War and military practices have shaped and reshaped cities and suburbia for millennia. Concentrated settlements hidden behind high walls were an important pattern of defence at a time before planes and aerial warfare. From the early twentieth century, decentralized settlements and urban deconcentration have provided better protection against military attacks. The Japanese military developed suburban settlements in the 1930s knowing the potential danger of wars fought in the dense cities mostly built out of wood. Modernist planners in post-war Germany proposed high-rise buildings in greenery, based on their experience of firestorms created by bombs and rubble that blocked streets. In the US, the defence industry was an integral part of the national suburbanization process. During WWII, the Mutual Ownership Defense Housing Division promoted the construction of suburban housing projects for defence workers and their families. Post-war suburbanization was fuelled by discharged veterans, while German-based US military housing settlements became a way to apply American ideals to the Cold War’s easternmost frontier. In Israel, American-style suburbs housing acting military officers formed a governmental tool to stimulate the development of peripheral towns and to facilitate territorial expansion. In conclusion, this chapter reflects on modern warfare in the design of contemporary cities.

During the past five decades, the neoliberal market economy has become one of the most influential forces in the process of spatial production, transforming cities worldwide by subjecting them to the rationale of global finance. In a world where religions and ideologies continue to lose their influence, financial supremacy has turned into an adequate substitute. The global nature and overarching impact of neoliberalism has made it the research focus of a vast cohort of urban and architectural scholars, historians, theoreticians, geographers, and economists, leading to a significant body of literature that discusses the relationship between the market economy and the built environment on all scales. This “globality” of neoliberalism is recently being disputed by its widely-accepted depiction as a western phenomenon with varied local implementations. Post-socialist neoliberalism, we argue, is not an isolated occurrence but rather an extreme case that accentuates the distinct features of neoliberal spatial transformations, making its characteristics more evident and traceable. This thematic issue challenges the notion of neoliberalism as solely a post-Fordist Keynesian phenomenon, proposing a new theoretical framework that redefines the neoliberalization of the built environment as a global spectacle with diverse, yet analogous, localized expressions across various spatial scales.