Domenic Vitiello: The Sanctuary City

In conjunction with the publication of Domenic Vitiello's new book, The Sanctuary City: Immigrant, Refugee, and Receiving Communities in Postindustrial Philadelphia, Vitiello is giving a public talk.

In The Sanctuary City, Domenic Vitiello argues that sanctuary means much more than the limited protections offered by city governments or churches sheltering immigrants from deportation. It is a wider set of protections and humanitarian support for vulnerable newcomers. Sanctuary cities are the places where immigrants and their allies create safe spaces to rebuild lives and communities, often through the work of social movements and community organizations or civil society.

Philadelphia has been an important center of sanctuary and reflects the growing diversity of American cities in recent decades. One result of this diversity is that sanctuary means different things for different immigrant, refugee, and receiving communities. Vitiello explores the migration, settlement, and local and transnational civil society of Central Americans, Southeast Asians, Liberians, Arabs, Mexicans, and their allies in the region across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Together, their experiences illuminate the diversity of immigrants and refugees in the United States and what is at stake for different people, and for all of us, in our immigration debates.

Thanks to the support of Dean Fritz Steiner and the Humanities+Urbanism+Design initiate at Penn, The Sanctuary City is available for free download as an ebook or on Amazon Kindle (with a free app). 

It is also available in paperback from the publisher, Cornell University Press, from Amazon, or other booksellers.

This event is co-sponsored by the Penn Institute for Urban Research and the Department of Urban Studies.

Domenic Vitiello is an Associate Professor of City Planning & Urban Studies.  He is the author of Engineering Philadelphia and coeditor of Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization in the United States.  Domenic and his students have worked with numerous community organizations in the Philadelphia region, southern Italy, and transnationally, helping design, implement, and evaluate programs and cooperative enterprises with community development corporations, migrant associations, immigrant and refugee resettlement agencies, and food and urban agriculture organizations.  He has served on the boards of the African Cultural Alliance of North America, JUNTOS/Casa de los Soles, Philadelphia Orchard Project, Society for American City and Regional Planning History, and presently the International Planning History Society.  Domenic is Editor for the Americas for the world's leading urban history journal Urban History.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu to let us know what you need. Please note, we require at least 48 hours’ notice. If you register within 48 hours of this event, we won’t be able to secure the appropriate accommodations.