Read about some of our distinguished faculty and their accomplishments.
Dr. Jovanna Rosen
Assistant Professor
Dr. Jovanna Rosen earned her Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Development from the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. She also holds a Master of City Planning and undergraduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining LMU, she was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Rutgers University-Camden. Dr. Rosen’s research and teaching draw from perspectives across urban planning, public policy, and geography to study the relationship between community development and urban political economy. She examines the connections between the state, capital, land, and cities; how these forces shape urban conditions and communities; and the strategies available to promote community interests and enhance social equity.
Dr. Rosen has three ongoing lines of research: social innovation, digital technologies, and housing markets. Social innovation refers to new strategies to solve complex social problems, spanning efforts across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, from public policy to social movements. Along this line of research, she has studied community benefits, which are a recent urban organizing tactic to ensure that affected residents benefit from large-scale development projects. Her book, Community Benefits: Developers, Negotiations, and Accountability, published with the University of Pennsylvania Press, explores what these agreements actually deliver for residents. Dr. Rosen’s work on digital technologies and housing markets examines these topics as primary pathways of social transformation in cities today, which therefore offer important lenses to examine the changing nature of urban inequality and potential solutions. Among this research, she led a door-to-door survey of Los Angeles residents to understand how people cope with housing affordability pressures. This work has been cited in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among other outlets. Her research on the impacts of the digital technology sector on cities has been published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. She is currently working on a collaborative book project to understand how the digital technology sector is changing urban growth, cities, and inequality.
Dr. Rosen was raised on the California Central Coast and lived in Los Angeles for nearly a decade. She is excited to return to the city that shaped her passion for urbanism and that remains the focus of much of her research. In her free time, she enjoys swimming, backpacking, farmers markets, and exploring cities.
Welcome to LMU Dr. Rosen!