ABSTRACT
Between the end of the Second World War and the start of the 1960s lay an arduous period of recovery for the cities and citizens of Western Europe. More specifically, the focus is on the role of vision and visual culture in the radical transformation of cities proposed in the interwar period, catalysed by the bombing war, initiated in the early postwar period and widely taken up in the broader project of urban renewal from the 1960s onwards. It demonstrates how paper memorials to the ruins or photographic reconstructions of lost spaces worked to offer particular ways of looking at and thinking about urban destruction, influencing the formation of cultural memory and imagined communities in the immediate postwar years. The interconnected modes of urban photography, which are the focus of the main chapters of this book, cut across many of the central concerns of this period, such as ruination and rebuilding, housing and youth, Cold War divisions and international cooperation.
