Christina Rosan has taught at Temple University since 2009. She is particularly interested in how we make cities more sustainable and just. She received her Bachelor’s in History (with Honors) from Williams College. After college, she taught English in Ecuador and worked at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC on a research project for USAID. She later attended the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) for her Master’s in City Planning with a focus on International Development. Her Master’s thesis examined the regional politics around the siting of a new airport outside of Mexico City. Rosan was offered an opportunity to continue her studies in a PhD at MIT where she worked on a research project on the politics of air pollution in Mexico City. Her interest in regional planning and sustainability led her to write her dissertation on metropolitan governance and land use planning in Boston, Denver, and Portland.

After graduation, Rosan was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at MIT where she worked on a book project on the history of planning ideas which produced a co-edited book, Planning Ideas that Matter (MIT 2012). The book is the winner of the International Planning History Society’s 2014 best edited book in planning. She was also a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at MIT coordinating the MITPortugal PhD in Sustainable Energy Systems. At Temple, Rosan’s research focuses on urban sustainability. She is particularly interested in the politics of becoming a green city. She was the Co-PI on an EPA STAR research grant, Performance and Effectiveness of Urban Green Infrastructure: Maximizing Benefits at the Subwatershed Scale through Measurement, Modeling, and Community-Based Implementation.

Rosan is the author of Governing the Fragmented Metropolis: Planning for Regional Sustainability (Penn Press 2016) and co-author with Dr. Hamil Pearsall of Growing a Sustainable City? The Question of Urban Agriculture (University of Toronto Press, 2017). Rosan is also the co-author (with Stephen Wheeler) of Reimagining Sustainable Cities (University of California Press, 2021). Rosan is active in the Philadelphia sustainability community and is eager to use research to inform practice.