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Environmental History, the Second World War, and Urban Resilience

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Book cover The Resilient City in World War II

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History ((PSWEH))

Abstract

In public imagination World War II was waged above all by omnipotent states and armies. However, no other war in human history has been waged with such ferocity and devastation done to cities, against cities, and in cities. Warfare between the major powers depended completely on the R&D and mass production of industrial products in towns and cities. Consequently, World War II was the first war in which military strategies systematically aimed at and succeeded in devastating towns and cities and killing civilian populations on a massive scale. This essay discusses urban environmental histories of World War II in terms of three concepts, that is, shock city, model city, and resilient city.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Aarni Krohn, “Kruununhaka – kotikaupunkini,” in Paavo Haavikko, ed., Helsinki , kaupunki graniittisilla juurilla, avaralla niemellä (Helsinki: Art House, 2000), 203.

  2. 2.

    For Winter War, see Pasi Tuunainen, Finnish Military Effectiveness in the Winter War, 1939–1940 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

  3. 3.

    For a rare global approach to the history of World War II, see Evan Mawdsley, World War II: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  4. 4.

    John Sheail, “‘Never Again’: Pollution and the Management of Watercourses in Post-war Britain,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 1 (January 1998): 117–133; Rauno Lahtinen and Timo Vuorisalo, “‘It’s war and everyone can do as they please!’ An environmental history of a Finnish city in wartime,” Environmental History 9, no. 4 (October 2004): 675–696.

  5. 5.

    Roger Lotchin, “Turning the Good War Bad?: Historians and the World War II Urban Homefront,” Journal of Urban History 34, no. 1 (November 2007): 33, 174–175.

  6. 6.

    Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  7. 7.

    Simo Laakkonen, “Warfare: An Ecological Alternative for Peacetime? The Indirect Impacts of the Second World War on the Finnish Environment,” in Edmund Russell and Richard Tucker, eds., Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Historical Studies in War and the Environment (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004), 175–194.

  8. 8.

    Kenneth Hewitt, “Place annihilation,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73, no. 2 (June 1983): 257–284; Jörg Friedrich, The Fire : The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945. Translated by Allison Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

  9. 9.

    James Burke, “Former British POW Describes the Horror of the Dresden Fire-Bombing,” Vision Times, March 26, 2015. Also US prisoners of war testified the bombing. Kurt Vonnegut’s well-known anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) was based on his experiences of the same bombing that he survived in the slaughterhouse.

  10. 10.

    The concept adopted by Harold Platt (Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) is presented in a heavily modified format here.

  11. 11.

    Imperial War Museums, Worker and War-Front Magazine, Issue Number 12. Production date of the original news reel is 1945-01, http://film.iwmcollections.org.uk/record/index/5161 (accessed August 21, 2013).

  12. 12.

    Post-war planning and reconstruction in Britain: Hull Regional Survey, Ministry of Works, 1943. Imperial War Museum. For other reconstruction plans see Peter J. Larkham and Keith D. Lilley, Planning the ‘City of Tomorrow ’. British reconstruction planning, 1939–1952: An annotated bibliography (Pickering: Inch Books, 2001); Andrew Jenks, “Model City USA: The Environmental Cost of Victory in World War II and the Cold War,” Environmental History 12, no. 3 (July 2007): 552–77; Richard Hornsey, “‘Everything is made of atoms’: the reprogramming of space and time in post-war London,” Journal of Historical Geography 34, Issue 1 (January 2008): 94–117; Peter Shapely, “Governance in the Post-War City: Historical Reflections on Public-Private Partnerships in the UK,” International Journal of Urban & Regional Research 37, no. 4 (July 2013): 1288–1304.

  13. 13.

    Raymond Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871–1971 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 84, 122; John Sheail, “War and the development of nature conservation in Britain,” Journal of Environmental Management 44, no. 3 (July 1995): 267–283.

  14. 14.

    Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), 83. Please note that in our text the term “social structure” is substituted for “economic structure.”

  15. 15.

    The following books are the most important previous edited volumes on the history of the resilient city: Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, eds., The Resilient City. How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). This book provides a rich historical overview of cities and their inhabitants that have faced natural and man-made disasters over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also discusses devastation wrought on Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo during World War II. The second book, Howard Chernick, ed., The Resilient City: The Economic Impact of 9/11 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005), discusses more recent urban crisis. See also Michael Burayidi, ed., City Resilience , 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 2015).

  16. 16.

    For different definitions of resilience see Fikret Berkes, Johan Colding, Carl Folke, eds., Navigating Social-ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  17. 17.

    Philip Ziegler’s popular account London at War 1939–1945 (London: Pimlico, 2002) and Cynthia Simmons, Nina Perlina, Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002) focus on everyday wartime life. Otherwise similar studies seem to focus on the Great War. See e.g., Jay Winter, Jean-Louis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  18. 18.

    Roger Lotchin, “Turning the Good War Bad? Historians and the World War II Urban Homefront,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 2 (January 2007): 176.

  19. 19.

    Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (March 1990): 1087–1106.

  20. 20.

    W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955); Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

  21. 21.

    Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Ronny Pettersson, ed., Skogshistorisk forskning i Europa och Nordamerika. Vad är skogshistoria, hur har den skrivits och varför? (Stockholm: Kungl. Skogs- och Lantbruksakademien, 1999).

  22. 22.

    For example, Richard P. Tucker and John F. Richards, eds., World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987).

  23. 23.

    James E. Krier and Edmund Ursin, Pollution and Policy: A Case Essay on California and Federal Experience with Motor Vehicle Air Pollution, 1940–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Martin V. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870–1930 (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1980); for discussion, see Martin V. Melosi, “The Place of the City in Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17, no. 1 (March 1993): 1–23; Christine Meisner Rosen and Joel A. Tarr, “The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental History,” Journal of Urban History 20, no. 3 (May 1994): 299–310.

  24. 24.

    Edited volumes of the environmental history of a single city have explored, for example, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Houston, Boston, Phoenix, New Orleans, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Montreal.

  25. 25.

    Bill Luckin, Pollution and Control: A Social History of the Thames in Nineteenth Century (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1986); Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times (London: Routledge, 1987); Chris Hamlin, A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century Britain (Berkeley: California University Press, 1990); Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1986); André E. Guillerme, The Age of Water: The Urban Environment in the North of France, A.D. 300–1800 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1988); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Thomas Rommelspacher, Blauer Himmel über der Ruhr : Geschichte der Umwelt im Ruhrgebiet, 1840–1990 (Essen: Klartext, 1992); Ian D. Biddle and Kisten Gibson, eds., Noise, Audition, Aurality: Histories of the Sonic World(s) of Europe, 1500–1945 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

  26. 26.

    Simo Laakkonen, Sari Laurila, Pekka Kansanen and Harry Schullman, eds., Näkökulmia Helsingin ympäristöhistoriaan. Kaupunki ja sen ympäristö 1800- ja 1900-luvuilla (Helsinki: Edita, 2001) (Approaches to the environmental history of Helsinki. The city and its environs in the nineteenth and twentieth century, in Finnish.)

  27. 27.

    Dorothee Brantz and Sonja Dümpelmann, eds., Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991).

  28. 28.

    See, e.g., Dieter Schott, ed., Energy and the City in Europe: From Preindustrial Wood -Shortage to the Oil Crisis of the 1970s (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997); Christoph Bernhardt, ed., Environmental Problems in European Cities in the 19th and 20th Century (Münster: Waxmann, 2001); Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin, and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, eds., Resources of the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Andrew C. Isenberg, ed., The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006); Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud and Richard Rodger, eds., Environmental and Social Justice in the City: Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2011).

  29. 29.

    Simo Laakkonen and Sari Laurila, eds., “The Sea and the Cities,” a special issue, Ambio. A Journal on the Human Environment 30, no. 4–5 (August 2001): 263–326; Stephen Bocking, ed., a special issue, Urban History Review/Revue d’Histoire Urbaine 34, no. 1 (Fall 2005 automne): 3–112; Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, ed., “Ville et environnement,” a special issue, Histoire Urbaine 1, no. 18 (avril 2007): 5–156; Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud and Peter Thorsheim, eds., “Cities, Environments, and European History,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 5 (July 2007): 691–847.

  30. 30.

    Arthur H. Westing, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976); Susan Lanier-Graham, The Ecology of War: Environmental Impacts of Weaponry and Warfare (New York: Walker, 1993); A. Corvol and J. P. Amat, eds., Forêt et guerre (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994); Günther Bächler et al. Kriegursache Umweltzerstörung Vol. 1–III (Zürich: Rügger, 1996).

  31. 31.

    Jay E. Austin and Carl E. Bruch, eds., The Environmental Consequences of War: Legal, Economic and Scientific Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  32. 32.

    As exceptions see Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001); Joachim Radkau and Frank Uekötter, eds., Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus. Geschichte des Natur- und Umweltschutzes (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2003); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, eds., How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005).

  33. 33.

    Rainer Hudeman and François Walter, eds., Villes et guerres mondiales en Europe aux XXe siècle (Paris and Montreal: L’Harmattan, 1997); Marcus Funck and Roger Chickering, eds., Endangered Cities: Military Power and Urban Societies in the Era of the World Wars (Boston: Brill, 2004); Stefan Goebel and Derek Keene, eds., Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemoration of Total War (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). The main approach of these studies is cultural history. For other approaches see e.g., Nico Wouters, “Municipal Government during the Occupation (1940–45): A Comparative Model of Belgium, the Netherlands and France,” European History Quarterly 36, no. 2 (April 2006): 221–246.

  34. 34.

    Lahtinen and Vuorisalo, “‘It’s war and everyone can do as they please!’; Matthew Evenden, “Lights Out: Conserving Electricity for War in the Canadian City, 1939–1945,” Urban History Review/Revue d’Histoire Urbaine 34, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 88–99; Laakkonen, “Warfare: An Ecological Alternative for Peacetime?” in Natural Enemy, 175–194; Timothy Cooper, “Challenging the ‘refuse revolution’: War, waste and the rediscovery of recycling, 1900–1950,” Historical Research 81, no. 214 (2008): 710–731; M. Riley, “From Salvage to Recycling: New Agendas or Same Old Rubbish?”, Area 40, no. 1 (2008): 1–11.

  35. 35.

    Jari Niemelä et al. “Introduction,” in Jari Niemelä et al., eds., Urban Ecology: Patterns, Processes, and Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2.

  36. 36.

    Dieter Schott, “Urban Environmental History: What Lessons Are There to Be Learnt?,” Boreal Environment Research 9, no. 6 (2004): 519–28.

  37. 37.

    Sybil P. Seitzinger et al., “Planetary Stewardship in an Urbanizing World: Beyond City Limits,” Ambio 41, no. 8 (December 2012): 787–94.

  38. 38.

    Winston Churchill, The Second World War. Volume 1. (London: The Educational Book Company Ltd., 1954), ix.

  39. 39.

    Richard P. Tucker, “The Impact of Warfare on the Natural World: A Historical Survey,” in Natural Enemy, 37.

  40. 40.

    Friedrich Huchting, Prüfung alter Verwertungstechnologien aus Mangel- und Kriegszeiten. Umweltforschungsplan des Bundesministers des Innern. Abfallwirtschaft (Berlin: Umweltbundesamt, 1979); Johanna M. Jurkola, Treading lightly on the environment: Using Second World War fabric saving and clothing reuse techniques to inform contemporary women’s clothing design, Thesis, University of Alberta (2003); Timothy Cooper, “War on waste? The politics of waste and recycling in post-war Britain, 1950–1975,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 20, no. 4 (February 2009): 53–72.

  41. 41.

    See David D. Woods and Erik Hollnagel, “Prologue: Resilience Engineering Concepts,” in Erik Hollnagel, David D. Woods, and Nancy Leveson, eds., Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts (Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 6.

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  1. University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Simo Laakkonen

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  1. Simo Laakkonen
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Simo Laakkonen

  2. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

    J. R. McNeill

  3. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Richard P. Tucker

  4. Department of Biology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Timo Vuorisalo

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Laakkonen, S. (2019). Environmental History, the Second World War, and Urban Resilience. In: Laakkonen, S., McNeill, J.R., Tucker, R.P., Vuorisalo, T. (eds) The Resilient City in World War II. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17439-2_1

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