Domenic Vitiello

Domenic Vitiello is an urban historian and planner whose research, teaching, and practice focus on community development in migrant communities, urban agriculture, and urban history. He has taught in Urban Studies at Penn since 2000 and served on the faculty in City Planning and Urban Studies since 2007.

Migrant communities have been the greatest focus of Domenic’s research and practice. Since the 2000s, he and his students have supported the work of numerous migrant- and diaspora-led organizations in the United States, Mexico, Africa, and more recently in Italy. His book, The Sanctuary City: Immigrant, Refugee, and Receiving Communities in Postindustrial Philadelphia (Cornell, 2022), compares the experiences of people from Central America, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Southwest Asia, and Mexico. It won the Urban History Association’s Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book on North American Urban History. The book is open access, free to download as an ebook or pdf.

Domenic is also co-editor, with Thomas Sugrue, of Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization in the United States (Penn, 2017) and has authored over 30 articles and book chapters. His cv can be found below; and you can read his essays on immigration and community development in the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.

Currently, Domenic’s research and practice with colleagues and students includes long-term collaboration with migrant-led organizations in Sicily that support community development in North and West Africa, in partnership with the intermediary organization Diasporas for Peace (DPP). In 2024-27, these and other partners are engaged in community-driven participatory action research focused on realizing various human rights in Palermo, Sicily’s North and West African, South and Southeast Asian communities.

Domenic and colleagues also remain involved, since 2010, in collaborative research with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (New York), Asian Americans United (Philadelphia), Chinese Progressive Association (Boston), and other partners in support of the preservation of the downtown East Coast U.S. Chinatowns that survive. This work inspired Domenic and his former students to investigate the long history of U.S. and Canadian Chinatowns’ destruction by redevelopment projects, and to study property ownership and neighborhood change in twenty-first century Boston, D.C. and Philadelphia Chinatowns.

In another current project, Domenic is co-authoring a book with Penn Urban Studies professor Michael Nairn on the social impacts of community gardening, based on their longstanding work in three U.S. cities. Since the mid-2000s, Domenic has advised city governments and urban agriculture support organizations on food policy and programs in cities across North America. He was founding president of the Philadelphia Orchard Project and has collaborated on research with food and agriculture organizations including the Camden City Garden Club, Neighborspace in Chicago, Philadelphia County Agricultural Extension, and Share Food Program. Some of this work is synthesized in a recent open-access article and chapter on valuing urban agriculture in Chicago and Philadelphia. 

Domenic also remains engaged in the global community of urban and planning history scholars, as Editor for the Americas since 2019 for the journal Urban History (Cambridge University Press) and member of the boards of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History and the International Planning History Society. He has authored award-winning articles on urban and planning history, including “Machine Building and City Building: Urban Planning and Industrial Restructuring in Philadelphia, 1894-1928”; “Monopolizing the Metropolis: Gilded Age Power Brokers and Power in American Urbanization”; and “The Hidden History of Food System Planning,” with Catherine Brinkley. Domenic’s earlier scholarship on the history of urban economic development also includes two books, Engineering Philadelphia (Cornell, 2013) and The Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the City It Made (Penn, 2010).