Robin Lynn Lecture
This endowed lecture series explores key themes in urban studies and urban history. It brings together leading scholars and thought leaders to examine the historical, social, and cultural dynamics of cities, as well as the challenges and opportunities facing urban environments today.
2024-2025: Sara Bronin
February 27, 2025
"Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World"
Hear from legal scholar and architect Sara C. Bronin about how zoning codes - the most significant regulatory power of local government - determines how we experience our cities. In this talk, Bronin will illuminate how zoning has become such a prevailing force and will reveal its impact — and its potential for good. In the talk as in the book, Bronin puts forward a practical and energizing vision for how we can reimagine our communities.
Sara Bronin is a Mexican-American architect and attorney whose interdisciplinary research focuses on how law and policy can foster more equitable, sustainable, well-designed, and connected places. She is the author of Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World, and she is the founding director of the National Zoning Atlas, which aims to digitize, demystify, and democratize information about zoning in the United States. As a leading voice on historic preservation law and related land use practices, Bronin was confirmed by the Senate to assume the role of the 12th Chair of the U.S. Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP).
2023-2024: Brodwyn Fischer
April 11, 2024
"Slavery’s Survivals: Intimacy, Informality, and Inequality in a Brazilian City"
What were slavery’s urban legacies in the Americas’ largest and most enduring slave society? This talk is built from the archival scraps of everyday lives in Recife, an iconic northeastern city that helped give birth to Brazil’s myth of racial democracy. It explores how the intimate but radically unequal relational networks that sustained urban slavery persisted after abolition, shaping the pursuit of full freedom and structuring urban racial and spatial injustice to the present day.
Brodwyn Fischer is a professor of Brazilian and Latin American history at the University of Chicago. Her work explores the roots of urban social and racial inequality, focusing especially on the ways that law intersects with informality to create and constrict possibilities for just and free cities.