Rachel Bondra is a doctoral student in City and Regional Planning and the inaugural Fellow in the Initiative in the History of the Built Environment (HBE) at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. She is affiliated with the History Department through the HBE initiative. As an historian of the built environment, she studies the social and cultural history of urban landscapes and planning in US cities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work cultivates a process of reading waste as an avenue through which to understand urban and social transformation. She frames waste as both a material and process through which urban development altered the urban environment and residents’ lives, while considering the power dynamics implicit in transforming the city. Broadly, she is interested in how the urban landscape is a repository for historical narratives and how waste shapes the planning and management of the modern city. Rachel's research asks what the histories of landfills and waste facilities convey as a city changes over time, and how – and to what end – practitioners and scholars of planning transform these sites for the future.

Her doctoral work is informed by her background in urban planning and as an historian of art and architecture. Presently, she is assisting research on a book manuscript about Colonel George E. Waring with a faculty member at Penn. Other research positions include work within the Office of Community Engagement and Inclusion at Barnard College in New York City. Rachel has been a teaching assistant in the History Department and City and Regional Planning Department at UPenn and the Urban Studies Department at Barnard and Columbia. The intersections of her work as both an historian and scholar of urban planning guide her interests in public history and digital humanities.