An initiative to offer cultural services to Ukrainian refugees, in the first months of the war (April 2022). A special Ukraine dossier on Atlasfor hosts a map of local services in Northwest Italian cities, while opening up the possibility for refugees to self-make a Ukrainian map of their “places of the heart” and locate educational records for their students in Italy

As of April 2022 Landscapefor has launched the project. AtlasforUcraina, on behalf of Ukrainian refugees in Turin and Genoa, setting up a section dedicated to Ukrainian people on Atlasfor. All information is geolocated and can be read in an in-progress map, on a platform open source, with texts in English, Italian and Ukrainian.

The AtlasforUkraine project has three areas of activity:
#1: Second reception service

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

We are working on the reception of the municipalities of Turin and Genoa. Of 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 new guests: from religious places, community associations, meeting points to job offers, microcredit institutions, ethnic stores, markets, public parks, cultural heritage, green spaces, sports, and music.

#2: Places of the heart

We proposed to refugees an identity enhancement, presentation and knowledge exchange between Italian places and Ukrainian cities of origin.

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 narrative of a few sentences has been included to convey the sentimental and identity value of that place. This is an in-progress map where everyone can point out their cultural landmarks and participate in forming a collective fresco, with images of the “places of the heart,” cultural events and evidence of 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 want to participate, either to include their own tangible or intangible points of interest or to reflect on aspects of heritage that are useful for their own course of study. 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 received the interest of the Ukrainian Cultural Fondation (the operating agency of the Ministry for National Culture) and the Committee on Culture and Education in the European Parliament. (through the interest of the past-president, Honorable Silvia Costa).

The initiative is of total cultural, operational and economic management of the Landscapefor’s Foundation, Turin.