Peter Adey is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of
“The City Is To Be Evacuated”: Roads, Race, and Automobility During the Early Cold War
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Published:August 2024
Chapter 4 explores the situation of the Cold War urban landscape, where evacuation was considered at the scale of the North American city. It traces the development of particular fields of knowledge and expertise around evacuation, following the emergence of different ways of thinking about evacuation as an object of concern in organizational forms of government, national civil defense structures, and university departments and research centers, in the context of nuclear war. Complex interdisciplinary engagements evolved. They used fieldwork and theoretical studies to stage various evacuation events, with prior knowledge of peacetime evacuations and disasters, from which to anticipate wartime evacuation. The city was the problem within which evacuation was framed and made sense of, and this meant it was bound up in wider sets of antagonistic concerns over race, class, and urban poverty.
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