Dimendberg, Edward; City of Fear; ANY 18; 1997

In August 1946, The American City published an article entitled The Atomic Bomb and the Future of the City. Urging decentralization as a precautionary measure, the essay established the equation, made repeatedly after the war and throughout the 1950s, between urban concentration and military vulnerability. Postwar urban planners noted that of the wars two atomic weapon targets, the number of deaths at Nagasaki were half those at Hiroshima, a consequence of the dispersed urban population. In an atomic war, congested cities would become death traps, writes Edward Teller and two fellow nuclear physicists in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1946. Our contemporary urban structure presents an inviting target for the machines of modern war because it is dominated by a few dozen key centers, claimed Tennessee Valley Authority planner Tracy Augur in 1948. .To ensure a safety of space, nuclear physicists and planners alike translated their fears of density into plans for the built environment. In the 1946 scheme proposed by Teller and his colleagues, narrow ribbon or linear cities would form parallel, continuous settlements running from east to west, crossed by a network of cities built from north to south. The resulting grid, punctuated by an interval of 25 miles of agricultural land between each urban settlement, was intended to dissipate the destructive force of aerial bombing. Augurs 1948 scheme called for building urban centers with a population of one million inhabitants divided into 20 units of 50,000 people, separated by intervals of four to five miles of open country. Speed, no less than decentralization, also appeared a universal solvent of nuclear-generated anxiety Civildefense officials busied themselves developing plans for the most efficient use of existing road networks, and their efforts accompanied the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 that established the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Throughout the 1940s, film noir. relied implicitly on notions of urban centrality, permanence, and density already formed by the end of the 19th century Yet beginning in the 1950s, spatial representations in film noir began to mutate, responding to the emergence of a newly centrifugal space constituted by the interstate highway system, dispersed suburbs, and the growing prominence of television and electronic surveillance. . In the new era of Cold War urbanism, only the fallout shelter and the underground bunker provide the possibility of evading enemy attack Every urbanite requires a place to hide and flee. .The dispersal of cities has been considered thus far as a means of defense against overt military attack. It has equal value as a defense against the type of enemy penetration that has become so effective in modern times and which depends on the fomenting of internal disorder and unrest. .10 years later an influential group of American urban planners began to decry the disappearance of the metropolitan center and suburban flight. The legible and cognitively mappable pathways, plazas, and revitalized business districts of the 1960s redevelopment provided an ideological buffer between a decaying metropolitan infrastructure and the even more alarming menace of a disappearing city. . Los Angeles exemplifies a mode of urbanism that is neither the concentrated metropolis of the 19th century nor the dispersed modernism of the Radiant City or Broadacre City Urban form in Los Angeles pointed to the spatially decentered, electronically mediated, and automobile-navigated city that would later be identified with postmodernism. Los Angeles [portrays] the wishful image of collectivity with impending catastrophe, even as it appears to acknowledge the insufficiency of such urban representations.