The Future That Hasn't Come: Expertise, Planning, and the Late Soviet City

We are pleased to invite you to the lecture by Natalia Otrischenko, which completes this year's series "Let's Have a City...".

How did city planners envision the development of Lviv in the 1970s and 1980s? What concepts did they use in describing the urban future? What heritage did Soviet urban planning traditions leave us? What can we learn from the past imagination of the future? The researcher's presentation will take us back to late Soviet Lviv and allow us to reflect on the future that professional architects sought to realize and the tools they relied on.

During the lecture, Natalia Otrishchenko will outline the peculiarities of the institutions responsible for the city's spatial development during the period of state socialism. She will discuss the formation of critical voices within the planning system and why this criticism could not change the prevailing approaches and practices. Using these examples of architecture and urban planning, the researcher will talk about professional autonomy and the mechanisms that ensure it.

Another part of the lecture will be a talk about urban planning expertise and engagement challenges, which directly resonates with discussions about the reconstruction of Ukraine after 2022. Through the prism of the connection between the "problem of legitimacy" and the "problem of extension" (Collins and Evans 2007), Natalia will show the field of urban development as a space of tension between different stakeholders, each of which mobilizes its arguments to build the preferred future.

Credits

Cover Image: Panorama of the construction of the city of Prypyat' // Local History Museum of Slavutych and Chornobyl NPP // Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History

Gallery: Olya Klymuk