Francesca Russello Ammon is a cultural historian of urban planning and the built environment. Her research focuses on the social, material, and cultural life of American cities, from World War II to the present. She is especially interested in the history of urban revitalization, with a particular emphasis on urban renewal; 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. 

Professor Ammon is the author of Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (Yale University Press, 2016), recipient of the 2017 Lewis Mumford Prize for the best book on American city and regional planning history. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Planning History, the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Technology & Culture, Preservation Education and Research, Change over Time, and the archive of the Historic American Buildings Survey.

In her current research, she is studying the relationships between urban renewal, rehabilitation, and historic preservation. Through the digital public humanities project Preserving Society Hill, she aggregates, digitizes, and spatializes a variety of sources related to the urban renewal  and historic preservation of Philadelphia's Society Hill neighborhood, including: planning and architectural data, historical photographs, and an archive of nearly 90 oral history interviews and memoirs. This project was developed in collaboration with Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

Sunset Over Sunset, a digital urban humanities project developed in collaboration with Brian Goldstein and Garrett Dash Nelson, launched in 2024. The website uses Ed Ruscha’s repeated street view photographs of Los Angeles to uncover stories of everyday change and vernacular redevelopment. This project was developed in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute and with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Professor Ammon is Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches courses on urban and planning history, historical documentation, planning and preservation research, cities and sound, and photography and the city. She also directs the Initiative in the History of the Built Environment and is an associated faculty member of the History Department, an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE), and a Faculty Fellow of the Penn Institute for Urban Research.

Outside the classroom, Professor Ammon is President Elect of the Society for American City & Regional Planning History (SACRPH), Vice President of the Board of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, and a member of the Board of the Association for Public Art.

Professor Ammon’s research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Society of Architectural Historians, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, Ambrose Monell Foundation, Business History Conference, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Before joining Penn, Professor Ammon was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She previously earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University, her Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) at Yale School of Architecture, and her B.S.E. in civil engineering at Princeton University.