Domenic Vitiello
Biography
B.A., Wesleyan University
M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Domenic Vitiello helps lead the Community and Economic Development concentration. He teaches courses on strategic planning, food systems, immigration, and urban history. He also teaches for Penn's Urban Studies Program (http://urban.ssc.upenn.edu/) and is a senior fellow of Penn's Center for Public Health Initiatives (http://www.cphi.upenn.edu/).
Trained as a planner and historian, Domenic's research focuses on community and economic development institutions, migration, and urban agriculture. His historical scholarship includes books on the economic development and decline of Philadelphia. He has published articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning History, Journal of Urban History, Planning Perspectives, and Progressive Planning, as well as book chapters on community development and planning history.
As a practitioner, Domenic has worked with public, private, and third sector organizations in community development and food system planning. He has served as founding president of the Philadelphia Orchard Project (http://www.phillyorchards.org/); board chair of JUNTOS/Casa de los Soles (http://www.vamosjuntos.org/) and on the boards of the African Cultural Alliance of North America (http://www.acanaus.org/) and the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (http://www.dcp.ufl.edu/sacrph/).
Through Domenic's courses, MCP students have planned refugee housing systems, urban farming enterprises, and transnational development projects; helped the City of Philadelphia develop food policy; and produced research and reports for a wide variety of community development organizations. He has received the Michael B. Katz Award for Excellence in Teaching in Urban Studies and the G. Holmes Perkins Award for Distinguished Teaching in the School of Design.
Work/Research
Domenic's current research examines community development in immigrant communities and the connections between urban agriculture and food security. He is authoring a book comparing community development in the Puerto Rican, Chinese, Southeast Asian, Korean, African, Arab, and Mexican communities of Philadelphia. He helps lead the Philadelphia Migration Project, a research initiative with colleagues in Penn's Schools of Arts and Sciences, Social Policy, and Education, supported by the Penn Institute for Urban Research (http://www.history.upenn.edu/philamigrationproject/).
During the summer, Domenic has been working with colleagues and students to quantify the production and trace the distribution of food from community gardens and farms in Philadelphia, Camden and Trenton NJ, and Chicago. He is leading two national studies, one on the ways in which food banks connect to urban and regional agriculture, and the other on urban agriculture among immigrants. This work, much of it supported by the Penn Center for Public Health Initiatives and U.S. Department of Agriculture, aims to understand the economic and health impacts of formal and informal urban agriculture. Please visit: https://sites.google.com/site/urbanagriculturephiladelphia/ for Domenic's research reports, student projects, policy papers, and related work on urban agriculture in the Greater Philadelphia region.
Publications
Selected Publications
Thomas Carter and Domenic Vitiello, "Immigrants, Refugees and Housing: The North American Experience," in Immigrant Geographies of North American Cities, Carlos Teixeira, Wei Li and Audrey Kobayashi, eds. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2011), Chapter 5.
Domenic Vitiello with George E. Thomas, The Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the City It Made (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Domenic Vitiello, "The Migrant Metropolis and American Planning," Journal of the American Planning Association Centennial Issue, vol.75, no.2 (March 2009), 245-255.
Domenic Vitiello and Michael Nairn, "Everyday Urban Agriculture: From Community Gardening to Community Food Security," Harvard Design Magazine no.30, vol.2 (Fall/Winter 2009).
Domenic Vitiello, "Machine Building and City Building: The Planning and Politics of Urban and Industrial Restructuring in Philadelphia, 1891-1928," Journal of Urban History vol.34, no.3 (March 2008).
Courses
Professor Vitiello teaches the Community and Economic Development Practicum, Metropolitan Food Systems, and The Immigrant City.
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