Echoes of resilience: Urbicide, wartime memorials, and urban identity in Chongqing

Source abstract

During World War II, Chongqing endured severe urbicide from sustained aerial bombardment, targeting not only its infrastructure but also the social relations, symbolic meanings, and collective life embedded in urban space. This paper examines how Chongqing’s responses to wartime destruction, through memorials and preserved air-raid shelters, have shaped its contemporary urban identity and collective memory. Employing a qualitative research design, the study draws on semi-structured interviews with residents, urban planners, and historians, complemented by municipal archival materials and site-based observations. Focusing on key commemorative sites, including the Anti-Japanese War Memorial and preserved underground shelters, the analysis explores how urban memory is produced, governed, and recontextualized over time. The findings show that these sites function simultaneously as anchors of collective remembrance and as arenas of memory governance, while also serving as catalysts for urban renewal, heritage tourism, and place branding. Through processes of selective preservation, adaptive reuse, and commodification, wartime memory is actively integrated into Chongqing’s contemporary urban development. By foregrounding a non-Western case, this study challenges Euro-American–centric understandings of urbicide and demonstrates how post-urbicidal recovery unfolds through contested remembrance and everyday urban practice. The findings contribute to broader debates on urban resilience, memory politics, and post-conflict urbanism.