Although the decades following World War II were marked by rapid growth and construction in the United States, those years were also a time of large-scale destruction.

In order to clear space for new suburban tract housing, interstate highways, and urban renewal projects, wrecking companies demolished buildings and earth-moving contractors leveled land at an unprecedented rate and scale. In her book "Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape," Francesca Russello Ammon explores how postwar America came to equate this destruction with progress.

Francesca Russello Ammon is assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania.  She studies the history of the built environment, focusing on the social, material, and cultural life of cities in the twentieth-century U.S.  She lives in Philadelphia.

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