Sara Bronin, a leading voice on urban policy and law, will return to the University of Pennsylvania this spring to deliver the keynote address at the Graduation Ceremony of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design.
“Ms. Bronin is on a mission to make government work better for all Americans,” said Weitzman Dean and Paley Professor Fritz Steiner. “Her work on topics like zoning and renewable energy exemplifies the Weitzman School’s interdisciplinary approach to the built world and our commitment to advancing the public good.” Bronin was a visiting scholar at Penn’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy for the 2020-2021 Academic Year.
Bronin is a Mexican-American architect, attorney, Cornell University professor, and policymaker whose interdisciplinary work focuses on how law and policy can foster more equitable, sustainable, well-designed, and connected places. She wrote Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World (Norton, 2024) and she founded and leads the National Zoning Atlas, which is digitizing, demystifying, and democratizing information about zoning in the United States. Key to the City, in particular, reminds readers that the most powerful forces shaping our environment are sometimes the least understood.
One of the foremost American scholars in property, land use, zoning, and historic preservation law, Bronin is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles, and she has been interviewed by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, PBS, the Associated Press, and other major news outlets. Her contributions include leading the development of the Land Use volume of the Fourth Restatement of Property Law, a treatise that distills principles of black letter law that will shape judicial decisions for decades to come. She has also been a reformer and change maker in public roles at the local, state, and federal levels. She chaired the planning and zoning commission of Connecticut’s capital city for seven years and was subsequently confirmed by the US Senate and appointed by President Biden to chair the US Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. She holds a JD from Yale (Harry S Truman Scholarship), MSc from the University of Oxford (Rhodes Scholarship), and BArchitecture and BA in Plan II from the University of Texas. A seventh-generation Texan, Bronin is a native Houstonian.
Weitzman’s Class of 2025 is expected to include 328 individuals from 32 countries and 28 states: 155 students in the Department of Architecture, 62 in City & Regional Planning, 45 in Landscape Architecture, 29 in Urban Spatial Analytics, 1 in Fine Arts, 26 in Historic Preservation, and 10 dual-degree students.
The ceremony is scheduled for Saturday, May 17, 6:00pm EDT. Attendance for the in-person event is limited to ticketed graduates and their guests, but the event will be streamed on YouTube.
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