The contributions explore the experiences of urban devastation in the wake of the Second World War, with a particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe, where destruction was most profound. They ask for the connections between urbicide and genocide, the wars of extinction of cities and peoples and what this meant for re-establishing urban communities, in particular during and after Soviet-style state socialism. While the German and Allied bombing campaigns in the West have received much attention in recent years, this issue shifts the research agenda to cities that were directly effected by the fierce life-or-death struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This includes not only bombing, but planned devastation (as in the case of Warsaw), the transformation of cities into battlefields (Berlin), starvation (Leningrad) as well as genocide and forced exchange of populations (Lviv).