Continuance or Rupture? Discussing Lviv’s Future in the late 1980s and early 1990s

What kind of the city would we like to inhabit? What language do we use to describe it? Who defines our imagination about the urban future? These were some of the questions related to the history of urban planning. Natalia scaled them to Lviv during the last decade of state socialism and the first years of Ukrainian independence to understand what ideas are still defining urban development and what ideas remained in the past.

During the presentation, the researcher is going to focus on two discussions that are related to the visions of Lviv’s urban future. The first one is about the 1993 Lviv master plan – guiding document for urban development and management in the areas of residential and industrial construction, transport, engineering infrastructures, green and recreational zones, protected areas, etc. The second one is about Lviv underground tram construction. Both of them are using the statements about the future, and both are showing how urban expertise was circulating between different locations and institutions. Furthermore, with these two cases, Natalia would like to challenge the discourse of rupture related to 1991. Even though only a master plan seems to be an obvious example, as it was developed during the 1980s, approved in 1993 and guided urban development till 2010, presenter aims to show how the arguments from the discussion around underground tram from the late 1980s persisted as the legacy of socialism and could be easily mobilized nowadays. This research project is part of the international network "Legacies of Communism? Post-Communist Europe from Stagnation to Reform and between Autocracy and Revolution", which is financed by The Leibniz Association and which is coordinated by the Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) Potsdam. For more details, please visit the webpage.