The Radiant City

At 1.24 am on 26 April 1986 an accident occurs at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, causing one of the reactors to explode. 36 hours after the accident the almost 50,000 inhabitants of Pripyat, a city only 3 kilometres away, were evacuated at two hours’ notice and with a promise that they would be able to return after three days. An area of 30 square kilometres, including Pripyat, was closed off and has remained uninhabitable because of the radioactive contamination from the accident.
Pripyat was built in 1970 to house the workers of the Chernobyl power plant. As a new ideal city of the Soviet Union its city planning shares similarities with the French–Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s concepts of the utopian city, or, as he put it, the ‘radiant city’. Le Corbusier wanted to integrate greenery with high-rise buildings, in extensive spaces between the buildings but also underneath them and on the rooftops, creating a ‘vertical garden city’. His aim was to offer workers easy access to nature and leisure time. Pripyat today is a different kind of garden city: uninhabitable by humans, but a haven for wildlife.