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.