International Conference "Cities in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. Urbanization, Ecology and the Municipal Economy (1917-1991)"

The conference was held at the Department of History of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universitä Erlangen-Nürnberg. The main organizers of the conference were professors of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of Eastern Europe of this university: Prof. Dr. Julia Obertreis and Dr. Olga Malinova-Tziafeta. The conference was attended by three representatives of Ukraine, which implements the interuniversity project "CityFace: Practices of self-representation of multinational cities in the industrial and post-industrial era" (https://cityface.org.ua/). In particular, the chair of Project CityFace Prof. Sergiy Posokhov delivered a talk on the analysis of exogenous and endogenous variants of the representation of Soviet Kharkiv. Dr. Vadym Ilyin spoke about the sanitary policy and medical infrastructure of the city of Kharkiv during 1943-1991. The assistant chair of Project CityFace dr. Yevhen Rachkov presented a study of symbolic and ritual practices of the city of Kharkiv as a large socialist industrial center during the 1960s-1980s.

In general, within the conference the organizer managed to gather representatives of various scientific disciplines: historians, anthropologists, culturologists, etc. The conference participants represented universities and research centers in the United States, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Great Britain, Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Russia, Romania, Ukraine, and France.