Slavutych, located 186 km north of Kiev, 50 km east of Chernobyl, was built from scratch between 1987 and 1989 as a replacement town for the inhabitants of Prypyat, which had to be evacuated in consequence of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. Completed in the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the city can be seen as the last Soviet planned ‚ideal city‘.

In the ad-lib design studio „Atomograd. Mapping Slavutych“, architecture students from the Lviv Polytechnic National University and the Vienna University of Technology examined in individual fieldworks how the lives and daily routines of the inhabitants are influenced by the specific urban and social conditions of the planned town. During their on-site research they developed hand drawn cartographies and used them as tools for communication with the locals. The question of the future of an atomic city has always been in the foreground, whose main employer – to this day the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl – is continuously cutting jobs and thus depriving the city of its livelihood.