Faculty Fellow

Francesca Ammon

Image of Francesca Ammon
Faculty Fellow

Francesca Ammon

Associate Professor
Organization(s)
Current Themes

Francesca Russello Ammon is Associate Arofessor of City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. A social and cultural historian of the post-World War II built environment, she is the author of Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape, winner of the Lewis Mumford Prize for the best book in American planning history. She is currently writing a history of postwar preservation and urban renewal based upon the Philadelphia neighborhood of Society Hill. She has also published two digital humanities projects. Preserving Society Hill (https://preservingsocietyhill.org/) integrates photographs, oral histories, and architectural data into narratives of urban change. Sunset Over Sunset (https://preservingsocietyhill.org/) uses Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles photographs to illuminate examples of everyday, vernacular redevelopment. Ammon serves as President-Elect of the Society for American City & Regional Planning History and is a member of the boards of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia and the Public Art Association.