UMA in Slavutych

The town of Slavutych hosted an interdisciplinary summer school "The Idea of the City: Reality Check". Participants from 12 countries worked on three themes, each aimed at getting a grasp of the town (in the past, at present, and in the future) through their own research lens.

Natalia Otrishchenko, project manager of Urban Stories, participated in "Urban Practices, Memories, and Imaginations" and shared her experience of researching cities through oral history methodology. The workshop explored changes in the symbolic landscape of Slavutych by interviewing local inhabitants and analyzing texts and visual images.

As part of the school, the UMA team presented its activities and showed a series of newsreels about the construction of Soviet atomograds in the 1970s. The newsreels had been digitized and recently added to the Urban Video collections.

The UMA team also processed and digitized visual materials from the Slavutych Local History Museum and the Chornobyl nuclear power plant as well as from the private collections of local residents. Photographs from the construction of Pripyat and Slavutych will soon be added to the UMA collections and become available on the Urban Image Database webpage.