Akademgorodok

This purpose-built academic town on the southern edge of Novosibirsk was founded in the 1950s as a flagship centre of Soviet science, gathering research institutes, a university and laboratories near the Ob reservoir. Its planners embedded the campus among birch and pine forest, giving it a garden-city character quite unlike the industrial city to the north. Institutes here span physics, mathematics and biology, and the district keeps monuments to its pioneers, including a whimsical statue of a laboratory mouse.