The Side of St Petersburg You Haven’t Seen Before

St Petersburg is known as the cultural capital of Russia, but did you know it’s also one of the country’s major tech hubs? ITMO University, one of its three universities included in the QS World University Rankings®, has created the video above to showcase just that.

The video, which was inspired by cult science fiction films and series, imagines a futuristic version of St Petersburg which presents a completely different reality in which the city of poets, musicians, and philosophers had instead been the abode of tech visionaries and artists of laser and code.

St Petersburg was the place where researchers launched Russia’s first quantum communication network, and among ITMO’s students is the world’s six-time Google Code Jam winner, Gennady Korotkevich. The city is also home to one of the world’s top 20 universities for mining engineering, St. Petersburg Mining University, which has a museum that boasts one of the world’s finest collections of gems and minerals.

ITMO’s video demonstrates the exciting mix of old and new on offer in the city - “This is our Petersburg, a place where the future is made in the present: high art meets high tech, classicism coexists with cyberpunk, and the city’s history and culture are inseparable from technological progress.”