This Winter School is organized by the European Humanities University’s Laboratory of Critical Urbanism in order to bring together participants from Germany, Belarus and Lithuania in a two-week course mapping social practice in relation to the built environment of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius and the smaller town of Druskininkai. The school will be composed of a mix of lectures, seminars, excursions, a cultural programme and supervised fieldwork, during the course of which the students will be guided in the process of how to research the social and spatial relations of contemporary Vilnius. The product of the students’ work at the school will be to create an exploratory mapping project of a particular dimension of the life of this post-socialist city.

Twenty years after the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, debates about what sort of urban forms have emerged in their place and where these forms are heading are still open, a phenomenon clearly visible in the case of Vilnius. For while the city is most strongly associated with its increasingly tourist visited, UNESCO acclaimed old town, more representative of the complexities of post-socialist urbanisation are a district just outside the centre where contemporary skyscrapers stand back-to-back with wooden housing, or the swathes of socialist modernist housing estates where the majority of the city’s inhabitants live. These diverse contexts raise a series of questions:

- what does it mean to refer to today’s Vilnius as a post-socialist city?
- what was specific about socialist modernist urbanism in Vilnius, a city with a special status as the USSR’s window on the West, influenced both by a Baltic link with Scandinavia and its own multicultural urban history?
- what role do pre-socialist architectural forms and the city’s pre-war multi-cultural experience play in the post-socialist city after the destruction and deportation of the local population as an outcome of WWII?
- how are current social practices in Vilnius a product of, or a reaction to, the specific configuration of urban forms that the city inherited after socialism?
- how do post-socialist urban forms impact on post-socialist citizenship and statehood more widely?

In order to explore these questions, the Winter School will guide the students through in-depth case studies of two districts of Vilnius: one, the socialist-modernist sleeping district of Karoliniškės/Lazdynai and the other, Šnipiškės, a district that combines earlier 20th century wooden housing with post-modernist skyscrapers of the newly established business district of Vilnius. Notwithstanding their stark differences, both these districts might be considered cases of post-socialist urbanism in that they emerged as urban forms existing in Vilnius at the end of the socialist period encountered the new spatial and economic dynamics of post-socialism. The diversity of these two districts, constituting different extremes of post-socialist urban experience, is what makes it interesting to analyse them together.

The main methodology for our joint work within the Winter School will be mapping. The contemporary moment, in particular through the availability of digital mapping technologies, is witnessing a proliferation of the production of maps. This phenomenon creates new possibilities, which we will explore and expand upon through an open approach to mapping that considers high and low-tech strategies, and visual and narrative approaches to representing the life of urban spaces. It is a premise of the school that the multiplication and diversification of maps requires both creative experimentation and critical reflection on what is involved in the process of mapping, and this reflection on how to make maps appropriate to spaces will be an important element of the school.

Within this emergent paradigm post-socialist cities are undermapped, in terms both of the quantity and types of maps representing them. One goal of the Winter School is to contribute to filling this gap through the production of diverse, creative and empirically grounded projects mapping the case study districts. In order to stimulate this process, we propose two distinct approaches to mapping: one focusing on gathering local urban histories and drawing upon mental maps of the inhabitants, the other on mapping infrastructure and media in everyday use. Both approaches will be used in both field locations.

The Winter School is organised by the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism at the European Humanities University, a Belarusian university in exile in Vilnius, in collaboration with Lithuanian partners working at Vilnius University and Vilnius Gedimino Technical University and in NGOs such as Archfondas and Laimkis.lt. It is our common intention that the participants on the winter school will work in genuinely mixed group of students from Belarus, Lithuania and Germany. As well as being international, we also intend to be multi-disciplinary, believing that such an approach is necessary to understand and represent the multi-layered nature of today’s cities. The school is therefore open to applications from students of urban studies, sociology, cultural studies, history, geography, anthropology, architecture and students of film and photography, as well as all students interested in the development of urban forms and the transformations of the societies of Eastern Europe. Through a multi-disciplinary bottom-up approach to exploring the everyday life of cities, we believe the school offers rich possibilities for a deeper understanding of the spaces of contemporary Eastern Europe.