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During the Cold War military and civil defence bunkers were an evocative materialisation of deadly military stand-off. They were also a symbol of a deeply affective, pervasive anxiety about the prospect of world-destroying nuclear war. But following the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 these sites were swiftly abandoned, and exposed to both material and semantic ruination. This volume investigates the uses and meanings now projected onto these seeming blank, derelict spaces. It explores how engagements with bunker ruins provide fertile ground for the study of improvised meaning making, place-attachment, hobby practices, social materiality and trauma studies. With its commentators ranging across the arts and humanities and the social sciences, this multi-disciplinary collection sets a concern with the phenomenological qualities of these places as contemporary ruins – and of their strange affective affordances – alongside scholarship examining how these places embody, and/or otherwise connect with their Cold War originations and purpose both materially and through memory and trauma. Each contribution reflexively considers the process of engaging with these places – and whether via the archive or direct sensory immersion. In doing so the book broadens the bunker’s contemporary signification and contributes to theoretically informed analysis of ruination, place attachment, meaning making, and material culture.
Mixing first-person narrative of his travels around the U.S. in search of Cold War sites and objects with an extensive accumulation of historical facts, the author explores Cold War America's obsession with protecting itself from the nuclear threat through various forms of architectural structures, such as missile silos, fallout shelters, nuclear waste dumps, monoliths like the windowless PacBell building in Los Angeles, and countless motels and diners named "Atomic."
This book explores how and why the dangerous yet seemingly durable and stable world order forged during the Cold War collapsed in 1989, and how a new order was improvised out of its ruins. It is an unusual blend of memoir and scholarship that takes us back to the years when the East-West conflict came to a sudden end and a new world was born. In this book, senior officials and opinion leaders from the United States, Russia, Western and Eastern Europe who were directly involved in the decisions of that time describe their considerations, concerns, and pressures. They are joined by scholars who have been able to draw on newly declassified archival sources to revisit this challenging period.
Since prehistory, bunkers have been built as protection from cataclysmic social and environmental forces, and as places of power and transformation. Today, the bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears- from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it doesn't take long to start seeing bunkers everywhere. In Bunker, acclaimed urban explorer and cultural geographer Bradley Garrett explores the global and rapidly growing movement of 'prepping' for social and environmental collapse, or 'Doomsday'. From the 'dread merchants' hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is a brilliant, original and never less than deeply disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now, an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings it into new, sharp focus. The bunker, Garrett shows, is all around us, in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he shows, it's in our minds.
Featuring 170 striking photographs, Abandoned Cold War Places is a fascinating visual history of the relics left behind by both sides from the late 1940s to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Rooted in place, slipping between worlds - a rich collection of unnerving ghosts and sinister histories. 'An impressive line-up of established and emerging names.' The Sunday Times 'These eerie, unsettling stories are guaranteed to send shivers down your spine.' Daily Express Eight authors were given the freedom of their chosen English Heritage site, from medieval castles to a Cold War nuclear bunker. Immersed in the past and chilled by rumours of hauntings, they channelled their darker imaginings into a series of extraordinary new ghost stories. 'Subtly evocative of human relations loss, grief, or the fear of loneliness.' TLS 'A satisfying and spooky read.' Sun Also includes a gazetteer of English Heritage properties which are said to be haunted.
"...explores the fascinating subject of Spokane's backyard bunkers, basement hideaways, and public fallout shelters..." --Cover.
Cryptic Concrete explores bunkered sites in Cold War Germany in order to understand the inner workings of the Cold War state. A scholarly work that suggests a reassessment of the history of geo- and bio-politics Attempts to understand the material architecture that was designed to protect and take life in nuclear war Zooms in on two types of structures - the nuclear bunker and the atomic missile silo Analyzes a broad range of sources through the lens of critical theory and argues for an appreciation of the two subterranean structures’ complementary nature
This book explores aspects of the social and cultural history of nuclear Britain in the Cold War era (1945–1991) and contributes to a more multivalent exploration of the consequences of nuclear choices which are too often left unacknowledged by historians of post-war Britain. In the years after 1945, the British government mobilised money, scientific knowledge, people and military–industrial capacity to create both an independent nuclear deterrent and the generation of electricity through nuclear reactors. This expensive and vast ‘technopolitical’ project, mostly top-secret and run by small sub-committees within government, was central to broader Cold War strategy and policy. Recent attempts to map the resulting social and cultural history of these military–industrial policy decisions suggest that nuclear mobilisation had far-reaching consequences for British life. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary British History.
Brings together architecture, fiction, film, and visual art to reconnect the imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips. Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today’s cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific predictions: flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical reasoning on the other. In a digital age when the real and the fantastic coexist as near equals, it is especially important to know how these two forces are entangled, and how together they may help us best conceive of cities yet to come. Exploring a breathtaking range of imagined cities—submerged, floating, flying, vertical, underground, ruined, and salvaged—Future Cities teases out the links between speculation and reality, arguing that there is no clear separation between the two. In the Netherlands, prototype floating cities are already being built; Dubai’s recent skyscrapers resemble those of science-fiction cities of the past; while makeshift settlements built by the urban poor in the developing world are already like the dystopian cities of cyberpunk.