Cold War Cities

The Cold War left indelible traces on the city, where polarities on the global stage crystallized and intersected with political and social dynamics predating and bypassing the Blocs. This collection taps into the rich fabric of memories, histories and cultural interactions of thirteen cities worldwide and the lived experience of urban communities during the long Cold War: activated and mobilized by atomic technologies, taking tourist photographs, attending commercial fairs, enjoying the cinema and the ballet, singing in choirs, paying respect in local cemeteries, visiting museums, and responding to town councils, unions and the local press. Literature, film, photography, the press, the monument, the cemetery, the factory, the ruin, the archive and the natural ecosystem are some of the key frameworks of cultural production elucidated here with a view to countering and exploding received myths about the Cold War.

Katia Pizzi is Director of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she is also Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies. She obtained degrees from the Universities of Bologna, Kent and Cambridge and previously lectured in Italian at the University of Kent. Pizzi has published extensively on modern literary culture, memory and the history of cities, especially Trieste. Marjatta Hietala is Emerita Professor of General History at the University of Tampere and Honorary Doctor at the University of Stockholm. She has been a professor at the University of Helsinki, the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Minnesota. From 2010 to 2015 she was the president of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS)/Comité international des sciences historiques (CISH). She has written comparative history on the infrastructure of cities, the diffusion of innovations and creative cities, mostly in Europe.