The process of disconnection between the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant and the town of Visaginas leads to a new stage of urbanization. The result is an ongoing reconfiguration of relationships between social and material infrastructures, institutes of power and meanings of sites, collective habits and individual interests. These realignments provoke political, entrepreneurial, technological, artistic and scholarly responses. By documenting, juxtaposing and examining these responses, the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism aims at a better understanding of a newly emerging form of urbanity in Visaginas, of its specificity and resources. Locally applied empirical and theoretical work analyses “post-” changes as determined not only temporally, but also spatially: i.e. not only by the temporal sequence(s), but also by its specific multi-scalar interpenetrations and closures. Mapping, understood in this sense, opens up new possibilities for analyzing the modes of causality of social processes implied under the term “post-”.

Mapping Visaginas is the second book in a series promoting Critical Urbanism as a way of analyzing the changing relationships between citizens, the state and the international context in shaping urban spaces in Central- and Eastern Europe. In this participatory research into the former mono-functional nuclear town of Visaginas in the East of Lithuania, we used mapping as a process-oriented technique to explore its sources of urbanity.