The guest editors for this special issue of Urban History are both Canadian, and for many Canadians the hottest conflict of the Cold War might have been the 1972 ‘Summit Series’, eight hockey games played between the Russian Red Army team and an all-star cast of Canadian professionals. Without delving into the sporting glories of the series (Canada won it, four games to three, with one tie), we can aver that the event was as much about diplomacy, national identity and political-economic rivalry in the context of the Cold War as it was about skating and scoring.

Between 1950 and 1964, as a result of slight federal policy shifts, Cold War civil defence went from a pro-urban policy dedicated to the preservation of communities to an anti-urban policy focused on social control in the wake of an attack. Civil defence volunteers in Baltimore along with some of the city's civil defence paid staff, who had bought the federal message that they could protect themselves and their communities for nuclear war, allied with anti-nuclear activists against an increasingly militarized programme – one that by 1961 prioritized post-attack policing and de-emphasized the imperative to preserve urban neighbourhoods.

Focusing on the example of municipal interventions in defence, this article proposes to evaluate the role of cities and towns in Cold War policies. It discusses how, in the early 1980s, residents in Great Britain, New Zealand, West Germany and the USA claimed responsibility for defence and (dis)armament policies in the name of their respective city or home town. To justify this claim, protagonists not only portrayed urban settlements as probable targets of nuclear war. They also highlighted cities and towns as concrete places and drew attention to locality as a scale that might bear specific potentials for participation and empowerment. Yet a closer analysis of such initiatives in the four countries reveals that municipal activities for peace and disarmament developed in far more complex spatial relations than references to the ‘local’ as a scale of involvement might imply.

Focusing on Liverpool in the early 1980s, this article argues that localized approaches to Cold War cities can help us understand the impact of national nuclear policy on cultures of local government and everyday life. After an articulation of cultural politics in the early 1980s, this article suggests that nuclear cultures that existed in Liverpool were shaped by ideas and assumptions discursively reinforced at both a national and local level.

The final phase of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in 1975 is widely regarded as the high point of détente. This article discusses the staging and legacy of the CSCE from the perspective of its host city, Helsinki. The article examines how the Finnish initiative to host the conference became enmeshed with Helsinki's municipal politics and how the CSCE's and Finland's neutrality were used by the Helsinki authorities to project an attractive image of their city. The article further highlights the Helsinki Summit as a public spectacle with which a large number of local residents engaged.

The Cold War era created a gap between two opposing ideologies manifested on all social, economic and spatial levels. However, cities and their material expression maintained their significance, acting as valuable ideological resources.The specific position of Yugoslavia during the Cold War shaped the political background in which Belgrade and its planning and architectural scene developed intensive professional activities and international interactions thus overcoming global tensions. Covering the period from 1948 until 1980, this article identifies the main channels of professional exchange and dissemination beyond the constraints of the Iron Curtain, as well as their influence on the production of urban space in Belgrade.

The last military dictatorship to come to power in Argentina is most well known for its atrocious human rights violations. However, this campaign of terror represents just one act carried out in the regime's efforts to counter leftist activities. The military sought to provide responsive administration as a means to pacify the nation. In the national capital, Buenos Aires, the military pursued a comprehensive set of urban reforms meant to streamline and control the metropolis. Cold War ideologies deeply penetrated the every-day and profoundly changed how citizens lived in Buenos Aires.

The reconstruction of Managua following the 1972 earthquake laid bare the contradictions of modernization theory that justified the US alliance with Latin American dictators in the name of democracy in the Cold War. Based on an idealized model of urban development, US planners developed a plan to ‘decentralize’ both the city of Managua and the power of the US-backed Somoza dictatorship. In the process, they helped augment the power of the dictator and create a city its inhabitants found intolerable. The collective rejection of the city, the dictator and his alliance with the United States, helped propel Nicaragua toward its 1979 revolution and turned the country into a Cold War battleground.

The present bibliography is a continuation of and a complement to those published in the Urban History Yearbook 1974–91 and Urban History from 1992. The arrangement and format closely follows that of previous years. The list of abbreviations identifies only those periodicals from which articles cited this year have been taken, though many other journals are also checked.