The Threat of Total Devastation

Abstract

In the previous two chapters we have examined the nature of both threats to cities and urban order and responses to those threats into the modern period. However, the nature of threat, external defences and the internal control of cities all changed remarkably during the Twentieth Century. Towards the end of the Nineteenth and beginning of the Twentieth Century, the urban revolutions that had been feared by urban elites were actually successful in some places, as in Russia (thereafter the Soviet Union). The control of colonies also became more tenuous as independence movements grew stronger and European economies were overstretched by the costs of maintaining order and successive world wars. Internal control and surveillance reached their greatest intensities in the nations and empires that had overthrown their previous regimes: in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. However, it was only after the Second World War (WW2) that the nadir of the totalitarian surveillance state would be reached in the German Democratic Republic.