Francesca Ammon
Francesca Russello Ammon is associate professor 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-WWII 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. Her research also leverages the digital humanities to integrate photographs, oral histories, and other historical records into narratives of urban change through her website Preserving Society Hill and an NEH-funded exploration of Ed Ruscha’s photographic documentation of Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard.
Session
By 1965, nearly 800 American cities sought to spur revitalization through the federal policy of urban renewal. Typically this took the form of large-scale demolition, destroying countless buildings and displacing over a million residents and 100,000 businesses in the process. The city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was at the forefront of a more conservationist approach to renewal that incorporated rehabilitation and restoration as well. In its landmark Society Hill project, for example, the city married relatively selective clearance with the restoration of existing colonial-era rowhouses and the in-fill construction of new, contemporary designs. As in the case of clearance, however, these planning and preservation interventions of the 1950s–70s still dramatically transformed both the physical and social character of the built environment. In the process, they also helped define the myriad meanings of preservation itself. This talk will examine the urban renewal process in a series of site-based examples throughout the Society Hill neighborhood. The medium for this examination will be Preserving Society Hill (https://preservingsocietyhill.org), an ongoing public history project that leverages the data aggregation, organization, and mapping capacities of the digital humanities to illuminate the stories of individual residents and properties.