Robin Bartram, PhD

I study housing, with a focus on its physical and environmental aspects.

In my first book, Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality, I show how building code inspectors in Chicago assess built environments to make inferences about their inhabitants. These assessments often cause them to act in unexpected ways, by protecting some of the city’s most precarious residents. The fact that urban inequality prevails in spite of these actions reveals the contours of persistent inequality.

My next book project uses interviews with homeowners, landlords, and city officials in Chicago and New Orleans to investigate how cities plan for aging housing stock, centering questions of health equity and environmental justice. Climate change presents moments of crisis and material rupture to buildings. By contrast, my research focuses on the slow, mundane process of dilapidation of built environments and its relationship to housing precarity. The book argues that the current legal and policy foci of housing justice (e.g., on evictions and on access to home ownership) are not enough to deal with the overlapping crises of climate crises, aging populations, crumbling housing stock, and legacies of environmental racism.