A City In War

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.

Cities have evolved from small urban systems designed to withstand attack from without. The demands of the modern city have shifted the focus to the dangers of internal violence. War and the City analyses the role of cities in war and the effects of war on cities.

In an increasingly urbanized world, urban terrain has become a greater factor in military operations. Simultaneously, advances in military technology have given military forces sharply increased capabilities. The conflict comes from how urban terrain can negate or degrade many of those increased capabilities. What happens when advanced weapons are used in a close-range urban fight with an abundance of cover? Storming the City explores these issues by analyzing the performance of the US Army and US Marine Corps in urban combat in four major urban battles of the mid-twentieth century (Aachen 1944, Manila 1945, Seoul 1950, and Hue 1968). Alec Wahlman assesses each battle using a similar framework of capability categories, and separate chapters address urban warfare in American military thought. In the four battles, across a wide range of conditions, American forces were ultimately successful in capturing each city because of two factors: transferable competence and battlefield adaptation. The preparations US forces made for warfare writ large proved generally applicable to urban warfare. Battlefield adaptation, a strong suit of American forces, filled in where those overall preparations for combat needed fine tuning. From World War Two to Vietnam, however, there was a gradual reduction in tactical performance in the four battles.

Gotham at War: New York City, 1860-1865 is a concise, highly readable account of New York City during the greatest internal crisis in American history. A growing metropolis that was by far America's biggest and most powerful city, New York played a major role in the Civil War, mobilizing an enthusiastic though poorly trained military force during the first month of the war that helped protect Washington, D.C., from Confederate capture. Urban historian Edward K. Spann provides insights on both the varied ways in which the war affected the city and the ways in which the city's people and industry influenced the divided nation. Gotham at War includes observations regarding political, racial, ethnic, and economic aspects of this wartime society and shows how New York served as a center for manpower, military supplies, and shipbuilding, and for assisting sick and wounded soldiers. The efforts of its great Republican newspapers, local leaders such as William E. Dodge and Mayor George Opdyke, women, African-Americans, New Englanders, and the Irish and Germans of New York are all explored. The most southern of the northern cities, New York became a center for many citizens who opposed th

From John Strausbaugh, author of City of Sedition and The Village, comes the definitive history of Gotham during the World War II era. New York City during World War II wasn't just a place of servicemen, politicians, heroes, G.I. Joes and Rosie the Riveters, but also of quislings and saboteurs; of Nazi, Fascist, and Communist sympathizers; of war protesters and conscientious objectors; of gangsters and hookers and profiteers; of latchkey kids and bobby-soxers, poets and painters, atomic scientists and atomic spies. While the war launched and leveled nations, spurred economic growth, and saw the rise and fall of global Fascism, New York City would eventually emerge as the new capital of the world. From the Gilded Age to VJ-Day, an array of fascinating New Yorkers rose to fame, from Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes to Joe Louis, to Robert Moses and Joe DiMaggio. In Victory City, John Strausbaugh returns to tell the story of New York City's war years with the same richness, depth, and nuance he brought to his previous books, City of Sedition and The Village, providing readers with a groundbreaking new look into the greatest city on earth during the most transformative -- and costliest -- war in human history.

“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.”

Sometimes, the maelstrom of a crisis can be captured in a single image. The image of the mundane, barely noticeable movement of an urban dweller as they go about their everyday life. Athens and the War on Public Space commences from images just like this one, collected over a two-year period of research (2012-2014) in Athens during a time of severe financial and political crisis. For the author-curators of this volume, public space became a light-sensitive surface upon which they could begin to map the material imprints of the most structural and violent characteristics of the crisis, and their research spread in different directions, tracking the role of infrastructure and the shifts the financial crisis brought about upon built environments, the violent manifestations of the official anti-migrant policy, the rise of racism, the imposition of the emergency upon public space, and the phenomenology of mass transit.

His enemies are the most dangerous people in the world. So are his friends . . . The sole heir to a media empire, Rail Black is larger than life, richer than almost anyone, and living in opulent seclusion in Beverly Hills. His "curse" is a need for excitement coupled with an oversized sense of justice, which impelled him into Delta Force. Now he helps people without options—and billionaires play by different rules. Caught in gridlock on the world's busiest freeway, Rail comes to the rescue of a naked woman escaping from a van. But Kimberly York is no ordinary victim, and Rail has invited violence into his life . . . again—as a sudden, shocking murder pulls him into a decades-old international conspiracy of greed, rare treasures, and human depravity. But no matter how powerful and well-armed, his adversaries can't escape Rail's wrath as he races into the darkness surrounding the American government's most astonishing secret: the City of War.

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.