Research
PhD Student, Urban Planning
University California, Los Angeles
Luskin School of Public Affairs
Research Interests:
Planning theory, urban history, retrospective justice, arts & culture, placemaking, belonging, bureaucracies, race, urban highway policy
Advisors:
Amada Armenta
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris
Publications
Winkler-Schor, Lilith. 2025. "Spatial Imaginaries and Propertied Realities: Understanding how Property and Highway Planning are Tangled up in Urban Planning’s Whiteness Problem." Critical Planning 28 (1)
Winkler-Schor, Lilith. 2024. "Creatively Transforming Transportation: Collaborating with Artists as a Model Towards Reparative Planning in Transportation." University of California, Los Angeles ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
Lilith is an Urban Planning PhD student at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs whose work sits at the intersection of urban planning theory and history, just governance, and placemaking. Currently, her research examines how the field of urban planning is attempting to reimagining itself as a field of racial justice in light of its legacy as a political tool to serve Whiteness. She is particularly interested in how urban planning institutions are leveraging arts and culture to develop more responsive and just urban planning methods and governance structures.
Her doctoral research explores the federal Reconnecting Communities program as an example of how the transportation planning sector is working to acknowledge and redress the past racial harms of the highway interstate program. She hopes to contribute deeper understanding on how planners are conceptualizing past racial harms, how agencies are attempting to deliver repair, and how issues of retrospective justice can be understood through a spatial frame. Lilith also collaborates closely with Dr. Regan Patterson (Director of UCLA's Engineering Environmental Justice Lab) to examine urban highway policy and its implications for racial and retrospective justice.
Her doctoral research builds on her master's thesis, titled Creatively Transforming Transportation: collaborating with artists to promote equitable engagement and racial redress, which examined how two transportation agencies embedded artists into projects working to address complex transportation issues. She found that artists' approaches aligned well with tenets of reparative planning, offering a potential avenue for operationalizing these theoretical dimensions within an institutional context.
Lilith holds a MURP from UCLA. She received a BA in Social Policy and Political Science and a BFA in Visual Arts from Tulane University. Her Bachelor's thesis compared four presidential administration's public housing policies to understand the most effective unit of implementation for housing assistance.
Left: Poster from UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute Conference (see full sized version here).
Above: Lilith presenting at the Pacific Coast Transportation Workshop.