Reprogramming the library in Visaginas: a multifunctional public institution for a nuclear town
ENThis chapter summarizes and reflects on the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism’s applied work on the functional re-programming of Visaginas public library, and also presents the results of this work. This re-programming is disciplined by our research into the town’s context: both of the conditions after nuclear energy and the path determined by the town’s initial nuclear specialization. The key components of this context are the temporal dimension of nuclear de-industrialization, the meaning of the nuclear industry for the Lithuanian national narrative and the potential of this Soviet nuclear town’s exclusive welfare legacy. The main value orientations of our work on the library re-programming are the need to increase the library’s social inclusivity and functional diversity in comparison to the status quo, as well as the need to embrace the tendency of digitalization (and, more broadly, of a diversification of the ways in which knowledge is produced and consumed). The presented functional re-programming is anchored to the current library building. In particular, the material condition for the reprogramming scenario is to preserve the building’s current modernist form. This re-programming is developed for a single building, yet it is also co-articulated with an urban scale planning scenario. The spatial concept for this co-articulation is the Knowledge Park: a framework for the integrated development of Visaginas cultural and knowledge sectors. Hence, our aim is to create a spatial scenario for the library as a strategic institution and infrastructure within configurations of the production, archiving and distribution of knowledge in and around Visaginas. The argument of this chapter consists of four steps.First, we discuss how the specifically nuclear legacy of Visaginas challenges urbanist work. Second, we contextualize the work of the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism in Visaginas in the stream of the growing popularity of the urban living labs approach to studying and designing cities. Third, we discuss the research decisions we took to better understand the status quo and the potential of the Visaginas public library’s main building. And, fourth, we present the design decisions regarding the reprogramming of the library in the broader context of the development and planning of the town’s cultural and knowledge sectors. [p. 126].
- Conceptual principles of the planning of modern public libraries.. LIBER quarterly 2004, 14, 2, 1-10.
- Mapping Visaginas: sources of urbanity in a former mono-functional town. Vilnius : Vilniaus dailės akademijos leidykla, 2016. 141 p. + 1 sulankst. žml.
- Perfect representations of soviet planned space: mono‐industrial towns in the Soviet Baltic Republics in the 1950s-1980s.. Scandinavian journal of history 2008, 33 (3), 226-246.
- Social consequences of closing the Ignalina NPP. Geografija 2001, 37, 1, 69-75.
