Sara C. Bronin
- Founder, National Zoning Atlas
- Professor, Cornell University
“Law and policy must be harnessed to foster more equitable, sustainable, well-designed, and connected places.”
Sara C. Bronin is a Mexican-American architect, attorney, professor, and policymaker. She founded and directs the National Zoning Atlas, which aims to digitize, demystify, and democratize information about zoning in the United States. Bronin is one of the foremost American scholars in property, land use, zoning, and historic preservation law, having co-authored Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World, along with three other books, two treatises, and dozens of articles.
Bronin has 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, leading its nationally-recognized efforts to overhaul its zoning code, adopt a new decennial city plan, and draft and implement the city’s first climate action plan. In 2020, she founded DesegregateCT, a pro-homes grassroots coalition that successfully advanced the first major statewide zoning reforms in several decades. She also served in the Biden administration as Senate-confirmed chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the independent federal agency charged with preserving the country’s historic places.
