Abstract
Environmental historians of industrial warfare often neglect the urban dimension, the environmental complexities of the traumatized cities. In World War II, many cities were nearly destroyed, but integrated analyses also reveal the less visible story: resilience. This book considers both war-damaged cities and cities far from direct involvement in the conflict. They cover massive socio-environmental stress including refugee movements, the disruption of basic urban services, and the ways urban administration and uprooted populations struggled to survive. Where necessary, people reverted to pre-industrial survival strategies: creative urban devolution. Flora and fauna played important roles, including urban agriculture, and animals both domestic and untamed. After peace returned, some urban environments in Europe and Asia were drastically changed by the war; others were restored along pre-war lines.
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Notes
- 1.
Tapio Hämynen and Yuri Shikalov, Viipurin kadotetut vuodet 1940–1990 [The Lost Years of Viipuri, 1940–1990] (Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Tammi, 2013), 77, 86, 105, 110–116.
- 2.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 234.
- 3.
The criteria and ratings change somewhat annually, but in the twenty-first century the top ten green cities in the world have been constantly located in the Nordic countries, Central Europe (e.g. Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich), or Canada (Vancouver). It is not a coincidence that these cities have also had the most equal socio-economic structures. See, for example, Global Green Economy Index, Global Sherpa, and European Urban Ecosystem Survey. These rankings are not comparable because they address different criteria, although not always explicitly.
- 4.
See, for example, Steven Brakman, Harry Garretsen and Marc Schramm, “The Strategic Bombing of German Cities during World War II and its Impact on City Growth,” CESifo Working Paper, no. 808 (2002), 1–38. http://hdl.handle.net/10419/76256
- 5.
James H. Liu et al., “Social Representations of Events and People in World History Across 12 Cultures,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 36, no. 2 (March 2005): 185. For reasons of importance of wars in collective memory, see Magdalena Bobowik et al., “Beliefs about history, the meaning of historical events and culture of war,” Revista de Psicología 28, no. 1 (2010): 115–116.
- 6.
C. S. Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 4 (1973): 1–23; Thomas Elmqvist, “Urban resilience thinking,” Solutions 5, no. 5 (September 2014): 26–30; Akira S. Mori, “Resilience in the Studies of Biodiversity-Ecosystem Functioning,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 31, no. 2 (February 2016): 87–89.
- 7.
Indeed, many ecological studies conducted in urban settings have simply considered humans as agents of disturbance. See Nancy E. McIntyre, K. Knowles-Yánez and D. Hope, “Urban ecology as an interdisciplinary field: differences in the use of “urban” between the social and natural sciences,” Urban Ecosystems 4, no. 1 (January 2008): 11, 17.
- 8.
David E. Beel et al., “Cultural resilience: The production of rural community heritage, digital archives and the role of volunteers,” Journal of Rural Studies 54 (2017): 459–461. See Kristen Magis, “Community Resilience: An Indicator of Social Sustainability,” Society & Natural Resources 23, no. 5 (2010): 402.
- 9.
See, for example, Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation,” Security Dialogue 42, no. 2 (2011): 143–60; Muriel Cote and Andrea J. Nightingale, “Resilience thinking meets social theory. Situating social change in socio-ecological systems (SES) research,” Progress in Human Geography 36, no. 4 (2011): 475–489. See also Tobias Plieninger and Claudia Bieling, eds., Resilience and the Cultural Landscape: Understanding and Managing Change in Human-Shaped Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- 10.
Marjolein Spaans and Bas Waterhout, “Building up resilience in cities worldwide – Rotterdam as participant in the 100 Resilient Cities Programme,” Cities 61 (January 2017): 111; Beel et al., “Cultural resilience,” 460.
- 11.
Our concept that focuses on wartime cities is near definitions presented in Ian P. McCarthy, Mark Collard, and Michael Johnson, “Adaptive Organizational Resilience: An Evolutionary Perspective,” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 28 (October 2017): 1.
- 12.
Lawrence J. Vale, “The politics of resilient cities: whose resilience and whose city?” Building Research & Information 42, no. 2 (2013): 191–201.
- 13.
Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” originally published 1925, reprinted in John M. Marzluff, Eric Shulenberger, Wilfried Endlicher et al., eds., Urban Ecology. An International Perspective on the Interaction Between Humans and Nature (New York: Springer, 2008), 71.
- 14.
Raymond G. Stokes, Roman Köster, and Stephen C. Sambrook, The Business of Waste: Great Britain and Germany, 1945 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Simo Laakkonen, Sari Laurila, eds., Harmaat aallot. Ympäristönsuojelun tulo Suomeen (Helsinki: SHS, 1999).
- 15.
Polymeris Voglis, “Surviving hunger: life in the cities and the countryside during the occupation,” in Robert Gildea, Olivier Wieviorka and Anette Warring, eds., Surviving Hitler and Mussolini: daily life in occupied Europe (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 16–41.
- 16.
Modified on base of Stephan Barthel, John Parker and Henrik Ernstson, “Food and Green Space in Cities: A Resilience Lens on Gardens and Urban Environmental Movements,” Urban Studies 1, no. 18 (2013): 4–5.
- 17.
Ibid., 2; Stephan Barthel, Sverkel Sörlin, and John Ljungqvist, “Innovative memory and resilient cities: echoes from ancient Constantinople,” in Paul J. J. Sinclair, Gullög Nordquist, Frands Herschend and Christian Isendahleds, eds., The Urban Mind: Cultural and Environmental Dynamics (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2010), 391–406.
- 18.
Bernhard Klausnitzer, Verstädterung von Tieren (Wittenberg Lutherstadt: Die Neue Brehm-Bücherei, 1988), 12–13.
- 19.
Impacts of World War II on wildlife were, however, studied in some less inhabited areas of the global war theater. On Midway Atoll, the so-called moaning birds (e.g. wedge-tailed shearwaters) that had a depressing voice were disliked and persecuted by soldiers, while in another Pacific Ocean island military construction benefited local birds; the Papua New Guinea swiftlets started to use abandoned Japanese tunnels as their nesting sites. See Harvey I. Fisher and Paul H. Baldwin, “War and the birds of Midway Atoll,” The Condor 48, no. 1 (January–February 1946): 3–15, and Harry L. Bell, “Occupation of urban habitats by birds in Papua New Guinea,” Proceedings of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology 3, no. 1 (1986): 17.
- 20.
For origins of urban ecology, see Herbert Sukopp, “Stadtforschung und Stadtökologie in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart,” Geobotanische Kolloquien 11 (1994): 3–16; Jens Lachmund, “Exploring the city of rubble: botanical fieldwork in bombed cities in Germany after World War II,” in Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and Andrew Mendelsohn, eds., Science and the City, a special issue, Osiris 18 (2003): 234–54. For a wider picture, see Jens Lachmund, Greening Berlin : The Co-Production of Science, Politics and Urban Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
- 21.
Dan Listwa, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Long Term Health Effects,” University of Columbia, Center for Nuclear Studies, August 9, 2012, online article, https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki, accessed June 15, 2018. See also William M. Tsutsui, “Landscapes in the Dark Valley: Toward an Environmental History of Wartime Japan,” in Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell, eds., Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004), 195–216.
- 22.
Claire Campbell, Bonzo’s War: Animals Under Fire 1939–1945 (Glasgow, Scotland: Little, Brown Book Group, 2013); Hilda Kean, The Great Cat and Dog Massacre: The Real Story of World War Two’s Unknown Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Anna Reid, Leningrad : Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941–44 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).
- 23.
For Japan, see Mayumi Itoh, Japanese Wartime Zoo Policy: The Silent Victims of World War II (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); for Munich Zoo, see Michael Kamp and Helmut Zedelmaier, eds., Nilpferde an der Isar. Eine Geschichte des Tierparks Hellabrunn in München (München: Buchendorfer, 2000); for Leningrad, see E. E. Denisenko, Ot zverincev k zooparku. Istorija Leningradskogo zooparka (Sankt Peterburg: Iskusstvo-SPb, 2003).
- 24.
Frederick S. Litten, “Starving the Elephants: The Slaughter of Animals in Wartime Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 38, no. 3 (2009): 1–17.
- 25.
For further background on refugees in Asian war zones, see Micah Muscolino, “Conceptualizing Wartime Flood and Famine in China,” and Richard P. Tucker, “Environmental Scars in Northeastern India and Burma,” in The Long Shadows, 101–9, 120–22. For similarly massive refugee movements in wartime Europe, see, for example, Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Malcolm J. Proudfoot, European Refugees 1939–52 (Evanston: Northwestern, 1956); Andrew Paul Janco, Soviet Displaced Persons in Europe, 1941–1951, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2012.
- 26.
See Tom Arnold’s chapter in this volume. For related moral questions, see Charles S. Maier, “Targeting the city: Debates and silences about the aerial bombing of World War II,” International Review of the Red Cross 87, no. 859 (September 2005): 429–44, and Conrad C. Crane, American Airpower Strategy in World War II: Bombs, Cities, Civilians, and Oil (Kansas City: University Press of Kansas, 2016).
- 27.
See, for example, Ferenc M. Szasz and Issei Takechi, “Atomic Heroes and Atomic Monsters: American and Japanese. Cartoonists Confront the Onset of the Nuclear Age, 1945–80,” The Historian 69, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 728–752.
- 28.
William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (New York: Random House, 1998), 99–100.
- 29.
Sara Meerow, Joshua P. Newell, and Melissa Stults, “Defining urban resilience: A review,” Landscape and Urban Planning 147 (March 2016): 44; Patrick Martin-Breen and J. Marty Anderies, “Resilience: A Literature Review,” in Bellagio Initiative (Brighton: IDS, 2011), 8. See also Michael Burayidi, ed., City Resilience, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 2015).
- 30.
See Simin Davoudi, “Resilience: A Bridging Concept or a Dead End?” Planning Theory & Practice 13, no. 2 (June 2012): 302.
- 31.
Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Christopher Sellers, Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
- 32.
Mia Kunnaskari, “Kaupunkiviljely joustavuuden koekenttänä,” Terra 128, no. 4 (2016): 221; Simo Laakkonen, “Polemosphere. The War, Society, and the Environment,” in Laakkonen, Tucker, Vuorisalo, The Long Shadows, 22.
- 33.
For example, when there were not enough chicken eggs available for a children’s hospital in Helsinki, they were substituted in the summertime by collection of gulls’ eggs from the islets outside the city. Eero Haapanen et al., Lukuja luodoilta. Helsingin saaristolinnut nyt ja ennen (Helsinki: Helsingin kaupungin ympäristökeskus, 2017), 210–215.
- 34.
Jaakko Suominen and Anna Sivula, “Retrovation – the Concept of a Historical Innovation,” WiderScreen 3–4 (2016): online (http://widerscreen.fi/numerot/2016-3-4/retrovation-the-concept-of-a-historical-innovation/).
- 35.
Simo Laakkonen, “War – An Ecological Alternative to Peace,” in Natural Enemy, Natural Ally, 190. Generally, the ecological footprint refers to the biologically productive area needed to provide for all resources needed by people in a particular area, and for processing their wastes. See Mathis Wackernagel and William E. Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1996). For an innovative long-term assessment, see Helmut Haberl, Karl-Heinz Erb and Fridolin Krausmann, “How to calculate and interpret ecological footprints for long periods of time: the case of Austria 1926–1995,” Ecological Economics 38, no. 1 (July 2001): 35.
- 36.
Naturally, life in Leningrad or Warsaw did not become healthy. However, in Leningrad, people paid attention to the exceptionally clean air and silence in the besieged city. Lidia Ginzburg, Leningradin piirityksen päiväkirja (A diary of the blockade of Leningrad, translated from Russian by Kirsti Era) (Helsinki: Into Kustannus oy, 2011), 27.
- 37.
John Sheail, “War and the Development of Nature Conservation in Britain,” Journal of Environmental Management 44, no. 3 (June 1995): 267–83; Raymond H. Dominick III, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871–1971 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 101, 114.
- 38.
Annika Björklund, Historical Urban Agriculture. Food Production and Access to Land in Swedish Towns before 1900 (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2010), 214–215.
- 39.
A good example of this phenomenon is Japanese cities. The population of Tokyo decreased from 6.8 million in 1940 to 2.8 million in 1945 while the populations of Osaka, Nagoya, and Yokohama were halved in the same period. The share of urban population decreased in wartime Japan as a whole from 37.7 percent down to 22.8 percent. Source: Demography of Imperial Japan, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, accessed 15 June 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_Imperial_Japan
- 40.
See, for example, Laurence L. Delina and Mark Diesendorf, “Is wartime mobilisation a suitable policy model for rapid national climate mitigation?” Energy Policy 58 (2013): 371–380; Hugh Rockoff, “The U.S. Economy in WWII as a Model for Coping with Climate Change,” NBER Working Paper, no. 22590, The National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2016; Bill McKibben, “We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII,” The New Republic, August 15, 2016.
- 41.
Meghan Doherty, Kelly Klima and Jessica J. Hellmann, “Climate change in the urban environment: Advancing, measuring and achieving resiliency,” Environmental Science & Policy 66 (2016): 310–313.
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Laakkonen, S., McNeill, J.R., Tucker, R.P., Vuorisalo, T. (2019). Epilogue: What Makes a City Resilient?. 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_14
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