The theme aims to produce a socio-cultural, etnographic study of a Lviv city suburb, Sykhivskyi masyv. It focuses on its emergence and its life, providing a kind of "thick description" of its
functioning, uses and symbolic meanings.
The aim of this theme is to produce a socio-cultural,
ethnographic study that complements the historical dimension of the
Lviv Interactive Project. The Sykhiv
theme focuses on the emergence and life of a city suburb,
Sykhivskyy masyv, providing a kind of "thick description" of its
functioning, uses and symbolic meanings.
In relation to Lviv, Sykhiv emerges as the "representative
Other" in full contrast to the historical center and the celebrated past
of the city. With its visible layers of historical change, the suburb
embodies the recent past. Historical urban transformations mark its
landscape crudely: Sykhiv, the former Polish village was almost fully
demolished by socialist industrialization in the 1960s yet some parts of
the village are still visible today. The superimposed district
exemplifies the microraion, the basic spatial unit of the socialist city
under Soviet urbanism. However, the new Sykhiv remained an unfinished
urban project, a failed attempt to create the Soviet urban ideal.
Instead, it was appropriated and transformed in the early 1990s by its
own residents and became a field of contestation and "privatization".
Today Sykhiv is a dynamic neighborhood in the expanding city and its
case illustrates well the strange trajectories of urban development in
this region.
This ethnographic study of Sykhiv focuses on the multiple
interactions between people and urban spaces that are revealed through
everyday practices and personal experiences of the city. The research
methods involve ethnographic and survey research aimed at collecting
contextual and macro-structural data (such as demographic,
socio-economic, linguistic, ethnic, health, and migration information);
in-depth interviews; narrative descriptions of events, archival research
into maps and graphic representations, including urbanization and
construction plans; visual analysis of photographs and films; and the
analysis of diaries and personal travel narratives.
