Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on November 8, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Maksym Romaniko. Moderated by Mark Andryczyk.
In June 2023 the destruction of the Kakhovka dam drained a reservoir that had covered the lower Dnipro floodplain since the 1950s. The Great Meadow, or Velykyi Luh, the historic landscape, came back into the air after seventy years underwater: two thousand square kilometers of exposed sediment, now a frontline, and a growing forest.
This talk presents the Great Meadow Atlas, a collaborative mapping platform built this autumn by the Soil Histories studio at Columbia GSAPP with the Center for Spatial Technologies. The atlas layers cartographic and aerial records of the floodplain from 1853 to 2026, including German reconnaissance imagery from 1943 and satellite time series across the 2023 draining, alongside nearly seven thousand historical photographs, biodiversity surveys, and contamination data from the exposed bed. Maksym Rokmaniko and students from the studio will show how these sources are being read together to reconstruct what was drowned, what has surfaced, and what is at stake in the debate over whether to rebuild the dam. The project treats the Great Meadow as a built landscape rather than a wilderness, and asks what that means for its preservation.
Maksym Rokmaniko is an architect and researcher and the founder and director of the Center for Spatial Technologies (CST), a research collective working on digital forensics, spatial history, and heritage documentation. He is a fellow of Forensic Architecture and teaches at Columbia GSAPP and at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.
