In this interview with Brian Rosa, who joined BCNUEJ as a postdoctoral researcher in 2024, the Connecticut native says most people are unaware that the state has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the United States. Witnessing that influenced his eventual choice of career in urban justice research, having obtained an MRP in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University and a PhD in Human Geography from The University of Manchester. He is interested in urban infrastructures and the transformation of cities in the face of deindustrialization and currently leads the ReHousIn project.
How did your upbringing influence your career path?
I grew up in Connecticut, USA, in a “blue-collar”, but comfortably middle-class, family. My sister and I were the first in our family to study at university. Connecticut is one of the two most economically unequal states in the USA, despite its outward image as wealthy suburbs of New York City. When I was a child, the local television news was always full of stories about economic hardship and violence in the state’s small, deindustrializing cities.
The contrasts were severe and all things urban signalled something threatening. I am from Wallingford, a small, former industrial city that was populated predominantly by so-called ethnic white Catholics (Italian, Irish, and Eastern European). A turning point for me was going to study at a public high school for the arts in New Haven, a lower-income city whose population is predominantly Black and Latino. New Haven is also home to Yale University, a prestigious, fortresslike institution in the city center. I am sometimes surprised I ended up where I did, when I found the university so alienating and unwelcoming. Seeing the stark socio-economic, environmental, and racial inequalities in Connecticut, along with my political awakening through the global justice movement in the late 1990s, inspired me to want to understand conflicts around global capitalism, injustice, and urbanization at college.
My first interest in urban space, and way of seeing the city, was as a skateboarder.
How did you become interested in urban and environmental justice and end up at ICTA-UAB?
I worked as a community organizer and fundraiser for various activist groups and non-profit organizations while studying sociology and urban studies at Clark University. I was especially inspired by the class Urban Ecology and our field trip to New York City, visiting urban gardens and canoeing down the Bronx River. I later worked at the Center for Public Service and Brown University, then left to complete an MRP in City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, attraced by its focus on community-based urban planning. After a research fellowship in Mexico City, I moved to Manchester, England to continue my studies, and got a PhD in human geography. That’s when I attended one of ICTA-UAB’s first summer schools on environmental conflict and degrowth in 2010.
After living with my Spanish partner in Boston and New York City, where I was a professor of urban studies at the City University of New York, we took the opportunity to move to Barcelona with our infant child. For the past seven years, I have been working here as an instructor and researcher: first at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and then at the UAB. At this point, Barcelona is the city where I have lived longest as an adult. I was first a research affiliate of the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability, becoming a full time member of a year ago. It has been a great experience.
Tell us a bit about your current investigation and where you want to go with it.
Right now I am working on the Reducing Housing Inequalities (ReHousIn) project, which explores the relationship between green transition projects and housing inequalities. The fieldwork will have a focus on the Sants-Montjuïc district in Barcelona. What I am trying to do now is develop a 9-country, mixed-method comparative study on the “green” redevelopment of urban brownfield sites in major European cities to better understand whether, and under what conditions, such land use transformations drive gentrification.
What do you most love about your work?
I love doing fieldwork: walking around the city, observing, making photographs, taking notes, and interviewing people to understand the complex, overlapping social and ecological relations that transform locales. I also like getting lost in archives and searching through the stacks at libraries. I haven’t taught much in recent years, and that is something I would like to get back too.
What are the most common difficulties you come across as a researcher?
Being a foreigner and conducting social research is a double-edged sword. Working between multiple languages and cultural contexts is challenging, something that people from the United States tend to be blissfully unaware of. Having some challenges with language or being viewed with initial distrust as an outsider may be hurdles sometimes, but being outside of one’s culture and country of origin offers opportunities to notice the idiosyncracies and things that are taken for granted, or overlooked, by people from that place. I find that once I display knowledge and genuine curiosity about a place, people are happy to open up to me and are curious about my observations.
What are the most significant insights you’ve gathered through your research at BCNUEJ?
As much as different scales of government are celebrating the increased production of new social housing in Spain, official protection (VPO) housing is expiring much faster than it is being produced, leading to a net loss in an already very low stock of social housing. Without a combination of more stringent renter protections, reigning in property speculation, and building new decommodified housing, we will not find a way out of the current housing crisis.
What have been your most important references, in terms of knowledge and practice?
A recent oral history project I did (with historian Javier Tébar) with retired trade unionist, former exile, and political prisoner from Barcelona, Carles Vallejo. Carles followed in the footsteps of his father as a radical trade unionist and anti-Francoist and played a key role in struggling for workers’ rights in Barcelona and beyond, while also finding himself in a fascinating cultural and intellectual milieu while in exile in France and Italy. Still today, he works from an office at a union headquarters leading an association of former political prisoners, walking by the police station on Via Laetana where he was tortured in the 1970s. This experience really impressed on me that the transition to democracy in Spain was recent, the key role of labor and neighborhood movements played in ushering in a new era, and that we need to learn more about such movements while they are still in living memory.
In what ways do you feel academia should improve?
The academic job market is precarious, particularly in Barcelona. Though I have been privileged to have full-time work as a researcher, jumping from one project to another and constantly thinking about the next step can be stressful and get in the way of fully seeing projects into fruition.
How much of an impact do you feel that your work, and that of other researchers, has on the ground?
I have written journal articles that I care a lot about, but no one has ever cited. I think my work has more social impact at the point when it involves community-based and participatory methods, or when I am working with activist organizations to provide them with data that will help them make claims and demands. Citations are great, but I am more interested in changing the world than simply observing it. For that reason, BCNUEJ is a great place to be, as it is an uniquely supportive environment that puts social justice and transformative research at its core.
