Histories of architecture and design have conventionally emphasized the wartime advances in mechanization and standardization opened new fields of inquiry in the aftermath of World War I. Fewer histories have focused on how rampant imperial and colonial militarism became entangled with this bureaucratization and institution building; indeed, the State of Emergency not only precipitated rapidly circulating goods within the context of semi-planned economies, it also expanded the logic of governmentality and its tacit violence in an unrestrained fashion. This special issue thus embeds the creation of wartime and interwar institutions into broader frameworks of imperial and colonial warfare, while also mapping the development of survival, coping, and resistance mechanisms by those forced to contend with everyday scarcity on the ground. Covering a wide geographic range—from Russia to East Africa—this special issue highlights a) the material, spatial, and institutional developments between the front and the home front and the gendered dimensions of labor in imperial warfare; b) the militarization of citizens and the transformation of civic landscapes through wartime socio-scientific managerial measures; and c) the reinforcement of, and resistance against, colonial and imperial practices of making both territory and subjects through the use of viewing and mapping devices.

Cover image: Evacuees in Kovel, Ukraine, July 12, 1916. © Austrian National Library, Image Archives.