08.02.2022

Presentation of a book edited by Siarhei Liubimau and Benjamin Cope “Re-tooling Knowledge Infrastructures in a Nuclear Town (Vilnius Academy of Arts Press, 2021)

This book started in 2016 as a search for concepts, empirical registers and urbanist tools to tackle the dead-end of Soviet industrial modernist mono-functionalism. The empirical setting for this search was the energy town of Visaginas, planned and built in the 1970s and 1980s with the sole purpose of servicing the major electricity provider to Soviet Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Kaliningrad: the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant. From 2010, the INPP no longer generates energy and is in the process of being dismantled. Visaginas thus is facing dilemmas over its purpose after nuclear power.
The scaffolding that gave rise to the book is five applied urbanist summer schools on the town’s future, organized by the European Humanities University’s Laboratory of Critical Urbanism annually from 2016 to 2020. This period involved preparatory research to make the summer schools’ work processes empirically grounded, as well as the research and urbanist proposals resulting from the schools themselves (each lasting for 10-14 days) and side projects of the schools’ faculty, participants and social partners. The chapters of this book comprise both research centered and proposal centered contributions, aiming to set-up and sustain an intersection of research, educational and urban development approaches to Visaginas’s manifold dilemmas: all subsumed under the prefix “post-”, but opening up different horizons for conceptual and applied urbanist work. Those horizons involve various perspectives on mono-functionalism, the nuclear, industrialism, modernism, Soviet socialism and the Chernobyl catastrophe, as well as on exceptionalism in terms of political decision making. In order to conceptually and empirically saturate the “post-” prefix, we initially aimed to describe and make sense of the process of the de-hermitization of city/industry relations since the beginning of the INPP decommissioning.

Siarhei Liubimau is a co-founder of the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism (2007) and Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the European Humanities University in Vilnius (2014). He has been a fellow at the Central European University (Budapest), the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna) and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. In fall 2020, he is visiting lecturer at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

Benjamin Cope is a co-founder of the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, where from 2002-2020 he was a lecturer in Critical Urbanism, Gender Studies and Visual and Cultural Studies. He is a member of the Anthropology Undisciplined Research Unit at the IAE PAN, and associate researcher at the Fundacja Nasz Wybór in Warsaw.