Invitation: EHU International Workshop “Infrastructure and Urbanity in the Baltic Region”
European Humanities University’s (EHU) Laboratory of Critical Urbanism invites scholars from the fields of Anthropology, Sociology, History, Geography and Economics to take part in the International Workshop “Infrastructure and Urbanity in the Baltic Region”.
The international workshop will take place on May 4-6 in Vilnius and Visaginas (Lithuania) and will be focused on the shifting meanings of infrastructures of cities currently being radically redefined through modes of technological innovation, geographical rescaling and concomitant mobilities. The aim of the workshop is to critically discuss what is involved in the transformation from the modernist era organisation of urban space into current conditions of urbanity, and to speculate as to what may be further developments and consequences of this. Within this setting the workshop asks particularly about the changing modes of sovereignty as traced in various dimensions of city dynamics.
NB! The program is available online.
In the era of late socialism and late modernist capitalism, urban space was the very obvious product of the dictates of the state. In socialist cities, political decisions at the state level + infrastructure modernisation generated particular modes of habitation, work and citizenship. In the case of Visaginas, a new town built to service the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant starting from the mid 1970s, in many ways this looked like a success story of modern urbanism: the town is close to a cheap energy source and place of work, pedestrian-friendly, with a well-planned micro-district structure, a highly developed school and culture infrastructure, pleasantly embedded in nature, with decorative architecture features in well designed public spaces, etc. Problems started when the nuclear technology exploited in Visaginas was deemed inappropriate in the new scalar context of the EU after the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. Thus, after the end of state socialism in 1991 the inhabitants of Visaginas were confronted with a set of major changes in a complex setting of multi-lateral and multi-scalar influences. We consciously organize the workshop in Visaginas. While its history is rather specific, our discussion of the various scales in which urban space is produced changed will place this particular case in a broader European context.
For further details, please contact Dr. Benjamin Cope (Laboratory of Critical Urbanism) urbanism @ ehu.lt
The workshop is organized with support of Baltisch-Deutsches Hochschulkontor (Riga) and in cooperation with Herder-Institut Marburg, Urban Institute Riga, Tallinn University, EHU Center for German Studies, German Historical Institute Warsaw and Laimikis.lt.