The School of Urban Pioneers (SUP) is a nine-month non-formal continuing education program aimed at consolidating, developing, and qualifying urban communities and activists (in exile) in Georgia and Moldova. It includes local educational events, webinars, meetings with experts, peer workshops, and an educational trip for multipliers to Berlin. The program runs from November 2022 to May 2023.

This format is focused on networking and promoting the professional skills and resources of war opponents and media creators in exile. It includes support in building professional networks between major and minor regional media organizations, media activists, journalists, and bloggers; continuing education with webinars and multi-day offline workshops; strategic development of a media agenda to influence the attitudes of people living in Russia, particularly media users who support the war in Ukraine.

In the multi-day “Science Labs on the Road” in Georgia and Moldova, project experts focus on analyzing and discussing the cities and their societies, the current role of professional urban communities, bottom-up initiatives, and urban activists, their new professional context (in exile), and their opportunities for taking action to shape cities “from below.” The goal of the Science Labs is also to develop a transnational network of experts and active urban residents and to facilitate their direct exchange. In this section, project experts will also create reflective and practical contributions related to the project theme.

These include a series of large and small public events, such as the 2022 conference “WARning the City” with 100 experts and participants, “Kitchen Sociology Evenings,” and others that address current issues and challenges facing cities, initiatives, and urban residents in times of war: New war-related migration: Between solidarity and efficiency, Science and education in exile, Manifestations of “authoritarian urbanism” and the position of professional communities, “Relatively European Cities”: Russian emigrants in Yerevan, Tbilisi, Batumi, and Baku, Translocal infrastructures of feminist anti-war resistance, and others.