Lindiwe Rennert is a senior research associate in the Housing and Communities Division at the Urban Institute. She is a member of the fair housing, land use, and transportation practice area, where her research focuses on the interplay between transportation, racial justice, and gentrification.

Before joining Urban, Rennert worked on accessibility and governance matters in the private, public, and academic sectors. In previous positions as adjunct professor of planning practice at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, transit planner with the Boston Transportation Department, and transportation consultant with Nelson\Nygaard Associates, she has lead projects centered around fare restructuring, bus rapid transit, multimodal network redesigns, and Title VI reform, as well as broader initiatives related to civic inclusion and transparency, transit electrification, overlay zoning districts, and institutionalized race-based metrics in prioritization and evaluation processes. In the justice policy realm, she has provided research service to the reparations field-builder Liberation Ventures and worked on housing securing at the Detroit Land Bank.

Rennert has been a guest on the planning and policy podcasts Rail~Volution, Progressing Planning, and Planning Ideas that Matter and has published peer-reviewed scholarship in numerous journals, including Transportation Research Part A, Transport Policy, and Cities. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University, a master’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a doctoral degree in regional and urban planning from the London School of Economics.