Lilith Winkler-Schor

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Lilith Winkler-Schor is a PhD student whose research broadly examines how the field of urban planning is currently reimagining itself as a field of racial justice and attempting to rectify its origins in white supremacy. She is particularly interested in how the planning field is leveraging arts and culture to develop more responsive and just urban planning methods that authentically heal past racial harms. Her current research examines how the transportation planning sector has been working to acknowledge and redress the racial harms of the highway interstate program, particularly through the development and implementation of the Reconnecting Communities grant. She hopes to contribute deeper understanding on how planners are conceptualizing their role in redressing past racial harms and what delivering repair to historically harmed communities might look like.

Lilith’s previous research examined how two transportation agencies collaborated with embedded artists to address complex transportation justice issues. Through this research she found that artists provided departments with a new set of approaches that align well with reparative planning approaches. However, she also found that these new approaches, though theoretically aligned with emergent scholarship, were in tension with standard agency operations. She continues to explore how theoretical planning concepts around repair and justice can be translated into bureaucratic settings.

Professionally, Lilith works as an urbanist, designer, and urban cultural policy strategy consultant. Prior to moving to LA, she spent a decade in New Orleans, where she worked in holistic neighborhood development. She seeks to incorporate creative and human-centric methods that deliver equitable opportunity, belonging and joy in all the work that she does.
Lilith holds a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA and a certificate in Urban Humanities. She received her BA in Social Policy and Political Science and a BFA in Fine Arts in Visual Arts from Tulane University.

Chendi Zhang

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Chendi Zhang (she/her/hers) is a doctoral student in Urban Planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. Her research interests include age-friendly public space, participation and community engagement, urban design, smart city and technologies, and Urban China.

Prior to pursuing her PhD, Chendi was a landscape designer at OLIN, Philadelphia, assisted in curating Penn-China Design Dialogue 2019, worked on Beautiful China – Reflections on Landscape Architecture in Contemporary China as an assistant editor and book designer, and started to share tutorials about landscape architecture and her experience as an international student in design and planning major as a social media influencer.

Chendi studied and worked in the field of landscape architecture for ten years, holding her master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and bachelor’s degree of Science in Landscape Architecture from Beijing Forestry University. With her research concentration, practice experience, and design background, Chendi studies urban issues from a perspective of how planning and design processes can collaborate more tightly and efficiently to better respond to the demands of overlooked and misrepresented vulnerable groups and reduce spatial inequality in the built environment.

Website: chendizest.com