The Absence of the Past as Future for the City: Reconstruction as Situated Modern Urbanism in Post-War Milano, Rotterdam, and Warsaw.

Following the Second World War, numerous European cities grappled with the challenging task of reconstruction. Despite the transformative impact of these reconstruction projects on the urban landscape of Europe, the historiography of urbanism tends to acknowledge them only minorly, often reducing them to the mere creation of new housing developments or city centres. However, the reconstruction plans for European cities went beyond surface-level planning of neighbourhoods or central city areas. They were intricately connected to specific instances of urbicide and involved elaborate negotiations with pre-existing social, legal, economic, technical and morphological conditions, as well as with prevailing agencies. Focusing on the cities of Milan, Rotterdam and Warsaw, this article argues that, due to their charged relationship with the existing fabric, urban reconstruction projects appear as alternative approaches to post-war urbanism. They emerge as exemplars of a ‘situated modern urbanism’ distinct from their counterparts, as they establish a modern urbanistic approach grounded in a highly nuanced understanding of the dimensions of time and agency.