Lilith Winkler-Schor

/in , , , , , , , /by

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.

Aurora Echavarria

/in , , , , /by

Aurora Echavarria is a PhD Candidate in Urban Planning at UCLA. Her current research centers on the intersection of public finance, comparative urban governance, and disparities in urban service and infrastructure provision. Her dissertation explores the politics of property taxation in Mexican municipalities and is supported by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Aurora’s broader research agenda examines the challenges of leveraging land value to fund public services and infrastructure provision. Her research delves into the political and technical limitations that local governments face in implementing adequate revenue collection strategies. In a parallel line of research, she studies fair housing policies as a lens for analyzing inequalities in infrastructure implementation and public spending across neighborhoods.

Prior to joining the PhD program, Aurora worked as a consultant for Mexican local and federal government, as well as international agencies. During this time, she advised governments on transportation, housing, and public finance policy.

Claire Nelischer

/in , , , /by

I am a doctoral candidate in UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning. My research investigates struggles over the production, design, and experience of urban parks and public spaces, with the goal to inform justice-oriented policy and design action. Linking urban design with other fields that speak to urban transformation, including urban political ecology and environmental justice, my work makes theoretical and practical contributions at the intersection of urban planning and design, environmental governance, and spatial justice.

My dissertation investigates the environmental justice outcomes of philanthropic participation in urban green space production, design, and governance, examining three high-profile urban infrastructure reuse parks in Toronto. This work is supported by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). In another line of community-engaged design research, as a Doctoral Fellow at cityLAB-UCLA, I lead participatory research with youth and older adults to understand and intervene in the urban public realm to support intergenerationality, mobility equity, and networks of care.

In my research and teaching, I use transdisciplinary approaches that blend the analytical, representational, and projective practices of the social sciences, design disciplines, and humanities. I am Associate Director of UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative, an interdisciplinary urban research and teaching effort, where I manage and teach in the Graduate Certificate Program. I am a founding member of the UnCommon Public Space Group, a collective that uses community-based events to connect public space scholarship with the city. Before doctoral studies, I worked for eight years as an urban planner focused on public realm design, policy, and advocacy in Toronto and New York City.

My research, often in collaboration with wonderful advisors, classmates, and colleagues, has been published in design and planning journals, including Moving, Mapping, Imagining: Youth-Centered Methods for Understanding and Envisioning Mobility (Journal of Planning Education and Research), The social life of the sidewalk: tracing the mobility experiences of youth in Westlake, Los Angeles (Mobilities), Turn of Events: Community Events as a Practice for Inquiry in Public Space Research (Planning Theory and Practice), Intergenerational public space design and policy: A review of the literature (Journal of Planning Literature), Caring public space: Advancing justice through intergenerational public space design and planning (Journal of Urban Affairs), Urban humanities as a framework for the study of public space during the pandemic (Journal of Urban Design), and The Road, Home: Challenges of and Responses to Homelessness in State Transportation Environments (Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives).