Research

facebook icon twitter icon email icon telegram icon link icon whatsapp icon

The Center’s research focuses on themes connected with the history and historical experiences in the cities in Eastern and Central Europe, including their spatial, social, and cultural transformations and everyday practices. Our research projects look at the history of Lviv, but also include the history of other cities and towns of the region in order to bring a comparative perspective and contextualize historically contemporary discussions and developments. The Center’s first research projects were developed within the framework of its digital projects, Lviv Interactive in particular. Gradually the range of topics and approaches has expanded, particularly through inter-institutional cooperation. Our research projects are developed and realized by the team of historians, sociologists, and historians of architecture working at the Center for Urban History or those affiliated as research fellows and guest researchers. This interdisciplinary quality allows for a fruitful framework and capacity for innovative work in urban history.

We are truly interdisciplinary, aiming to foster communication between history, sociology, urban studies, history of architecture, visual studies, and digital humanities. The chronology for the research projects covers broadly the period from the 19th century until today.  Our research focuses includes the following topics: urban heritage; planned urbanity; cities, wars and recoveries in the 20th century; cultural infrastructures and audiences in cities; professionalization and urban developments; urban mediascapes; public history and urban spaces, digital history and archiving. Research projects are closely communicated and connected with our academic formats, such as conferences, lectures, seminars and teaching courses, as well as public history and digital history formats.

For questions or proposals, please contact the Center's program manager, Maryana Mazurak at [email protected] or researchers working at the Center.

Read more

Cities, Wars, and Recoveries

This focus incorporates the history of the cities and towns in the eastern parts of Europe, both on and behind the front lines, during periods of belligerence and post-war recovery.

Details

Documenting Experiences of War

We have involved our capacity and expertise to document the experiences of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as historical and/or legal evidence, but also as a way to withstand the invasion.

Details

Planned Urbanity

This focus on planned cities, towns, and districts in socialist societies explores the visions of planners, experts, and decision-makers, who were all involved in the construction and experience of planned urbanity.

Details

Public History and the City

This focus brings together research on the forms, formats and multiple agendas in engaging with the past from urban perspectives and in urban settings.

Details

The Social City

This research focus extends the established approaches to the history of modern Lviv, centered on the history of the formation of national communities, by addressing other categories of social divisions: gender, age, class, and group.

Details

Urban Cultural Infrastructures

This research focus aims to expand our understanding of the ways infrastructures shape creative culture in the modern city.

Details

Urban Heritages

This research focus incorporates several individual projects, as well as initiatives in cooperation that analyze heritage both as a set of concepts, discourses, and practices, as well as institutional and discursive frames.

Details

Previous Research

’Searching for Home’ in Postwar Lviv: The Experience of Pidzamche, 1944-1960

The goal of this project was to illuminate one of the most important pages in the history of contemporary Lviv: the transformation of the city from Polish border town Lwόw and German-occupied Lemberg into Soviet Ukrainian Lviv.

Details

Industrialization and Urban Landscape of the Industrial South of the Russian Empire

This project examines how industrialization changed the image of the cities in the Industrial South of the Russian Empire and how these changes affected the visual representation of the urban landscape.

Details

Region, Nation and Beyond. An Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Reconceptualization of Ukraine

The overarching objective of the project is to challenge the dominance of the nation-state paradigm in analyses of Ukraine by illustrating the interrelationship between national and regional dynamics of change.

Details

Voices of Resistance and Hope

Documentation of the experiences, attitudes, motivations, and expectations of EuroMaidan participants.

Details