An Urbanist Visits the Last City Built by the Soviet Union - Slavutych, Ukraine

The town of Slavutych is a nerdy destination for any urbanist worth their salt but it remains unknown to many. This is the last city that the Soviet Union built.
But it was built in a hurry between 1986 and 1988 to house the staff and families of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, after one reactor exploded in April 1986. The town where the workers lived - Pripyet - was evacuated days after the explosion and they were never allowed back. Three other reactors still worked and people needed to keep them running so the Soviet Union decided to build a new town from scratch nearby, in the pine forests of Northern Ukraine. Far enough away from the contamination zone but close enough for a commute - 50 km.
Mikael finally visits the town after wanting to for many years. A typical “ideal town” by Soviet urban planning standards, it is nonetheless unique. Eight republics of the Soviet Union volunteered architects, planners and construction workers to build the town fast. Each republic built a neighbourhood - or quarter - in the style of the architecture of their home region. The quarters were named after the capital cities of the republics - and Russia had three cities donating time and money. Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Yerevan, Baku, Tbilisi, Moscow, Leningrad and Belgorod.
There is nowhere in the world like Slavutych and the town now faces an existential dilemma now that the rest of the Chernobyl facility was closed in 2001.
Thanks to Bogdan from canactions.com/uk/home/ for the road trip and helping with filming.
Small bits of additional footage from the amazing @ukrainernet channel.
#ukraine #sovietunion #architecture #urbanplanning #urbanism #slavutych #chernobyl #pripyet #ussr #townplanning #townscaper #city #cities #citybuilder #urbandesign #travel #travelblogger #славутич

[@simaskup7667]

If you want to feel kind a same vibe visit Visaginas in Lithuania. It is a bit older town (built around 1976), but shares some story. It was built in really nice place in a middle of nowhere to serve nuclear power plant workers. USSR were really obsesed to give the best possible conditions for nuclear workers and families so the town planing was based on family friendly design. As town was build quickly (not in a rush like Slavutych but still quick) many different building factories were involved and each building block is different. Now after nuclear station has been shut down there are not so many jobs and people started moving out so some buildings are abandoned. Recenly people has found it once again, this time as town with beautiful nature and nice lakes.

[@mikep584]

Thanks for the video! I lived un Slavutych in mid 90s when it was about 30k big, and it was very cozy, walkable and bikable - no hills at all, and only one circular city bus rout existed and the bus was always empty. It's also true that every neighbourhood had its sport facility, and each of them hosted a professional sport section - gymnastics, karate, judo, basketball, tennis ans so on. Slavutych also has an industrial satelite town of Lisovyi, next train stop towards Belarus.

[@Nebufelis]

This is so fascinating. Two years, and you'd think they'd have had other things in mind but unique housing styles and bike lanes - but there they are. It makes me doubly frustrated about my hown town of Vienna that builds whole quarters without a rush and with lots of money, but the architecture is just live- and loveless profit maximization, and good, safe bike lanes are nowhere to be seen. But oh well. :)

[@bramvanduijn8086]

It is not actually profit-maximization to build car-dependent. Bike lanes safe money.

[@Nebufelis]

@@bramvanduijn8086 You are of course right - for city and society bike lanes are better, as are good buildings. But to understand this, people have to take more into account than just building costs, and that is unfortunately beyond the scope of many politicians.

[@marcusott2973]

​@@Nebufelis the cheap money in the last 15 years has truly fueled some bad city building decisions. And so much of it isn't just ugly and badly placed or planned, but also empty purely a cold storage for money, which really infuriates me. The city itself is still to well laid out to be fu**ed by a couple of stupid decisions. The safe bike lanes will come eventually, because over the next 10-15 years we will see a steep decline of personal car ownership in Urban areas.

[@Nebufelis]

@@marcusott2973 Very beautifully said, even if it's a sad observation.

[@jerickfreyre]

7:59 seems like the name of Moscow has been torn off.

[@antonbabichok5439]

Deservedly

[@Ryan_hey]

I love the city center. So much of it is not dedicated to cars that it's wild to see, at least as an American.

[@PerkeleKeyboardist]

Somewhat humane development as for USSR, wide streets with walking, cycling, and automotive space well separated apart, and the overall accessibility of services made me think of Slavutych as something similar to Eindhoven, which was also built as a mono-city to cater for one giant production facility (Philips), and then had to re-arrange itself into a city with wide number of businesses and things to do, which Slavutych is on a verge of.

[@SianaGearz]

Rail is an important prerequisite insofar as that you need rail to efficiently transport the construction materials at such a massive scale to the destination. Building out rail to a region without rail would delay the whole project by years!

[@ArtemMelanich]

Bike lines have a caveat - when they were build, workers\designers forgot to add 'ramps' (not sure how to call it properly) to go up the edge, so they were mostly useless for years, until maybe 10 years ago they added ones seen at 11:00 that are also barely usable. Only recently some parts were being rebuild bit by bit to proper standards, but war fucked that up.

[@bramvanduijn8086]

I wanna live there. Just need to figure out how to create a job there :D. Is there a decent internet connection? Because a walkable city in a forest with good internet would actually attract a lot of people who can work remotely.

[@denhuchenko]

Internet is pretty decent there (or at least it was before the war broke out). And I also think that once the war is over, Slavutych indeed may become a refuge for all people tired of living in big cities.

[@yoriko_takaoka]

Internet here is good and inexpensive! Us$ 5 a month.

[@denisdrozdoff2926]

Ukraine mostly skipped dial up/adsl era of the internet and jumped headfirst into broadband, in most cases you can have a gigabit FTTH in a three street village for $5ish/mo (signup fee would depend on remoteness (but less then 50 bucks probably).

[@SionTJobbins]

Yerevan is easily the soon to be trendy part and best designed.

[@CrapKerouac]

Interesting, thanks for the upload, and it's good you see you. I used to watch you on The Knowledge Network. I loved your show, so I'm glad such an erudite chap as yourself has another place to share your passion for urbanism. Great content, keep up the good work.

[@Maxime_K-G]

Interesting! Every country has its own newest city and it's always interesting to see what those places are like as they often represent the peak urban planning knowledge at the time. Be it Houten in the Netherlands, LLN in Belgium or Seaside in Florida as you mentioned. I'm sure there are more.

[@ruwiki]

very interesting!

[@vaiyaktikasolarbeam1906]

it has eerie but cool vibes

[@innerrevision]

Arts college, Audio and Visual Media Production Facilities...Strong incentives for returning war refugees to relocate there esp. creatives, educators and LGBTQ folks. That - and crafts-people to restore current architecture & build sets as well as gardeners and landscape designers. Big film tax credits like we do in Vancouver, but also really incentivize all the other supportive arts... The differing buildings can backdrop many unique stories. What war would harm - art will heal... ....juuuust spit-ballin' here...haha

[@AdamBurianek92]

The map shown in 0:48 completely ignored former Czechoslovakia, lol 🤣

[@jrv128]

Very interesting city and history

[@chromebomb]

damn they have a skatepark?! sick

[@soda6556]

Yeah and it's pretty popular place

[@mydlo3]

Really cool video! Maybe you will have a chance to visit and comment on some polish town someday? I am very ciurious what your thoughts will be

[@Venice_Mestre]

if you feel like taking a trip to venice, come and pop into mestre. it's still Venice, but it's the neighborhood that's on the mainland. it is full of cycle paths and is increasingly increasing, improving and expanding sustainable mobility. In my opinion, if you inform yourself a little, you might also like it because, by Italian standards, it is very good

[@pavlodragobetskyi5745]

12:40 supermarkets were rather en exception before 2000's. Some groceries in soviet union might be run in this format as experiment, one I remember is універсам №9 in north-west of Kharkiv, but typically I would expect Славутич residents to stay in separate queue for fish, separate for vegetables and so forth

[@mikep584]

I actually lived in Slavutych in mid 90s and as for 1995 there were at least two supermarkets there, one of a Soviet type, one smaller a private and more expensive yet with more imported items. Slavutych was 30000 big then and pretty progressive in many ways, thanks to the long time mayor Udovychenko.

[@NicolasProix]

I wonder about something : the commuter workers who maintain the former power station at Chernobyl take the train at Slavutych ; but this train travels through Belarus, right ? How does it work since the war begun ? Does the train go through Belarus without stopping, just like the trains to Berlin during Cold War ?

[@denhuchenko]

The workers switched to long-term shifts: nowadays they take bus to Chernobyl (travelling through Kyiv), and they live there for a few weeks until their shift ends and they are transferred back to Slavutych.

[@ellajanebosanquet847]

Is 36 hours later a "Hurry"???? I beg to differ.

[@jamesannetts4449]

😊

[@guntisber5415]

This is yet another example why dense housing, public spaces and public buildings are not enough to create a true city and why soviet cities suck and are dense suburbs (with or without true city) at best. City starts from the market square but continues through its streets which make up most of the city. Soviets were ok at building modernist city squares (still ugly and mostly too large) but disastrous at building city streets. If you embrace soviet free development and put buildings perpendicular or at some angle to the street then you fail to make them cozier, fail to make accessing services and commerce quicker, easier and more efficient. Of course it was irrelevant to talk about commerce in soviet cities but later after USSR fell it created a lot of problems as most buildings had first floors hard to adapt for commerce so they just lacked it. Even if they could or somehow managed to accommodate commerce - accessing it when you have to leave the street and go into yard or through access road makes it harder to reach, less convenient, less visible from the street, less likely for business to succeed. Also not placing buildings snuck to the streets created lots of space without function. people would try to fill the space with trees, grass, flowers but after USSR fall all of that excess space mostly became chaotic parking lots where people leave their cars on dirt. At least in most large soviet cities. Slavutych is blessed to be smaller and probably not suffer from the cars too much. Also it was at least planned with some street grid in mind while in some other soviet cities some soviet urbanists got rid of street grid completely and built huge blocks without streets at all with mazes of apartment buildings and access roads ending with cul-de-sacs. One thing when orderly city like Barcelona experiments with superblocks but soviets created superblocks of literal mazes of apartment buildings in some cities. Today those are neither cozy nor comfortable nor safe at it is now a perfect area for ambushes by thugs. Can you imagine a city without streets? Well soviets believed they could and they failed big time. What they ended up was the same formula they used for sanatorium/spa towns where people supposed to do nothing but rest which is anything but city - anticity. Yes, they are quieter than city streets and have more trees and grass (if not turned into dirt parking lots) but they are boring and sometimes dangerous if they end up like ghetto with people leaving for nicer districts. Maybe they are nice for the oldest people who are nostalgic for USSR or want a quiet place to spend retirement but for most they are just places of nothingness. It is peak utilitarianism whether it is for sanatorium town, nuclear power plant town, military town, kolkhoz farming town or just a city suburb with apartments for industry workers to spend a night. Nothing else happens there besides main function or resting/doing nothing. I trust when you say that there were lots of people in Slavutych but most ex-soviet towns aren't blessed like Slavutych and became quite depressing ghost-towns or suburbs where nothing happens and most residents spend time inside their apartments or going out to the "real city" which is usually old town built in pre-soviet times. For Ukrainians reading this - Slava Ukraini. I don't want to sound like a hater of this particular Ukrainian town. I believe Slavutych itself has enough history to be preserved, I love pre-soviet districts of Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa. I just hate soviet anti-urban planning which did more harm to several cities I love than the damn WWII and which still can't die in still rapidly growing cities. 30 years after USSR fell we still have urbanists continuing tradition of soviet urban planning just because they try to preserve urban fabric of those soviet districts when they should be either tearing them apart or trying to patch them with traditional truly urban development full of commerce and directly accessible from the street. It is so frustrating that to undo half of century of soviet anti-urbanism will take another half of century. I wish EU would be helping us but its "New European Bauhaus" movement so far has been a failure promoting wrong ideas and only encouraging our urban planners to continue creating modernist huge non human scale developments just with some bits of green-washing like plants on buildings which do more harm to building longevity and carbon footprint. Once again we would be better off by simply creating traditional green squares and parks. We already had perfected cities in the late 19th century when we still had streets full of trams and bicycles but also had started building metro for longer journeys. It all went downhill in the 20th century. Soviets perfected building anti-cities, American perfected killing cities and replacing them with suburban megavillages.

[@ChristyOFaghan]

that's a fascinating critique and i'm glad you took the time to write it one of my main thoughts while watching the video, was that with all that land to develop, they could have provided homes with large plots of land for growing vegetables for the hard times, and flowers/herbs for the simple benefit to quality of life -- but then i remembered that totalitarian regimes _need_ to have a dependent population, that receives even their food from the state _and_ if people were growing their own food, they might start trading with each other which would also undermine the revolution reminded me just how detrimental to human flourishing, communism is

[@guntisber5415]

@@ChristyOFaghan I hate what soviet urbanism did to cities, I hate soviet occupation of my country, I hate any totalitarian ideology, I hate the boredom which communism created with lack of free markets and commerce, I hate predefined roles of communist society. Having said that I believe that capitalistic American suburbia can be just as detrimental in some cases, especially for children. As kids we did not really care about propaganda, living in dense districts we had lots of opportunities to make lots of friends in the neighborhood, school was close and you would walk to it, mazes of apartment buildings was even fun for playing games outside which we did a lot. There were playgrounds full of kids in each yard, little cars so no danger from them, helicopter parenting did not exist, we did not feel chained to adults, at most we had older brothers or sisters looking after us. We as children had enough or even more freedom than modern children have and always had friends around to do stuff. After USSR fell our cities also built a lot of American style suburbia and I feel that for small kids being fully dependent on parents driving them everywhere and having little friends near home and nowhere to play outside is much more harmful in the early stages than communism was to us. Of course whole idealism of communism used to fall apart very quickly when you start turning from child into adult. It is very unfortunate that people depressed from everything soviet turned to another complete opposite but still evil - individualistic single family home suburbialand and those who became responsible for urban development just said "*uck it - lets continue building in a way soviets taught us because we know how to do it cheap and quickly and those who do not like it can move to newly built suburbia of single family housing". We simply do not know how to build cities anymore and learning process is very slow. too slow.

[@Ryan_hey]

@@guntisber5415 It's funny you hate what the USSR did because here, in America, the incredibly "free", privatized markets have created the worst possible urban design that could possibly exist. Everyone lives in suburbs or urban areas where nothing is accessible. Everyone needs a car to get anywhere, so local commerce has failed as big chains with large parking lots dominate the landscape. Very little is walkable, there are little to no trains, and riding a bike to the store is more of an extreme sport (due to cars) than a realistic option. Sure, you don't need communism to create well-designed cities-there are many places in Europe that prove this. But what it does take is INTENTIONAL city planning, not large real estate corporations making decisions solely based on profit. Most of America has become a nightmare to live in because of this, despite being such a wealthy country.

[@guntisber5415]

@@Ryan_hey did you see my second comment? From it it should be clear that I hate American suburbanism just as much. It is just another opposite evil. But we did not have to deal with it until USSR collapsed so I am mostly sharing experience with soviet planning. Having said that it is much easier to rezone single family districts and build everything from scratch and replace one house with multiple apartments increasing value ten fold. It is almost impossible to fix soviet antiurbanism when you have huge problematic apartment buildings with 50-80 families living. You can't just demolish and build something more valuable, those projects will stand for hundreds of years because in our cities thanks to public transport access and closeness to city center those projects will retain value much better than US projects which were demolished when most dwellers just left them due to awful conditions. In post USSR soviet districts due to high number of dwellers with mixed income so far has resisted becoming ghettos but situation is getting worse. I am sure time will come when those projects will go down but it will take a lot of time.

[@greasher926]

Well when in it comes to the pre-Soviet districts of old Ukrainian cities, what survives was mostly built during the 1800s (as these cities were originally built from wood), meaning they were designed and built by imperial Russia, and Austria in the case of Lviv.

[@carkawalakhatulistiwa]

Soviet microdistrict vs USA suburb

[@marinakralik1977]

so ugly and murky buildings.. no soul, no real life, so sad.

[@SianaGearz]

Please, there's lots of soul to them. Just needs some surface treatment and a fresh coat of paint not contaminated by years of neglect, modern formulations, brighter, more colourful. When i think of something without a soul, that's American stroads and single family home suburbs. And real life comes from real people putting their own signature on things, which is a problem here isn't it.

[@alexlozinsky3930]

No wonder. Its a standart soviet apartment buildings called (chruschovka's), but with some exterior details. How you might seen before they're just decorated outside in style of different soviet republics.

[@sliftylovesyou]

And a great place to live :)