Jovanna Rosen
Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies Loyola Marymount University
Biography
Dr. 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.
Education
University of Southern California
Ph.D.
Urban Planning and Development
2016
University of California, Berkeley
M.C.P.
City and Regional Planning
2011
University of California, Berkeley
B.A.
Political Science, Geography
2007
Social
Areas of Expertise
Articles
Harassment or Neglect? How Market Dynamics and Rent Control Shape Landlord Behaviour in Los Angeles
Urban StudiesSean Angst, Jovanna Rosen, Gary Painter, Soledad De Gregorio
2025-01-31
Abstract: This paper examines whether and how housing market dynamics shape landlords’ profit-seeking behaviours, focusing on harassment and property neglect. Leveraging household survey data, we assess whether differences between market and contract rents, rent control and gentrification influence landlord behaviour. Findings reveal that one-quarter of respondents reported inadequate maintenance from landlords within the past two years, and more than one-fifth reported at least one form of harassment. However, the incidence of these issues varied across contexts. Tenants in rent-controlled buildings and gentrifying census tracts were 14.8 and 9.4 percentage points more likely than peers not in those situations to experience harassment, respectively. Moreover, rent-controlled tenants were more likely to experience illegal eviction practices while those in gentrifying tracts were more likely to experience threats and assault. In contrast, paying lower rents relative to market estimates alone was not associated with a greater likelihood of refusal to provide maintenance and a lower likelihood of harassment. These results suggest that landlords respond in illegal ways when frictions in the market make it difficult to simply increase rents in response to strengthening market conditions.
Signaling Hinterlands and the Spatial Networks of Digital Capitalism
Annals of the American Association of GeographersJovanna Rosen, Luis F. Alvarez Leon
2023-10-18
Abstract: This article develops the concept of signaling hinterlands to explain how digital social networks extend and shift the interconnections between a metropolis and its hinterlands. The relationship between metropolis and hinterlands—the multiple, overlapping, networked geographies on which cities rely—is a long-standing area of geographical inquiry. This dynamic reflects networks of densely and more sparsely populated places connected by asymmetric relations, thus far primarily envisioned as physical goods-related production activities. How do these relationships change in a geographical political economy centered around digital technologies? We argue that digital technologies expand the productive capacity of the hinterlands, reshaping the dynamics between places within and beyond the metropolis. With digital social networks and digital platforms, places can gain value through their potential to signal and amass social, cultural, and economic capital. Signaling hinterlands reflect the simultaneously cultural, symbolic, technological, political, and economic relations involved in networking places under digital capitalism. We leverage Google Maps visitor posts to document the interconnections between the San Francisco Bay Area metropolis and Calla Lily Valley, a rural locale that we argue has become a digitally induced hinterland. Mapping postings from users who recorded visits to Calla Lily Valley, we examine how digital traces re-create and alter the asymmetric relations between rural and urban, metropolis and hinterlands in the digital economy.
How do Renters Survive Unaffordability? Household-Level Impacts of Rent Burden in Los Angeles
Journal of Urban AffairsSean Angst, Jovanna Rosen, Soledad De Gregorio, Gary Painter
2023-08-23
Abstract: Prior research shows that households reduce consumption of basic necessities in response to an increasing rent burden. However, questions remain regarding the interrelated, cumulative tactics renters use to survive amidst declining affordability. We address these critical questions by leveraging data from a door to door household survey in South and Central Los Angeles. First, we find that rent-burdened households (those paying over 30% of their income on rent) were more likely to reduce consumption and that adjustments in many consumption categories had persisted for years. Second, rent-burdened households undertook impactful functional adjustments, including working more hours and altering their homes to accommodate more residents. Severely rent-burdened households were 10.4 percentage points more likely to accommodate additional residents than those paying between 30 and 50% of income toward rent. Finally, we find that many households made both functional adjustments and consumption cutbacks simultaneously, which demonstrates the cumulative hardships caused by housing unaffordability.
Land, Reconfigured: Defying the Laws of Physics, Upholding the Rules of the Market in the Metaverse
Environment and Planning D: Society and SpaceLuis F. Alvarez Leon, Jovanna Rosen
2024-06-08
Abstract: Land ownership, occupancy, and use are enduringly central components of economies and societies across the world. Even in a capitalist economy increasingly mediated through digital technologies, land remains foundational to wide-ranging aspects of social life. However, conceptualizations of land fundamentally transform through virtual environments like the Metaverse, where digital or virtual land is a core feature. This article examines the construction and use of land under digital capitalism, specifically in the online virtual reality environment Metaverse. Studying virtual land markets in this environment, we show how land exists in continuous material and conceptual transformation via myriad landmaking technologies. Virtual landmaking offers new capital accumulation possibilities while simultaneously reifying existing market logics and creating new fictions around land. We emphasize how, despite its newness, virtual landmaking in the Metaverse relates to landmaking efforts that predate digital capitalism, from state-led large-scale engineering projects to land grabs and colonial expansion. Simultaneously, land reconceptualization in the Metaverse reflects new economic dynamics germane to digital capitalism, including commodification and assetization, and the rise of digital platforms as both market creators, through digital renderings, and rentier intermediaries. Throughout, we highlight the distributional and political stakes of reconfiguring land via new technologies.
The Social Innovation Trap: Critical Insights into an Emerging Field
Academy of Management AnnalsChristine Beckman, Jovanna Rosen, Jeimee Estrada-Miller, Gary Painter
2023-07-27
Abstract: We present an integrative approach to social innovation research to build a unified understanding of this emerging field. Based on a systematic literature review of articles about social innovation published in top-tier journals from 2003 to 2021, we argue that a “social innovation trap,” resulting from disciplinary silos, has limited our inquiries thus far. We contend that the social innovation trap has led the field to overlook three key insights. First, fragmentation across disciplines obscures the particular advantages of different sectors to social innovation. Second, the dominance of management within the social innovation field has led us to ignore the extent to which social innovation is embedded in space and place, which makes scale a fundamental dimension in need of exploration. Third, the management bent within social innovation scholarship has favored market perspectives over more democratic approaches. We call attention to two competing schools of thought—the instrumental and democratic perspectives—that open the field to broader inquiries into the role of innovation, knowledge, participation, and outcomes in social innovation. We conclude by delineating a research agenda that incorporates these three insights, to build the foundation for a more comprehensive social innovation field.
The Digital Growth Machine: Urban Change and the Ideology of Technology
Annals of the American Association of GeographersJovanna Rosen, Luis F. Alvarez Leon
2022-05-24
Abstract: Technology sector–led urban growth combines digital accumulation and urban accumulation dynamics to transform urban growth processes and outcomes. Together, these forces create the digital growth machine: a potent urban growth variation that fosters four related capital accumulation avenues that enable and support its activities. First, the digital growth machine extends long-standing land development and industrial attraction strategies to promote urban growth and increase exchange values. Second, it develops new possibilities for capturing land-related profit beyond traditional land development and intensification strategies. Third, it supports new opportunities for intermediaries to emerge and profit. Fourth, it creates new digital renderings of the city that affect land-related value and perceptions of place. With these processes, the digital growth machine simultaneously furthers dynamics of elite control over land that have become deeply entrenched in cities under capitalism, while qualitatively transforming urban life and the role of cities and land in this economic system.
Rental Affordability, Coping Strategies, and Impacts in Diverse Immigrant Communities
Housing Policy DebateJovanna Rosen, Victoria Ciudad Real, Sean Angst, Gary Painter
2022-02-16
Abstract: Rental affordability represents a growing issue across the United States. Existing research largely focuses on consumption trade-offs related to rising rents or the impacts of poverty more generally. Much remains unknown about how rental affordability shapes household, family, and community-level dynamics, including differences in impacts and coping strategies across groups. We use data from focus groups with low-income immigrant and refugee households to reveal deep and far-reaching impacts. We show how residents rely upon unique neighborhood-based resources and social support. Citing significant competition for affordable units and their desire to stay in the neighborhood, residents express that they have limited alternatives to their current housing—even as many described harmful housing conditions and housing-related stress. Furthermore, rising housing costs have strained community and family dynamics, undermining social support. These findings illustrate unique and impactful housing affordability dynamics among diverse populations, which extend far beyond household and housing consumption, force impactful trade-offs, and introduce constraints.
Technology as Ideology in Urban Governance
Annals of the American Association of GeographersLuis F. Alvarez Leon, Jovanna Rosen
2019-10-16
Abstract: This article argues that the turn toward smart cities, emphasizing solutions, services, and infrastructures driven by digital technologies, has reinforced a dominant ideology shaping urban decision making, frameworks, and outcomes. Two core dimensions of this ideology of technology in urban governance interact to consequentially reshape urban processes: (1) the priority of attracting high-technology industries as engines for urban economies and (2) the tendency to reframe urban problems into technological problems, to be addressed by technological solutions. Together, these mechanisms operate in conjunction to privilege technological needs, capacities, and priorities in urban governance, contributing to the widespread exclusion of people and problems beyond the scope of technology. Although not unprecedented, this ideology of technology has acquired renewed potency with neoliberalized urbanism, urban restructuring, and the ongoing information revolution. Furthermore, these changes intensify the ongoing transformation of cities (and space more generally) into digitized spaces tailored for capital accumulation in the context of digital and surveillance capitalism. To illustrate these dynamics, we briefly describe recent events in San Francisco, one of the key sites in the current techno-economic paradigm.
From Citizen Control to Co-Production: Moving Beyond a Linear Conception of Citizen Participation
Journal of the American Planning AssociationJovanna Rosen, Gary Painter
2019-07-01
Abstract: Problem, research strategy, and findings: Sherry Arnstein’s classic “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” still shapes our understanding of citizen participation within and beyond planning. However, Arnstein’s citizen control offers communities only partial authority. Rather, community control does not fundamentally alter the political and economic power differences between stakeholders that limit community influence over outcomes. In response, we describe a co-production participation model for inclusive participation to help communities confront the political and economic power relationships that limit their influential participation. Residents directly and influentially engage in a dynamic and iterative problem-solving process throughout problem formation and implementation. Co-production recognizes that truly inclusive community development requires adaptive and enduring processes to address the political and economic power inequalities that shape local decision making. In this way, co-production offers an evolving participation model, rather than a specific outcome or process, to continually refine strategies toward more equitable processes. To illustrate this argument, we describe a community-based initiative in California’s Coachella Valley. We trace the initiative’s evolution toward a co-production model of community engagement, shifting the initiative’s strategies and goals toward greater community power. This evidence shows how a co-productive model can more effectively tackle political and economic power imbalances through adaptive, flexible, and long-term participatory processes.
Takeaway for practice: Co-production models can offer new ways for planning practitioners to advance more inclusive community participation, with greater resident power sharing. Fundamentally, planners and local practitioners must extend participation beyond engagement and inclusion, using adaptive, long-term participation models, with capacity building and resource sharing, to build and sustain community power. This sustained approach challenges traditional government decision-making models, requiring power holders to shift greater power, resources, and influence toward communities. Power holders must hold spaces of power for communities while simultaneously building resident ability to effectively gain, retain, and exert local control.
The Important Role of Government in Comprehensive Community initiatives: A Case Study Analysis of the Building Healthy Communities Initiative
Journal of Planning Education and ResearchJovanna Rosen, Moira O'Neill, Malo Hutson
2018-12-12
Abstract: Comprehensive community initiatives (CCI) are multi-issue, large-scale, often philanthropic investments in disadvantaged communities to comprehensively address community problems. We studied two sites of The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative, Richmond and East Oakland, to examine CCI implementation. Prior research offers best practices focused on cultivating existing community organizational and organizing infrastructure. We find that CCI success also requires an enabling local government context. Where political will aligns with the initiative’s goals, CCIs should support work to inform and improve local public policy and systems. Inadequate government resources necessitate CCI investment, but government has an important role in CCI success.
Benefits-Sharing Agreements and Nonideal Theory: The Warning Signs of Agreement Co-Optation
Planning TheoryJovanna Rosen, Lisa Schweitzer
2017-08-17
Abstract: Community members seek benefits-sharing planning agreements to advance their own distributive justice goals by directing benefits to communities. Nonideal theory does much to explain the context and possibilities for these agreements. The agreements forged between communities and development interests seek to address, but not completely achieve, distributive justice via consensus about incremental changes in project benefit distribution. However, implementation and outcomes can vary widely. This article develops theory to conceptualize a practical framework for these planning agreements using nonideal justice theories, granted the triple concerns of inaction, tokenism, and rhetorical trickery posed by ineffective implementation. The Crenshaw Light Rail Project in Los Angeles illustrates the issues in play.
Climate, Environmental Health Vulnerability, and Physical Planning: A Review of the Forecasting Literature
Journal of Planning LiteratureJovanna Rosen
2015-09-06
Abstract: Climate change is expected to alter human health in important ways, with significant regional variations. To understand these effects, I review the climate change health forecasting literature and connect it to planning. I find that this literature indicates that local contexts deeply influence health outcomes, with implications for planning practice. However, this literature is fragmented by place and topic and prevents planners from anticipating the cumulative impacts on individuals and places. Future research should consider physical environment, socioeconomic and political characteristics, and interactions with health effects, to present a comprehensive understanding of the health effects of climate change.
