Urban Heritages: Concepts, Practices and Legacies
Research Focus

Urban Heritages: Concepts, Practices and Legacies

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. A major premise of this focus is to take a longer chronological overview, tracing the development and impact of heritage concepts and practices from the Soviet Union / Soviet Ukraine into the present. Exploring the ways how heritage is conceptualized and managed offers a possibility to trace circulations, adaptations and impacts between local, and transnational scales. It is important for us to trace how heritage practices are integrated within a set of institutions, policies, and expertise. This contextualization will allow for a more complex and dynamic understanding of heritage discourses and practices in contemporary Ukraine and Eastern Europe. While research geography is not defined by Lviv, the city is a place to engage in contemporary discussions, practical projects, and bringing in best-practice formats into the public, shaping a bridge between research and practice. This research asks how different kinds of power relations, negotiations, and contestations were generated by different actors in the spheres of heritage selection, preservation, use, and promotion, in specific Soviet and post-Soviet settings. We are interested in how institutionalization and professionalization influenced the making of cultural heritage, but also how different layers of the past (local, regional, imperial, national, transnational) were renegotiated during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Finally, this research focus questions chronological frames and asks how diversity and homogeneity were tackled not only before and after 1989/1991, but also across longer period of the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century. This research theme has strong practical dimensions and relevance. Urban heritage was one of the focuses at the Center from its establishment, both as an area of research and a topic for public history and community projects. The Center launched and organized several initiatives focusing specifically on heritage practices and history of heritages in Lviv, and more generally in Eastern and Central Europe. One of the examples of our engagement with urban heritage on a both scholarly and practical level is how our 2008 international conference "Jewish Urban Heritage and History in East Central Europe" sparked an initiative to commemorate and mark sites of Jewish history and heritage in Lviv. Over several years, it developed into "The Space of Synagogues," which includes projects to conserve and mark the sites of two synagogues and a beth hamidrash in Lviv. This project is realized in cooperation with the Lviv City Council and the German Organization for International Cooperation (GIZ).

Credits

Сover Image: Jason Francisco, project "An Unfinished Memory:  Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust in Eastern Galicia" for permanent exhibition of the Galicia Jewish Museum, Kraków

Research Projects:


Other research focuses

Cities, Wars, and Recoveries in 20th Century Eastern Europe

Cities, Wars, and Recoveries in 20th Century Eastern Europe

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.

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Documenting Experiences of War

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.

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Professionals, Expertise, and Planned Urbanity

Professionals, Expertise, and 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.

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Public History and the City: Engaging and Reflecting the Pasts

Public History and the City: Engaging and Reflecting the Pasts

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

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The Social City: Histories of Mobility, Status, Gender and Welfare

The Social City: Histories of Mobility, Status, Gender and Welfare

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.

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Urban Cultural Infrastructures: Creators, Managers, Audiences in the Modern City

Urban Cultural Infrastructures: Creators, Managers, Audiences in the Modern City

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

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Visual Regimes, Materialities, and Technologies

Visual Regimes, Materialities, and Technologies

This research focus is related to visual practices and historical or social ways of seeing. Within it, we focus on the study of historical changes in technology, imagination, and politics, and how they influence the transformation of visual practices and sensibilities.

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