Recap and reflections on the ReCITY project 2025
Over the past year, the ReCITY project has made significant progress in its aim to better understand urban transformations in small, former industrial cities in Armenia. A particular highlight in 2025 were three research trips of the Univie project team to Armenia, as well as two visits of the YSU project lead Harutyun Vermishan to Vienna. The field trips to Armenia provided numerous insights into urban development of the three small Armenian cities – Charentsavan, Sisian and Stepanavan, which are at the centre of the research project. On the other hand, all exchanges contributed significantly to strengthening cooperation within our international project team.
In April 2025, Prof. Kerstin Krellenberg and Dr. Julia Wesely travelled to Armenia to meet project partners in Yerevan and conduct research in two of the cities studied in the project, Charentsavan and Sisian. The cities selected as ReCITY case studies followed a comprehensive analysis by the Armenian project team along a systematic set of criteria to assess their suitability for illustrating a diversity of post-Soviet urban transformation processes. Charentsavan is particularly interesting because of its proximity to Yerevan, which allows residents to commute to the nearby urban centre while living away from the hustle of the capital. Sisian, on the other hand, is very remote and located in a geopolitically sensitive region, where both the great distance from Yerevan and the proximity to disputed areas shape all aspects of urban life. In both cities, the team went on urban walks and mapped important sites, as well as conducting narrative interviews with key stakeholders. You can read more about insights from Sisian in our Storymap. This opportunity, to get a first-hand impression of the cities, marked an important milestone in the project and enabled the Vienna team to better understand the local context and to work on existing research gaps.
The methodological approach was advanced in August during a second visit of the Viennese project team by Dr. Yvonne Franz and Hannah Szirota. During a stay in the third case study city, Stepanavan, additional participatory mapping and narrative interviews with residents were conducted. The reconstruction after a devastating earthquake in the 1980s and the resulting socio-spatial division of the city are of particular interest in this context. Together with everyday observations new insights occurred, illustrating how the city’s infrastructural decline is interpreted by its inhabitants, how the legacy of the Soviet era is remembered, and how visions of the future are developed. In October and November 2025, Kerstin Krellenberg conducted a longer research stay at Yerevan State University and the TS&D Lab as part of her sabbatical. She visited all case cities again, participated in international workshops and conferences, and developed current and future research activities further.
The visits and observations in all three cities clearly showed that life in post-Soviet, post-industrial cities should not and cannot be understood solely as a story of urban decline and that, indeed, the very notion of “post” needs to be critically examined. Rather, the cities and their inhabitants demonstrate a multifaceted perseverance in which memory and improvisation replace a centralized, state-controlled planning strategy as the primary driver of urban development. Each city has developed its own spatial practices and social arrangements that sustain urban life.
In addition, the Vienna team welcomed two of their Armenian colleagues who presented their research in very interesting guest lectures: At the EUGEO conference, which took place in September, Aram Vartikyan was one of four contributors to a session titled “Looking at the overlooked urbanities: People, practices and left-behind cities”. His input included emerging insights from the mapping exercises, urban walks, and interviews from the three case study cities and argued poetically for “telling a story of ruins that are possibly alive”. Meanwhile, during his visit, Harutyun Vermishyan presented ReCity’s current progress in a course led by Julia Wesely and PhD candidate Micol Sonnino, called “Global Urban Studies: A Focus on the Overlooked”. There will be more opportunities for similar exchanges in Vienna, as Haruytun Vermishyan will be teaching his own class as a guest professor in April 2026.
Essentially, a key objective of the ReCITY project is to integrate the research findings into university curricula. A milestone towards this objective is the ReCITY international summer school in July 2026. Over the course of one week, 25 Bachelor, Master and PhD students from Armenia and abroad, as well as activists from Sisian, Stepanavan, and Charentsavan, will work together on projects related to urban cultural heritage, sustainability, and justice, and discuss challenges and opportunities for urban transformation processes in the context of small cities.
