Re-tooling knowledge infrastructures in a nuclear town
ENRe-Tooling Knowledge Infrastructures in a Nuclear Town is the result of five applied urbanist summer schools on the future of nuclear town of Visaginas, organized by the European Humanities University’s Laboratory of Critical Urbanism annually from 2016 to 2020. We look at space/society relations inherent in nuclear development in order to build a research and design scaffolding for nuclear towns after their productive phase. The book chapters describe and make sense of the process of city/industry disentanglements since the beginning of the decommissioning of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, Visaginas core enterprise. The main spatial site that framed our work on Visaginas knowledge infrastructures relevant in 2015-2020 is the town’s public library as potentially a strategic institution and facility in the process of the disconnection between the INPP and the town. Although this work has resulted in concrete design proposals, the library building was only a starting point and a puzzle to identify and start re-tooling spatial and social connections within Visaginas knowledge and cultural sectors, as well as their relations to other forms of spatiality.
- P. 18-41. Is there a nuclear urbanism?
- P. 42-55. Nuclear energy in transition. The Ignalina nuclear power plant from Soviet to Lithuanian rule
- P. 56-80. Building and dismantling the Ignalina nuclear power plant: social and technical media packages
- P. 82-98. When private and public react together: regimes of privatization and their consequences in Visaginas
- P. 100-122. Hand-making modernist forms: the visual environment in Visaginas from the 1970s to the 2010s
- P. 126-158. Reprogramming the library in Visaginas: a multifunctional public institution for a nuclear town
- P. 160-173. Libraries in peripheral cities as triggers of social change
- P. 174-194. Representing migration past, present and future: Visaginas institutions between cultural preservation and transnational knowledge
- P. 196-217. The Memory of Chernobyl in the Visaginas urban landscape
- P. 218-243. Typo Visaga - a collaborative design project
