Starting in April 2022, Landscapefor launched the AtlasforUkraine project for Ukrainian refugees in Turin and Genoa, setting up a section dedicated to Ukrainian people on Atlasfor. All information is geolocalised and can be read on a map in progress, on an open source platform, with texts in English, Italian and Ukrainian.

The AtlasforUkraine project has three areas of activity:

#1: Second reception service

We have offered refugees an orientation service with a map in Ukrainian that can be accessed immediately from a mobile phone, equipped with an around me function to find out what is around, with the aim of helping to find places and services useful for first reception.

We are working on the reception of the municipalities of Turin and Genoa. In these cities, we have included not only the health and administrative references of first necessity, but we have also mapped the services set up to cope with a prolonged stay of the new guests: from religious places to community associations, from meeting points to job offers, micro-credit institutions, ethnic shops, markets, public parks, cultural heritage, green spaces, sports, and music venues.

#2: Places of the heart

We proposed to the refugees an identity enhancement, presentation and knowledge exchange between the Italian places and the Ukrainian cities they come from.

In Atlasfor, the inclusion of photos, videos and audio podcasts was initiated, locating them in the streets and squares of origin. Alongside the pictures, a story of a few sentences has been included, to convey the sentimental and identity value of that place. It is an in-progress map where everyone can point out their own cultural landmarks and participate in forming a collective fresco, with images of the ‘places of the heart’, cultural events and testimonies of the personal and collective history to which they belong.

To this end, we have included in our working group two very young Ukrainian residents of Turin who, in addition to translating the atlas into Ukrainian, have begun a networking effort to populate the places of affection.

#3: Valuing personal identity and common heritage

AtlasforUkraine is aimed at male and female students who wish to participate, either to enter their own tangible or intangible points of interest, or to reflect on aspects of heritage that are useful for their studies. But the target audience of adults is also important, to bring out the places of identity value that one does not want to lose, the continuity with the past that one wants to maintain in common spaces.

The AtlasforUkraine initiative has attracted the interest of the Ukrainian Cultural Fondation (the operating agency of the national Ministry of Culture) and the Commission for Culture and Education in the European Parliament (through the involvement of the past-president, the Honourable Silvia Costa).

The initiative is under the total cultural, operational and economic management of the Landscapefor Association, Turin.