Session 2.20. Cities under Attack: Architecture, Infrastructure, and the Evolution of Urban Defence from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century

Throughout the 20th century, new forms of warfare profoundly changed the relationship between military technology, architecture, and the city. Strategic bombing and new, powerful weapons forced architects, engineers, and military planners to think of urban space as a battlefield. This led to new materials, techniques, and defences such as shelters, bunkers, casemates, flaktowers (flaktürme), and underground facilities. The distinctive feature of these types lies in their dichotomous nature – “visible or hidden” – within the urban fabric: in some cases, they reshape entire sections of the urban landscape; in others, instead, they are hidden deep underground, reinforcing the ambivalence between “inside and outside”.
From the Second World War onwards, cities became primary targets of military operations. Urban defence systems assumed a dual role: they functioned both as military installations and as instruments of civil protection. Existing infrastructure (including metro systems, tunnels, basements, and public buildings) was frequently adapted to provide temporary refuge at the outset of a conflict. But if the war continues and the threat of attack is constant, it becomes necessary to relocate what is on the surface, underground or in permanently defended areas: this is the architecture of urban shelters, underground factories, subterranean bunkers, and, in the most complex cases, atomic urbanism, with the underground cities planned or built during the Cold War. “Atomic urbanism”, in particular, has given rise to a process that has created a clearly defined architectural and urban condition, in which the subterranean has become a strategic domain of habitation, production, and governance. The threat of nuclear war led to the construction of full-functioning underground facilities, designed to ensure the continuity of government and the survival of the population in the event of a nuclear attack. Today, renewed geopolitical tensions and the re-emergence of large-scale warfare have brought questions of urban defence back to the forefront.
The session aims to investigate the genesis, evolution, and transformation of urban defence architectures and infrastructures, also in light of the most recent conflicts – characterised by the emergence of drones and hypersonic missiles – and to examine how changing military technologies continue to reshape urban form and defensive space.

Coordinators: Giusi Ciotoli, Marianna Charitonidou, Marco Falsetti, Raffaele Pontrandolfi
Contact: ciotoligiusi@gmail.com