Research

Lilith is an Urban Planning PhD student at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs. Her research broadly 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. As the field attempts to tackle more complex social issues, she is particularly interested in how urban planning institutions are leveraging arts and culture to develop more responsive and just urban planning methods. 

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Her doctoral research examines 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. She also is collaborating with Dr. Regan Patterson (UCLA) to examine how and why communities are selecting highway removal or highway caps in their efforts to reconnect their communities.

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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.

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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.