Jennifer Brooks
Jennifer Brooks is a landscape architect, urban designer, and educator in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her two decades of practice in New York City, San Francisco, and Charlotte bring a comprehensive perspective to architecture and urban design discourse, linking ecosystems and sites, material technology and design craft, and cultural history and speculative futures. As a leader in private design firms and local government, Jennifer’s work has driven innovation in materials and construction, operationalized research in resilient infrastructure and adaptability, and revealed cultural narratives and ecological systems to amplify design excellence in public space. Most recently, Jennifer served as Design and Construction Project Manager at Mecklenburg County, where she directed capital improvement
projects representing a $50 million investment in the County’s park and greenway system.
As assistant professor in architecture and urban design, Jennifer teaches design studios and seminars across the curriculum to grant students the foundational knowledge, skills and collective agency to ignite transformative design interventions in service to their communities and to our global ecosystem. Her approach endeavors to promote fluency in design language and ecosystem thinking, to inspire critical thinking regarding resilience and adaptability in the built environment, and to empower future design practitioners to be bold in design.
Jennifer’s current research investigates relationships between land, power, labor, and leisure in Charlotte’s marginalized landscapes and neighborhoods during the twentieth century, exemplified at L.C. Coleman Park in the Washington Heights Neighborhood in Charlotte. Her work in the public sector catalyzed a research framework, Nimble Innovation, adapting approaches from business entrepreneurship and design thinking to bring rapid prototyping and divergent thinking to the
bureaucratic context of local government, applied to recent built work at the Reedy Creek Greenway in Charlotte.
Jennifer upholds a strong commitment to public services as a member of the Partners for Parks Board and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project Steering Committee.
EDUCATION
Harvard University Graduate School of Design: Master in Landscape Architecture, 2007
New York University College of Arts and Science: Bachelor of Arts, 2002