehm was a member of the Baukollegium Berlin (architectural advisory board) in 2017-22 and was appointed to the German Academy for Urban Design and Planning (Akademie für Städtebau und Landesplanung - DASL) in 2020. She is a regular member of competition juries throughout Germany and gives lectures on topics related to the field of sustainable urban design.

What roles do architecture and urban design play in the development of sustainable urban lifestyles and ways of living? That is the guiding question for Verena in all of her projects, which she pursues with a conceptual approach. Her stance and method of working is characterized by engagement with social transformation processes such as digitization, climate change, knowledge culture, and mobility, without losing sight of the tangible and specific design, meaningfulness, and the everyday usefulness of urban design and architecture.