Events

Summer School “Mapping Visaginas: Sources of Urbanity in Post-Industrial Cities” was organized by the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism (European Humanities University) in order to bring together students from Germany, Belarus and Lithuania for two weeks of explorations of the future of mono-functional towns. These two weeks were composed of a mix of lectures, seminars, excursions and supervised fieldwork.

The goal of all these activities was to juxtapose the cultural, architectural, nuclear and social realities of Visaginas in the comparative perspective of Lithuania, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Germany. After studying all these dimensions, students engaged in designing instruments that could be used to further gather information needed in order to start to realistically project the town’s future.  

The idea of the school was that the map format is the best suited to blend artistic and research practices, and to enable a space for the cooperation of students of different professional specializations – from architecture and visual art to geography and social science. In the course of two weeks we have met and interviewed dozens of Visaginas experts from the fields of governance, spatial planning, activism, culture and industry. In addition, we have engaged in the life of the town by interviewing people on the streets and organizing focus group meetings. The four resulting projects that the students have developed stem from the preliminary analysis of this information and from the assessment of both micro- and macro- constraints on the town’s future.

The first project deals with the issue of the town’s specific heritage and identity, and, in particular with the as yet undecided meaning of its nuclear history. The second project has focused on the possible tools that can be used in ageing former mono-functional towns to foster the creation of public spaces by means of youth-driven interventions and institutional networking. The third project worked on the identification of actors and projects that have the potential to activate the pedestrian Sedulinos aleja in the broader context of Visaginas businesses and state services. The fourth project resulted in the creation of a communication game combined with a survey, which simultaneously gathers data about inhabitants’ attitudes to the town’s built environment and fosters participatory planning.

We kindly invite you to our follow-up meeting “Mapping Visaginas: Sources of Urbanity”, where participants will present results of the Summer School and will discuss it with a wider audience, on October 22 (Thursday) at 4.30 pm in Vilnius, Tauro g. 12-407.

Please find more details available on Facebook event page. Specialized brochure, containing results of the Summer school, is also available online.