ABSTRACT
Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the devastating reverberations of the Cold War continue to infect the globe. The past few decades have witnessed major political upheavals marked by the shifts from communism to capitalism, the realignment of alliances, and renegotiations and impositions of regional and global power. This has resulted in a series of localized civil wars along with pre-emptive wars of occupation in new struggles for power. The resultant shattering of civil society and the demolition of cities, which are a natural focal point of conflicts, has brought on a strange new urban phenomenon – an epoch of continuous destruction and reconstruction that generates specialized global and local industries that thrive off the process.
