Domenic Vitiello is Associate Professor of City Planning and Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
During the community development movement, which arose in the 1960s in large part in response to years of disruption spurred by government-imposed urban renewal, Philadelphia became an important center of activism and institutions devoted to locally-based improvement programs. Community development programs sought to provide greater control over the future of neighborhoods at a time when ...
Community development corporations (CDCs), initially a federal initiative intended to direct resources to beleaguered neighborhoods where local activists would take the lead in identifying and solving their most pressing problems, first formed in Philadelphia at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. As federal funding for such efforts dried up in the Reagan era, ...
Immigration into Greater Philadelphia throughout the twentieth century dramatically altered economic, social, and political life in both the city and suburbs. While slowed by the immigration restriction acts of the 1920s, immigration into Philadelphia increased after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and accelerated even more after the ...
Greater Philadelphia has had close links to Liberia in many eras. Free blacks and abolitionists from the region helped colonize and underwrite the nation of Liberia’s founding in the early nineteenth century. Yet Philadelphia and Liberia had little connection between the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth century. Most Liberian settlement in the region resulted from the Liberian civil war of ...
Greater Philadelphia’s economic ties to Mexico date to the era of European colonization. However, substantial Mexican immigration to the region started only in the 1970s, in Chester County’s mushroom growing towns, and in the 1990s in Philadelphia. Still, Mexicans became the region’s second-largest immigrant group in the early twenty-first century and were the largest immigrant ...
Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy