Cold War Bunkers

Located on the distinctive landscape feature Long Knoll, just over 1km southwest of the village of Maiden Bradley, stands Wiltshire’s only surviving Visual Reporting Post - a component of the early Cold War air defence network. The structure symbolises the final days of the passive defence of Great Britain before the development of the hydrogen bomb. Moreover, it is a unique indicator to the impact scientific advances had on the military archaeology of the late 20th century. The ‘Orlit Post’, as these structures became known, also has social implications, standing testament to a volunteer force, the Royal Observer Corps; an organisation prepared to respond if the unthinkable happened and the United Kingdom was attacked from the air. The structure also serves as a reminder that ideological warfare was a significant concern for successive British Governments. The post’s continued survival forces us to confront our recent past, serving to underpin the notion that, had war come in the 1950s, even rural Wiltshire would have been almost immediately on the front line and exposed to the effects of atomic attack.

From the late 1960s the communist state of Albania embarked upon a bunker building programme that was devised to be significantly more comprehensive than previous defence proposals. This was instigated by the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha during his alliance with China, a relationship that started in 1961 after failed partnerships with neighbouring Yugoslavia and the USSR. Albania had benefited greatly from Chinese financial and technical assistance. However, due to wider events in the Eastern Bloc, Hoxha had become concerned that China, being centred at some great distance from the Mediterranean, would be unable to counteract any invasion threat to Albania. Thus, the bunkerisation scheme was designed to be utilised by the whole population as a means of defence in the event of an attack or invasion. Numerous reinforced concrete defensive structures were created for the military and civilians at this time, from simple tunnels, air raid shelters, command posts, party headquarters, ammunition stores, subterranean army storage, machine gun posts and artillery bunkers. However, it is the smallest and most ubiquitous of these, the mushroom-shaped bunker (MSB), which will be the subject of this discussion.
This chapter will examine the varied life-histories of MSBs from their conception, installation and use, their later abandonment after communism fell in 1991 and their subsequent re-engagement through Albanian and foreign interactions. It has been almost fifty years since these small bunkers were conceived and twenty-five years since the fall of communism in Albania. Through this time-frame their characteristics, as individual entities and as a collective force, have been heavily invested with symbolism, meaning and identities. These qualities are not static. They are fluid and determined by their relationships with persons, socio-economic forces and the natural or urban environment in which they are situated. The coastal town of Ksamili in Southern Albania is close to the Greek coastal border with the Island of Corfu. Countless MSBs were installed along this coastal zone during communism, however in the post-socialist period, many have been re-used and/or destroyed in the drive to develop the town, tourism and create beaches. Ksamili is therefore an ideal focal point from which the form, function and future of Albania’s MSBs will be further explored, and implications discussed.

Emily Glass, University of Bristol, 2015

The Cold War was a time of intense war-preparations by the two opposing blocs, NATO and the WTO, including for a potential nuclear war. The building of massive underground bunkers was an essential part of these developments, with Object No. 1180 being a relevant example of Soviet bunker building during the last decade of the Cold War. Originally built to house the command point of the Soviet Army’s High Command of the Southwestern Direction, this bunker system was abandoned soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. A chaotic process of attempted dismantlement followed. At the same time, there is an increasing interest in this site from urban explorers and people interested in dark tourism. The aim of this thesis is to discuss the current situation of the site, compare it with other bunkers that were already transformed into tourist destinations, and propose suggestions for converting Object No. 1180 into a tourism attraction for a wider audience. A side objective of this work is to spark academic interest in the currently under-researched Soviet-era heritage in terms of bunker building and militarized landscapes. After discussing Object No. 1180’s current situation and cultural significance, and also undertaking the necessary comparisons with other sites, several suggestions on its conversion into a heritage site are given. They focus mostly around the concept of non-invasive tourism development, in order to preserve the authenticity and cultural significance of the Object No. 1180 bunker system. The creation and implementation of a tourism development project for Object No. 1180 would make it accessible for a diverse audience of tourists, while also contributing to awareness-raising regarding the Soviet-era bunker heritage.

In Parangoni. I. (ed.) 2015. Between Glory and Fall: Albania and the Industrial Experience. Tirana: Shtëpia Botuese.

Book Abstract: The book begins by examining the earliest traces of industrialisation in Albania, passing through the inter-war years and ending with the fall of communism in the early 1990s. There is a strong emphasis on the communist period, a time when the country saw a massive industrialisation effort.

This paper explores the worldwide unprecedented bunker infrastructure of Switzerland. Since the 1960s, the country has built hundreds of thousands of nuclear bomb shelters in family homes. Drawing on poststructural theories of social practice and ritual theory, the all-pervasive structures in the private sphere are analyzed as transitory spaces that coordinate the movement and connections between different milieus, regimes, and bodies. By studying the operational scripts of the authorities and the spatial arrangements and artifacts of the shelter, the paper argues that a sequenced set of “rites of passage” were to be practiced in order to guarantee a transition into the postapocalypse without any violations of norms, social roles, and affective regimes. However, this “territorializing” process launched by the state with the aim of engineering a “bomb-proof” society met with little success. By ignoring, distorting, or violating the constant prewar situation in their homes, Swiss people, as early as in the 1970s, started to undermine the shelter as an instance of concrete governmentality. Being traversed by various processes of “deterritorialization” the bunker lost its function as a locus of secured passage and transformed into a highly dynamic “empty space” that hides, till this day, residua for creativity and difference.

Unable to afford advanced technological deterrents, Albania’s communist regime built 500 000 military bunkers as a defence against a possible invasion. These monoliths that dominate the landscape were thankfully never used for their intended purpose.
This body of work investigates the re-use and recycling of the wealth that the bunkers retain. Between the years of 1975 and 1988 an estimated 500 000 bunkers were constructed.  With so much wealth invested in these now useless monoliths, the citizens nowadays are extracting their inheritance by reusing the bunkers as cafes, restaurants, accommodation, and agricultural buildings.
They are images of the Albanian mentality today, a portrait of their lives set within the confines of their past. How they perceive and re-organise the failed state inherited from the bankrupt communist regime.

(ES) La fortificación ejecutada al final de la Guerra Civil Española en la orilla norte del Estrecho de Gibraltar tenía como objetivos controlar la navegación entre el Atlántico y el Mediterráneo, bloquear el Peñón de Gibraltar y defender la costa contra un posible desembarco enemigo. Dada la capacidad de destrucción y el alcance de la artillería, la dispersión progresiva de los elementos convierte la fortificación en un sistema fortificado, un grupo compuesto por diversas redes o subsistemas con un importante componente territorial. El sistema de búnkeres queda obsoleto desde el cese de las hostilidades y poco o nada valorado en la actualidad; aunque este sistema fortificado merece situarse junto a los modelos de fortificación de otras épocas en términos de su interés histórico y su condición patrimonial. Sin embargo, y a pesar de que existen las herramientas legales necesarias, la realidad es diferente, y los búnkeres en la orilla norte del Estrecho permanecen abandonados y sin ningún tipo de protección. (EN): The fortification executed at the end of the Spanish Civil War on the north shore of the Strait of Gibraltar had as objectives to control the navigation between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, block the Rock of Gibraltar, and defend the coast against a possible enemy landing. Given the capacity for destruction and the range of the artillery, the progressive dispersion of the elements converts the fortification into a fortified system, a group composed of diverse networks or subsystems with an important territorial component. Obsolete since the cessation of hostilities, little or nothing valued at present, this fortified system deserves to be placed next to models of fortification from other eras in terms of its historical interest and its patrimonial condition. However, and despite the fact that there are the necessary legal tools, the reality is different, and the bunkers on the north bank of the Strait remain abandoned and without any kind of protection.

The year 1954 saw the first public detonation of an H-bomb, a weapon whose radioactive fallout challenged the existing spatialized notions of targeting and post attack recovery by making a whole country vulnerable to the vagaries of drifting toxic clouds that drew no distinction between urban centers and rural periphery. In response, the UK government established a network of 1,518 underground nuclear fallout monitoring posts spread uniformly across the country. This article considers how planning for this new reality brought a diffusion of cold war urban anxieties and practices into the UK countryside, but in a way that was awkward and approximate. This article considers the implications of the rise of the H-bomb for the United Kingdom's (UK) experience during the 1950s of "cold war urbanism". Cold war urbanism is taken here to encompass (1) the influence of cold war anxieties upon urbanists, their professional discourses, and practices and (2) the production of built environments shaped by or in service of cold war objectives. This article investigates the UK's experience of cold war urbanism by presenting a case study that considers the planning and implementation of one of the few conspicuously cold war motivated building schemes actually undertaken in the UK: the creation of a network of 1,518 underground nuclear fallout monitoring posts spread uniformly across the countryside.

Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to excavate their own backyards while governments the world over exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. The dreams and nightmares inspired by the spectre of nuclear destruction were expressed in images and forms from comics, movies, and pulp paperbacks to policy documents, protest movements, and survivalist tracts. Illustrated with photographs, artwork, and movie and television stills of real and imagined fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies, award-winning author David L. Pike's continues his decades-long exploration of the meanings of modern undergrounds. Ranging widely across disciplines, this volume finds unexpected connections between cultural icons and forgotten texts, plumbs the bunker's stratifications of class, region, race, and gender, and traces the often unrecognized through-lines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present. Although the Cold War ended over 30 years ago, its legacy looms large in anxieties around security, borders, and all manners of imminent apocalypse. Treating the bunker in its concrete presence and in its flightiest fantasies while attending equally to its uniquely American desires and pathologies and to its global impact, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s proposes a new way to understand the outsized afterlife of the bunkered decades. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/cold-war-space-and-culture-in-the-1960s-and-1980s-9780192846167?cc=us&lang=en&. Available on Oxford Scholarship online if your library subscribes; excerpted in PopMatters, Bright Lights Film Journal, and Literary Hub (see attached links).

The Atlantic Wall along the coast of Europe and Norway is in ruins. One of the most radical Hitler’s infrastructure projects, known as Fuhrer Directive No 40, capable to transform natural coastal lines into the Fortress Europe, today lies in oblivion and solitude. Concrete structures are migrating along the borderlines, becoming part of rocks, dissolving back into minerals, metamorphosing into skeletons and the giant shells of reptiles. No longer regarded as functioning architectural bodies, no longer serving as a record of violent human activity, today fifteen hundred of these Nazi bunkers have become a new form of media, the abstract techno-basis of a new layer of coded information.

This paper advances the idea of transplanting the discourse of the Atlanic Wall Bunkers on the territory of photography, film and contemporary cultures at large, based on an on going cross-disciplinary research project – 1XPerUnknown. Launched in 2012, by the Italian urban artist Margherita Moscardini this multidisciplinary experiment forces us to re-think and re-calibrate the phenomenon within the broader trajectory of curatorial practices, material cultures, law, geography, conservation, chemistry and mineralogy. Balancing on the border of different media—engineering, politics, military-industrial production, statistics, science, forensic architecture the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall themselves embody numerous layers of meanings. However, it is this particular ambivalence of construction/deconstruction, a shift from of the most traumatic archeological remains - to radical art takes the discourse on the bunker as a military unit and a material fact to the whole new extreme.

El presente libro estudia, inventaría, cataloga y restituye gráficamente todos los elementos de la arquitectura para la defensa de la costa existentes en el litoral de la provincia de Alicante, levantados durante la guerra civil española por las tropas republicanas para defender el territorio y a su ciudadanía de un posible desembarco de las tropas nacionales y de los bombardeos de la aviación fascista italiana realizados desde la isla de Mallorca. Se clasifican en siete zonas los enclaves militares de los que aún quedan restos: Costa Norte (desde Denia hasta Benidorm), Alicante Norte (cabo de Huerta), El Portixol (accesos por la carretera nacional de Madrid), Alicante Suroeste (accesos desde San Vicente hasta Cartagena y el puerto, incluyendo los aeródromos), Clot de Galvany (en la zona del Carabassí, Elche), Cabo de Santa Pola (junto al faro de dicho cabo) y Bahía de Santa Pola (en las playas y puerto de este municipio). Se realiza el inventario y el dibujo de todos los búnkeres, baterías de costa y antiaéreas, barracones militares y otras edificaciones de intendencia (polvorines). Se procede al estudio de las familias tipológicas de búnkeres y baterías en atención a su geometría, forma y superficie. Se aporta un extenso reportaje de fotografías de época de estas arquitecturas para la defensa.

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Sinnes- und Emotionsgeschichte der atomaren Bedrohung im Kalten Krieg. Das Augenmerk der Literatur galt bislang visuellen Repräsentationen von Feuerbällen, Atompilzen und Ruinen von Städten, die staatlicherseits zur emotionalen Kontrolle der Bevölkerung instrumentalisiert wurden. Allzu schnell wird bei diesem Fokus auf zirkulierende Bilder der Bombe jedoch vergessen, dass das nukleare Zeitalter auch reale Bauten hervorgebracht hat, die nicht nur den Sehsinn, sondern das gesamte körperliche Sensorium der Menschen qua materiellem Schutz gegen Nuklearwaffen miteinbezog. Anhand wissenschaftlicher Studien zum Leben in Atomschutzräumen in der Schweiz zeigt der Beitrag, dass im „radikalen Zeitalter“ durchaus alle Sinne einem staatlichen Zugriff unterworfen waren. Übergeordnete Zielsetzung der in den 1960er- und 1970er-Jahren durchgeführten Laborstudien war es, die Denk- und Gefühlswelten der Schweizer durch die Modulierung der sensorischen Umweltstressoren im Bunker zu steuern. Emotionale und multisensorische Geographien waren im Kalten Krieg aufs engste miteinander verwoben. Der schweizerische Staat verschrieb sich einer sensory politics, die eine auf das Sehen ebenso wie die haptischen, olfaktorischen und akustischen Wahrnehmung zielende Regulierung der Sinne umfasste, um dozile Bürger und eine schweizerische „bomb-proof society“ herzustellen.
***
Cette contribution traite de l’histoire des sens et des émotions dans le cadre de la menace nucléaire durant la Guerre Froide. Pour la plupart des gens, la menace de «la Bombe» qui structurait l’antagonisme systémique entre les blocs était très difficile à appréhender de manière sensorielle. La littérature à ce sujet se focalisait presque exclusivement sur des images et des films représentant des champignons atomiques, des boules de feu ou encore des villes en ruines, autant d’images qui étaient instrumentalisées de manière répétée par l’Etat à des fins de contrôle émotionnel des populations. Cette focalisation sur la dimension visuelle de la Bombe contribuait le plus souvent à faire oublier que le conflit Est­Ouest avait suscité la construction de structures dont le but était justement d’offrir une protection matérielle et sensorielle la plus large possible contre la bombe atomique: les fallout shelters ou bunkers anti-atomiques. En se basant sur des études scientifiques analysant les conditions de vie dans les bunkers en Suisse, cette contribution souligne que tous les sens étaient soumis durant la Guerre Froide au regard inquisiteur de l’Etat. En effet, les expériences de laboratoire menées durant les années 1960 et 1970 visaient principalement à orienter les univers sensoriels et cognitifs des Suissesses et des Suisses par le biais d’une modulation des expériences haptiques, olfactives et visuelles à l’intérieur des bunkers. L’Etat fédéral développait ainsi de véritables sensory politics dont le but était de produire des citoyen·ne·s dociles et, autant que possible, une bomb­proof society.

(ES): Las fortificaciones militares europeas del siglo XX son hoy una ruina ambigua que activa el paisaje. Pueden entenderse como una marca que se convierte en un impacto estético en el territorio. Aunque Paul Virilio, hace aproximadamente cuarenta años, editó, de manera pionera, su "Bunker Archéologie" (libro y catálogo de la exposición homónima en París en 1975). Su fascinación por los búnkeres varados en playas comenzó antes, en 1958, sin embargo, las contribuciones teóricas en torno al legado de la arquitectura militar pueden ampliarse. Es necesario aproximar el tema, tanto como un objeto con interés artístico y escénico como por su relevancia fenomenológica y estética. Este estudio pretende cubrir parcialmente esta carencia, desde la reflexión sobre conceptos como el aura (Walter Benjamin) del monumento, la ruina o el residuo. Para ello, la metodología utilizada se basa en el estudio y el uso de legados heterogéneos, como las ideas de Virilio o las obras del geógrafo Eric Dardel, el filósofo Martin Heidegger o el propio Walter Benjamin, entre otros. Se expondrán ejemplos concretos de paisajes militares, como el Muro Atlántico, la Línea Maginot, el Muro del Estrecho de Gibraltar o el Muro del Mediterráneo. Es posible que la mayoría de estas reflexiones sobre búnkeres, en el sentido de ruinas fosilizadas de conocimiento técnico militar, puedan aplicarse a los restos históricos históricos más dispersos y abandonados. (EN): The European military fortifications in the XX Century are today an ambiguous ruin that activates the landscape. It can be understood as a mark that develops into an aesthetic impact on the territory. Although Paul Virilio, approximately forty years ago, edited, in a pioneering way, his "Bunker Archéologie" (book and catalogue of the homonymous exhibition in Paris in 1975). His fascination for the bunkers stranded on beaches came even before, since 1958, however the theoretical contributions around the military architecture legacy are not still enough. It is necessary to approximate the subject, both as an object with artistic and scenic interest and with phenomenological and aesthetic relevance. This study aims to partially cover this lack, from the reflection around concepts such the aura (Walter Benjamin) of the monument, the ruin or the residue. For that purpose, the methodology used is based on the study and the use of heterogeneous legacies, such as Virilio’s ideas or the works of geographer Eric Dardel, philosopher Martin Heidegger or Walter Benjamin himself, among others. Concrete examples of military landscape will be exposed, such as the Atlantic Wall, the Maginot Line, the Strait of Gibraltar Wall or the Mediterranean Wall. It is possible that most of these reflections about bunkers, in the sense of fossilized ruins of military technical knowledge, can be applied to most scattered and abandoned historical military heritage remains.

The Mediterranean wall, which is a collection of defensive constructions along the coast, was built during the Spanish War (1936-39) to prevent enemy attacks. Its called this way like the Atlantic Wall, which was built after the Second World War. These group of buildings consist of batteries, bunkers and barracks placed along the coastline, sometimes next to another kind of infrastructure. Its location (typical of a military strategy) and its peculiar morphology are like another ones: the historical watchtowers ones. They were built by the Kingdom of Spain in the same geography four centuries earlier although, in our case, the buildings are updated to the conditions of contemporary wars: camouflage against air raids. A collection of anti-aircraft devices, placed along the coast since the late 1937, were risen following the instructions of the Valencian State to defend both citizens and cities from the aviations bombings. The following military settlements, organized from North to So...

This was a preview of my dissertation, which focuses on the cultural and political significance of survival shelters, clean rooms, and safe homes. In this presentation I posit that Foucault's concept of "heterotopia" - spaces that exist outside of the everyday but nonetheless shape the everyday in complex ways - might be a useful way to think about survival shelters and bunkers that are proliferating through the Prepper movement. I am also thinking more generally about the philosophical and political foundations of shelter architecture. What does it mean to be safe in the Anthropocene? How do literary tropes and scenario-based training schemes relate to domestic fortification trends? Given at the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA) annual conference at Rice University, "After Biopolitics", 2015, and also at the graduate conference for the Cultural Analysis and Theory department at Stony Brook University, 2015.

A watching brief was carried out during the groundwork for the installation of a new traffic control system at Central Operating Base (COB) West, MoD Boscombe Down. It was unlikely that the work would reveal below ground archaeology as the immediate area was extensively damaged during the construction of the Hardened Aircraft Shelters and associated taxiways in this area.  No archaeological features were noted.

The bunkerization of Europe is a Cold War story that has continued to resonate into the 21st century through foreign policy, the built environment, and cultural traces both material and imaginary. This essay explores the physical, ideological, and cultural bunkerization of Switzerland, one of the most heavily fortified countries in the world, through its military and civil defense history, the spatial manifestations of that history, and the cultural responses to these manifestations during and after the Cold War. The essay compares the unusually democratic process of the Swiss civil defense infrastructure and its ramifications for thinking about the spatial legacy of the Cold War with the bunker fantasy in the United States and the rest of Europe. Early on in my research on bunkers and Cold War infrastructure, as I was taking the photo of an entrance to one of the defense networks beneath the Swiss Alps (which is not reproduced here, for reasons that will become clear), an official-looking man drove up and told me that I was breaking the law. It was illegal to take a picture, he said; it was even illegal to take an unauthorized look at this threshold, despite its being in plain view on public land. This came as particularly frustrating news to me, as I had spent the better part of a morning hiking mountain trails in search of just such a look. Earlier, believing I had finally made some progress in my quest, I had happened to chance on a convoy of trucks halted at a security barrier at the edge of the mountain-side woods. Politely but firmly turned away by heavily armed soldiers, I had accepted a truck driver's offer of a ride back down into the riverside town where I had first disembarked from the Swiss Rail train. It was when he had dropped me on the outskirts of the town that I found myself looking through a high wrought-iron gate straight into the heart of the same mountain I had earlier climbed, into a tunnel easily wide enough to accommodate trucks and armored vehicles like those I had encountered much farther up. But here is the twist; the accusing driver who would find me there snapping away with my camera, rather than arrest me in good old Cold War fashion and confiscate my film (or flash drive as the case was here), invited me back to his home, introduced me to his family, offered me lunch, and plied me with pamphlets and books describing

This chapter is part of Luke Bennett's edited volume Approaching the Ruins: Atmospheres, Bodies and Materiality in Cold War Bunkers. Series: Place, Memory, Affect (Campbell, N. and C. Berberich, eds), Rowman and Littlefield International Limited. Pp. 113-129.

*Please email me if you want the entire chapter*

International Museum Day 8th May 2017

Theme: Museums and Contested Histories: Saying the unspeakable in museums

The International Council of Museums (ICOM) established International Museum Day in 1977 to increase public awareness of the role of museums in the development of society, and it has been steadily gaining momentum ever since. In 2016, International Museum Day garnered record-breaking participation with more than 35,000 museums hosting events in some 145 countries.

By choosing to say the unspeakable in museums, the theme of IMD 2017 looks at how to understand the incomprehensible aspects of contested histories. This was to encourage museums to play an active role in peacefully addressing traumatic histories through mediation and multiple points of view. It also highlighted how the acceptance of a contested history is the first step in envisioning a shared future under the banner of reconciliation. By linking museums and societies in a manner that goes beyond taboo subjects, a better understanding of one another can be gained in going forward.

In order to achieve this, the archaeology office of the Butrint National Park asked if I would create text and image content for four posters that would explore Albania’s militarised communist landscape mushroom-shaped infantry bunkers, their reuse and destruction. This was based on my PhD topic and predominantly utilised research undertaken in the areas of Gjirokastër and the Ksamil Peninsula. The posters were translated into Albanian, designed and printed by the Butrint National Park and exhibited for 4 weeks.

Emily Glass, University of Bristol, 2017

Army strategists and military engineers always opt for the more direct, more effective way in the project of buildings and machines. Contrary to the inertia which appears in the designs and architectures in the civil field, where common applications and inherited infrastructures converge, in the military sector the need to be more effective than the opponent produces an innovation tested and applied immediately.
During the 20th century the tactics and weapons of war have changed dramatically together with the advances in technology. The way up to the 19th century technological innovations used to rest fundamentally on the control of the place and on military architecture. Surprisingly, this phenomenon is still going on today: military engineering is using architecture on a large scale, although very often there are no objective reasons to justify it. On the other hand, architects view artefacts left from military engineering with a mixture of astonishment and admiration. As the fine lines separating art and sculpture tend to fade in the 20th century, this reality made people approach a large number of architectural works with the differences between civil and military fields blurred.

Los ejércitos, los ingenieros militares optan siempre por el camino más directo, más eficaz, en el diseño de sus edificios y máquinas. Frente a las inercias que aparecen en los descubrimientos del diseño y la arquitectura en el campo civil donde convergen usos habituales e infraestructuras heredadas, en el ámbito militar la necesidad de ser más efectivo que el adversario produce una innovación testada y aplicada de forma inmediata. Las tácticas y armas de guerra han cambiado radicalmente durante el siglo XX de la mano de los avances de la tecnología, y si hasta el siglo XIX las innovaciones tecnológicas no solo no cuestionaban, sino podría decirse se apoyaban fundamentalmente en el control del lugar y en la arquitectura militar, veremos cómo esto sorprendentemente sigue ocurriendo, la ingeniería militar utilizará la arquitectura a gran escala, aunque no existan motivos objetivos que lo justifiquen. Por otra parte éste ha sido también un camino de ida y vuelta, la arquitectura mira los artefactos que la ingeniería militar produce con una mezcla de estupor y admiración, y al igual que se diluyen las líneas cada vez más finas que la separan del arte o la escultura, durante el siglo XX la realidad se ha encargado de aproximar ambos campos hasta mezclarlos o, podríamos decir, desdibujarlos en gran número de obras de arquitectura.

Bunkerët e Kommunizmit - Shfrytëzojini për turizëm = Bunkers of Communism - Use it for tourism

Contributed to an interview by Engjëll Serjani for Gazeta Shqip in 2010 regarding my PhD research on Albanian communist bunkers and how they could form an important element for future communist heritage tourism.

Published 20th October 2010, Pages 28-29.

In the 1960s Switzerland started to build the world's largest system of civil defense shelters. Ever since, the tiny country has represented the gold standard for bunker design and technology, attracting worldwide interest amongst scientists, political elites, and private consumers. This essay examines the development, forms, and global reach of Swiss bunker expertise. It emphasizes the knowledge transfer and the networks of cooperation with West Germany and the United States upon which the career of Swiss bunker research was founded. At the same time, attention is drawn to the translation processes by which knowledge was locally adapted and technoscientific expertise was gained, strategically diffused, and marketed, thereby securing Swiss predominance in the field. In sum, the present study of Swiss bunker expertise showcases the often-ridiculed civil defense programs of the atomic age as a fertile ground for historians of cold war science and technology, allowing us to reveal a whole range of relevant and detailed engagements with nuclear practices and technology apart from completed atomic bombs. The essay also makes a case for exploring cold war scientific and technological achievements in a transnational frame while not losing sight of local conditions, national and economic interests, and narratives.

Debates on risk have largely assumed risk to be the outcome of calculative practices. There is a related assumption that risk objects come only in one form, and that the reason not everything can be transformed into a risk is because of the difficulties in calculating and creating universal quantitative comparisons. In this article, building on recent studies of preparedness that have broadened understandings of risk, we provide an analysis of how preparedness measures might themselves produce risk, in particular through risk’s durable instantiation, or what we call ‘concretisation’. Our empirical focus is on how government agencies in two countries shifted their attention from the risk of nuclear attack during the Cold War to an all hazards approach to preparedness. Comparing the mid- to late-twentieth century histories of the UK and Switzerland, we show that both countries shifted from focusing from a single risk to plural risks. This shift cannot be explained by a change in prevailing calculative practices, or by the fact that the risks changed historically. Instead, it is driven by historically specific changes in how risks are produced and reproduced in relation to how materialisations of risk operate over time.

Intensification of agriculture and land consolidation policy induced the removal of most natural features from farmland, reducing the habitat of many wild species. Abandoned WWII bunkers, unaffected by land consolidation, are a potential shelter for wildlife and could be used as burrows by carnivores such as European badgers and red foxes.
We explored 182 abandoned bunkers in a farmland area in eastern France in summer 2016. Bunkers were located in crops, forests, or groves. Over a three-month period, signs of presence, the number and type of burrows inside the bunkers and in their immediate vicinity were noted. Environmental variables were obtained using GIS, and binomial models were created to reveal parameters influencing bunker use by badgers and foxes. The degree of bunkers burrowing was used as a co-variable. Twenty-one groves without bunkers were also studied in order to estimate the added value of bunkers in groves.
Badger and fox tracks were found on 34% of the sites, and burrows on 24% of them with similar rates for badgers and foxes. Animals used partially buried bunkers more than underground or overground bunkers. The sizes of annual crops and urban areas around the bunker were positively correlated with bunker use. The presence of a bunker in groves was positively correlated with the presence of burrows in groves.

Cambridge Heritage Research Group Talk - 1st November 2018

Abstract: From the late 1960s communist Albania embarked upon a bunkerisation programme that was both ideologically tied to Enver Hoxha’s adoption of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and a defensive response to the country’s self-imposed isolation to all but China. The result was the installation of innumerable small personnel bunkers laid out in multiple rows and as individual positions across the whole country, with heavy concentrations around borders, towns, military bases and transport networks. The achievement of manufacturing, installing and maintaining these bunkers was a testament to how a country can utilise its population to create a collective megastructure that acted as a form of mental and physical walled barrier towards the outside world while encouraging an internal siege mentality.

Using the results of fieldwork, this talk will examine how mushroom-shaped bunkers in two southern border areas of Albania were perceived and engaged with during communism and discuss how this changed after the 1991 collapse. As these omnipresent objects have been situated partly under communism and partly within democracy, they comprise various narratives which contribute towards the formation of cultural biographies. Through this, it will be demonstrated how the mushroom-shaped bunker is an object that has become recontextualised and transmuted over time. Finally, the impact that destruction and tourism has had upon this particular form of communist heritage will also be explored to argue how the mushroom-shaped bunker has emerged as the unofficial icon of Albania.