Disaster and decentralization: American cities and the Cold War

Abstract

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also ushered in an era of anxious urbanism in the USA. Despite its status as the inheritor of European modernism, the champion of capitalism and the centre of a rapidly globalizing popular culture, America still struggled with the contradictory results of urbanization and military supremacy. In this essay, I bring political and urban geography together in a study of American cities and their role as strategic environments in the developing geopolitical conflict of the Cold War. New technologies such as the atomic bomb prompted a diverse wave of lurid disaster scenarios, as well as subsequent scientific attempts to contain, control and reduce risk and danger. Whether considered or far-fetched, these schemes were profoundly geographical, and borrowed much from the logic of postwar social science. In subtle yet pervasive ways they contributed to the prominent discourses of urban decline and suburbanization, and thus to the changing material fabric of postwar American cities.

Researching Militarized Landscapes: A Literature Review on War and the Militarization of the Environment

“…On landscape and war in the non-Western world, see Gordon (2004), Levine (2004), Shapiro (2001), Taylor (2007), Vayda (1974) and Weinberg (1991). On war, architecture, and urban landscapes, see 126 C. Pearson Bevan (2006), Farish (2003, Lutz (2001) and Weizman (2007). Aben and Rouzier (2001) and Bateman and Riley (1987) focus mainly on defence and urban geographies and economies.…”

Military Geography

“…Urban morphologies at this time reflect ideas about the capacities for the maintenance of the nation-state under nuclear attack, particularly ideas about settlement dispersal (Farish, 2003). First, we see the continuity of engagement between geography as a discipline informing military strategies and planning.…”

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“…At the end of the Second World War, Australia, as with other Allied nations whose infrastructure remained largely intact if strained by the needs of returned servicemen, experienced heightened levels of technological innovation, nationalism and immigration. Optimism produced in these conditions joined anxiety fed by the cold war, and particularly by urban panic in the age of the atomic bomb (Farish, 2003), to motivate suburban dreams of refuge. Writing in the middle of the insecurities of war, between stints as Prime Minister, Menzies (1992Menzies ( [1942, pp.…”