Lindiwe is the Deputy Director of The Lab @ DC. Her North Star is contributing to shaping thriving communities in which residents are happy, healthy, and well-resourced. To this end, she works to ensure that research translates into implementation, and that evidence and empathy sit the core of government decision-making. She is passionate about working with both members of the public and government staff to shape research questions that matter and design processes that make life fuller, more joyous, and more just for DC residents and visitors.
An urban planner and economist by training, Lindiwe’s career working on place, power, and infrastructure spans research and evaluation, teaching, planning and policy design, and program implementation. Prior to joining The Lab, Lindiwe worked as a Senior Researcher at the Urban Institute. There, she ran exploratory and evaluative studies focused on transit service and programming, land use policy, public safety and enforcement, and co-led Urban’s Housing Justice Initiative. Before that, she served in roles such as research associate for the reparations field-builder Liberation Venture, transit planner with the City Boston, faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, transportation consultant with Nelson\Nygaard Associates, project manager with the Detroit Land Bank Authority, and even provided consulting services related to topics of built environment and behavior for the award-winning video game company ZA/UM.
She has published in peer reviewed journals the likes of Cities, Transportation Research Part A, and Transport Policy, and her research on safety, social cohesion, and enforcement has been cited by state legislators and Departments of Transportation across the country in their program design efforts. The throughline of her career has been trying to enrich collective understanding of the interplay between racial identity, social freedoms, access, and civic trust with the aim of improving quality-of-life outcomes.
Lindiwe holds a Ph.D. in Regional and Urban Planning from the London School of Economics, a Masters in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.A. in Economics from Harvard University. When off the clock, she can be found cycling around her neighborhood, taking in all the live music she can find, or full-belly laughing at one of the District’s stand-up comedy haunts.