Stanley White Lecture: Francesca Ammon, “Urban Renewal through Historic Preservation: Mid-Century Housing in Philadelphia’s Society Hill Neighborhood”

Francesca Russello Ammon, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, is a cultural historian of urban planning and the built environment. Her teaching and research focus on the changing spaces of American cities, from World War II to the present. She grounds her interdisciplinary approach to this subject in the premise that the landscape materializes social relations, cultural values, and political and economic processes. Prof. Ammon is particularly interested in the history of urban revitalization, with an emphasis on urban renewal; digital public history as a tool for community-based research and engagement; and the ways that visual culture has shaped understanding of what cities are, have been, and should be.

Prof. Ammon is a member of the standing faculty of the Departments of City and Regional Planning and Historic Preservation. She also directs the Initiative in the History of the Built Environment. She is an associated faculty member of the History Department and the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies; an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Experimental Ethnography; and a faculty fellow of the Penn Institute for Urban Research. Previously, she has been a colloquium member of the Penn/Mellon Foundation Humanities + Urbanism + Design Initiative and an Andrew W. Mellon DH Fellow at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. Beyond Penn, she serves as president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, co-vice chair of the board of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, and a member of the board of the Association for Public Art.