Cities at War
Cities at War

Author: Mary Kaldor

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0231546130

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Warfare in the twenty-first century goes well beyond conventional armies and nation-states. In a world of diffuse conflicts taking place across sprawling cities, war has become fragmented and uneven to match its settings. Yet the analysis of failed states, civil war, and state building rarely considers the city, rather than the country, as the terrain of battle. In Cities at War, Mary Kaldor and Saskia Sassen assemble an international team of scholars to examine cities as sites of contemporary warfare and insecurity. Reflecting Kaldor’s expertise on security cultures and Sassen’s perspective on cities and their geographies, they develop new insight into how cities and their residents encounter instability and conflict, as well as the ways in which urban forms provide possibilities for countering violence. Through a series of case studies of cities including Baghdad, Bogotá, Ciudad Juarez, Kabul, and Karachi, the book reveals the unequal distribution of insecurity as well as how urban capabilities might offer resistance and hope. Through analyses of how contemporary forms of identity, inequality, and segregation interact with the built environment, Cities at War explains why and how political violence has become increasingly urbanized. It also points toward the capacity of the city to shape a different kind of urban subjectivity that can serve as a foundation for a more peaceful and equitable future.

City Fights
City Fights

Author: John Antal

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 0307414760

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“Urban terrain will likely be the predominant battlefield of future wars.” As September 11 and Somalia proved, hostile forces are now engaging America differently, avoiding open combat with our enormous military, striking at our civic centers or dragging us into theirs. But urban warfare isn’t new; it is as old as the battle of Jericho. Now an incomparable collection written by esteemed military veterans—some currently serving, others civilian analysts—re-creates the last century’s most astonishing examples of this kind of fighting . . . and offers important lessons for our future. Here are fourteen riveting histories that are both invaluable teaching tools for security leaders and engrossing accounts for any reader. They include • William M. Waddell’s “Tai-Erh-Chuang, 1938: The Japanese Juggernaut Smashed”—How China defeated the Japanese in battle for the first time in three hundred and forty years, by using a city only as a pivot area and attacking the exposed flank and rear ranks of its unprepared enemy. • Eric M. Walters’s “Stalingrad, 1942: With Will, a Weapon, and a Watch”—The largest and longest-running urban fight of the twentieth century, in which the Red Army became the tortoise to the Germans’ hare, out-lasting its stronger foe. • Norm Cooling’s “Hue City, 1968: Winning a Battle While Losing a War”—The six-day fight for the cultural center of Vietnam revealed how the American military’s distrust of the media made it fail to expose the enemy’s mass executions and lose the all-important information war. And these eleven additional accounts: “Warsaw, 1944: Uprising in Eastern Europe” by Maj. David M. Toczek “Arnhem, 1944: Airborne Warfare in the City” by Lt. Col. G. A. Lofaro “Troyes, France, 1944: All Guns Blazing” By Col. Peter R. Mansoor “Budapest, 1944-45: Bloody Contest of Wills” by Col. Peter B. Zwack “Aschaffenburg, 1945: Cassino on the Main River” by Mark J. Reardon “Manila, 1945: City Fight in the Pacific” by Col. Kevin C. M. Benson “Berlin, 1945: Backs Against the Wall” by Maj. Mike Boden “Jaffa, 1948: Urban Combat in the Israeli War of Independence” by Benjamin Runkle “Seoul, 1950: City Fight after Inchon” by Maj. Thomas A. Kelley “Da Nang-Hoi An, A Tank Skirmish in Quang Nam Province” by Dennis C. Fresch “Evolution of Urban Combat Doctrine” by Mark J. Reardon From the 1944 Warsaw uprising that almost caused the complete destruction of Poland’s capital to the crucial, near-forgotten fight for Manila in 1945 . . . from snipers and shoulder-launched missiles to tunnels and tanks . . . all aspects of the most important urban conflicts are revealed in stunning detail. Compelling and cautionary, City Fights powerfully reminds us that, in our ever more urbanized and vulnerable world, “if a state loses its cities, it loses the war.”

War and the City
War and the City

Author: Tim Keogh

Publisher: Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh

Published: 2019-12

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9783506702784

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A crucial collection of new insights into a topic too often ignored in military history: the close interrelationship between cities and warfare throughout modern history. Scenes of Aleppo's war-torn streets may be shocking to the world's majority urban population, but such destruction would be familiar to urban dwellers as early as the third millennium BCE. While war is often narrated as a clash of empires, nation-states, and 'civilizations', cities have been the strategic targets of military campaigns, to be conquered, destroyed, or occupied. Cities have likewise been shaped by war, whether transformed for the purposes of military production, reconstructed after bombardment, or renewed as sites for remembering the costs of war. This conference volume draws on the latest research in military and urban history to understand the critical intersection between war and cities.

Cold War Cities
Cold War Cities

Author: Richard Brook

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-20

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1351330640

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This book examines the impact of the Cold War in a global context and focuses on city-scale reactions to the atomic warfare. It explores urbanism as a weapon to combat the dangers of the communist intrusion into the American territories and promote living standards for the urban poor in the US cities. 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.

Cities, War, and Terrorism
Cities, War, and Terrorism

Author: Stephen Graham

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0470753021

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Cities, War and Terrorism is the first book to look critically at the ways in which warfare, terrorism and counter-terrorism policies intersect in cities in the post Cold-War period. A path-breaking exploration of the intersections of war, terrorism and cities Argues that contemporary cities are the key strategic sites of geopolitical conflict Written by the world’s leading analysts of the intersections of urban space and military and terrorist violence Draws on cutting-edge research from geography, history, architecture, planning, sociology, critical theory, politics, international relations and military studies Provides up-to-date empirical analyses of specific conflicts, including 9/11, the “War on Terrorism”, the Balkan wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and urban antiglobalization battles Offers lay readers a sophisticated perspective on the violence that is engulfing our increasingly urbanised world

Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century
Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Anthony King

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-07-07

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1509543678

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Warfare has migrated into cities. From Mosul to Mumbai, Aleppo to Marawi, the major military battles of the twenty-first century have taken place in densely populated urban areas. Why has this happened? What are the defining characteristics of urban warfare today? What are its military and political implications? Leading sociologist Anthony King answers these critical questions through close analysis of recent urban battles and their historical antecedents. Exploring the changing typography and evolving tactics of the urban battlescape, he shows that although not all methods used in urban warfare are new, operations in cities today have become highly distinctive. Urban warfare has coalesced into gruelling micro-sieges, which extend from street level – and below – to the airspace high above the city, as combatants fight for individual buildings, streets and districts. At the same time, digitalized social media and information networks communicate these battles to global audiences across an urban archipelago, with these spectators often becoming active participants in the fight. A timely reminder of the costs and the horror of war and violence in cities, this book offers an invaluable interdisciplinary introduction to urban warfare in the new millennium for students of international security, urban studies and military science, as well as military professionals.

Confederate Cities
Confederate Cities

Author: Andrew L. Slap

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-11-17

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 022630020X

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When we talk about the Civil War, it is often with references to battles like Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run, and, perhaps most tellingly, the Battle of the Wilderness, which all took place in the countryside or in small towns. Part of the reason this picture has persisted is that few of the historians who have studied the war have been urban historians, even though cities hosted, enabled, and shaped southern society as much as in the North. The essays in Andrew Slap and Frank Towers s collection seek to shift the focus from the agrarian economy that undergirded the South to the cities that served as its political and administrative hubs. By demanding a more holistic reading of the South, this collection speaks to contemporary Civil War scholars and classrooms alike not least in providing surprisingly fresh perspectives on a well-studied war."

Three Cities After Hitler
Three Cities After Hitler

Author: Andrew Demshuk

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2021-09-21

Total Pages: 601

ISBN-13: 0822988577

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Three Cities after Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold “redemptive reconstruction” after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, three cities under three rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hitler—in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents’ spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them.