Francesca Russello Ammon is Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at PennDesign. She studies the history of the built environment, focusing on the social, material, and cultural life of twentieth-century cities. Professor Ammon is particularly interested in the ways that visual culture informs planning and design; the dynamic relationships between cities, technology, and nature; the politics of place and space; and the means and outcomes of urban revitalization. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Planning History, Journal of Urban History, and Technology & Culture, among other venues. Her book, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in spring 2016. This project is the first history of the bulldozer and its transformation from military weapon to essential tool for creating the post-World War II American landscape.
 
Professor Ammon is currently researching the intertwined histories of urban renewal and historic preservation in postwar North America. She aims to use digital mapping tools to aggregate, analyze, and disseminate historical documents from these development processes at the scale of the individual site. Photographs, plans, oral histories, and the contemporary built environment itself are all central to this work.

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