Center for Urban History of East Central Europe

The Center for Urban History is an independent research institution working across several areas: urban history research, digital humanities and archiving, and public history. It was established in 2004 and is now based in Lviv, Ukraine.

The Center’s work has several objectives: to research the history of Eastern and Central European cities; to promote urban history in an interdisciplinary format; to foster international academic and cultural exchange; to deepen knowledge and understanding of the complexity and diversity of history and heritage in Eastern and Central European cities; and to enhance cooperation among local and international institutions.

Our research focuses are 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. Our research studies lie in such areas as “Cities, Wars, and Recoveries in 20th Century Eastern Europe” or “Urban Heritages: Concepts, Practices and Legacies”.

One of the examples of our engagement with urban heritage on both scholarly and practical levels 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 was realized in cooperation with the Lviv City Council and the German Organization for International Cooperation (GIZ).

Among other examples of cross-institutional cooperation was the ReHerit project, which resulted in several initiatives dealing with cultural heritage in Lviv, Uman and 10 other regions across Ukraine, or the OpenHeritage (Horizon 2020) project, identifying and testing the best practices of adaptive heritage re-use in Europe.

Lviv and other cities and towns in the region of East-Central Europe.

Archival holdings and some of the research materials of the Center are available through two digital projects: Urban Media Archive and Lviv Interactive.

Although not specialized in Holocaust studies, these projects could offer a number of materials on Lviv and other cities and towns in the region of East-Central Europe.

Urban Media Archive consists of digitized or digital-born collections of photos, films, videos, maps and oral history interviews that cover various topics related to the history of the 19th-20th century in East-Central Europe. The materials of the UMA come from various holdings: private collections, family archives, state institutions and other establishments. They were collected since the beginning of the Center for Urban History as a part of the research projects of our institution and represent our key interests. The annotated collections are available online at uma.lvivcenter.org. Additionally, the collections that are digitized but not yet described and published are available offline at the access point at the library of the CUH.

The photographic holdings are the biggest part of the Urban Media Archive that represent the urban life of the cities from the late 19th century till now. As our institution is sited in Lviv the images of this city are dominant in our collection. Another part of the Urban Media Archive consists of moving images of different formats, mostly created in the second half of the 20th century. The digitized archive of Lviv Television covers the news programs released during the 1960s and 1970s. The collection of digitized 8mm and 16mm films and VHS (home movies, amateur films, video documentation) is the source of the history of everyday life, creative practices and public events in the region (1938-2008).

The collection of historical maps consists of over 200 high-resolution scans of city plans from the 17th to 20th centuries. Among the cartographic materials of the Urban Media Archive, there is the digitized scheme that represents the resettlement of the Jewish population to the ghetto in 1941.

Oral history interviews collected within research projects of the Center for Urban History are organized around topics related to the perception of space, professional biographies, and changes in urban space. The collection “Search for Home” tells the stories of people from Pidzamche district, one of Lviv’s oldest districts, the place of the Jewish ghetto during World War II, and a site for postwar industrialization. Based on materials from towns and villages in Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, the collection “Social Anthropology of filling the Void” shows how the void was filled after representatives of social groups and ethnic communities were evicted by the violence during WWII and post-war changes.

Lviv Interactive (lia.lvivcenter.org) is a digital encyclopedia about the city and its past. Its main idea is to study and visualize history through places and spaces. Since 2007, the project has produced over a thousand entries on the history of buildings, organizations and figures. The texts prepared by scholars are combined with maps, photographs, archival materials and interviews. Lviv Interactive is focused on the history of the city from the late nineteenth century to the present. The main thematic focuses of the project are the history of architecture, urban planning, heritage, and cultural and social history.

The history of WWII and the Holocaust is considerable but still one of several topics in the project. The digital nature and encyclopedia format of Lviv Interactive, however, allows the creation of a network of connections and interrelations between various stories that are included in the project. This way, the history of the Holocaust here is also enriched with an urban angle and local context. It is also connected to a general history of the Jewish community in Lviv.

Among recent Holocaust-related publications, we prepared the history of the pogrom in Lviv in 1941, a map of the Janowska camp (ZAL-L, DAW), or a map of the Soviet POW’s camp in the city (Stalag 328). The stories of David Kahane, Leon Wells or Krystyna Chiger and her family show individual experiences and routes during the Holocaust in Lviv. We have also outlined the Holocaust topography in the city and the multiplicity of reactions to the Holocaust among non-Jewish residents of Lviv. We've also been working on mapping the ghetto addresses based on the ghetto registration cards.