Cold War Cities: Politics, Culture and Atomic Urbanism, 1945–1965
About this ebook
The Cold War saw the birth of ‘atomic urbanisation’, central to which were planning, politics and cultural practices of the newly emerged cities. This book examines cities in the Arctic, Europe, Asia and Australasia in detail to reveal how military, political, resistance and cultural practices impacted on the spaces of everyday life. It probes questions of city planning and development, such as: How did the threat of nuclear war affect planning at a range of geographic scales? What were the patterns of the built environment, architectural forms and material aesthetics of atomic urbanism in difference places? And, how did the ‘Bomb’ manifest itself in civic governance, popular media, arts and academia? Understanding the age of atomic urbanism can help meet the contemporary challenges that cities are facing.
The book delivers a new dimension to the existing debates of the ideologically opposed superpowers and their allies, their hemispherical geopolitical struggles, and helps to understand decades of growth post-Second World War by foregrounding the Cold War.
About the author
Richard Brook is an architect and Reader at Manchester School of Architecture, UK. He is author of Manchester Modern (2017). He has talked, written, curated and published extensively on post-war British architecture. He researches the policies of planning and regulation and their impact on urban form.
Martin Dodge is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester, UK. His major research interests are currently visual culture and the politics of mapping, and infrastructural geographies read through historical and archival perspectives.
Jonathan Hogg is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has conducted extensive research on the cultural and social history of the British nuclear state. His recent publications offer a new interpretation of nuclear culture and the Cold War by tracing the tensions between 'official' and 'unofficial' nuclear narratives.
