Shaping the Culture of a City: A Conversation with Bohdan Shumylovych

In this episode of Open Space(s), the Review of Democracy focuses on Lviv, where the Center for Urban Historyoffers a unique institutional model at the intersection between memory, space, and digital innovation. Founded in 2004 and located at 6 Bohomoltsia Street, Lviv, the Center for Urban History has become a vital node in public history and digital humanities. It defines itself as a hybrid institution with a hybrid audience.

The podcast has as guest Bohdan Shumylovych, who is a historian, researcher, and professor at the UkrainianCatholic University. The conversation traces how the Center emerged outside traditional academic conventions by fostering bottom-up approaches. In our conversation, you can learn more about the various approaches of the Center for Urban History, from archiving media to mapping the shifting street names of Lviv.

Space plays an important role in this context. Shumylovych reflects on the role of the building, designed by Ukrainian architect Ivan Levynskyi, in a once multiethnic, bourgeois neighborhood, as itself a palimpsest of empire, war, andpost-Soviet transformation. The episode explores how the Center for Urban History re-defined its role during war, including the urgent initiative Documenting the Experiences of War, which builds digital oral histories and archives in the context of the conflict. Whether digitizing diaries, archivingTelegram chats, or reimagining exhibition-as-research, the Center resists top-down narratives in favor of multiple perspectives.

The conversation also engages with broader questions that can be relevant for a broader public: how does public history resist nationalist paradigms? How would we work with street names that carry imperial, Polish, Soviet meanings?Shumylovych offers nuanced answers on these issues, and he insists on partnerships between academics and municipalities, between archives and the public.

As well, as Bohdan mentioned, they are proudly fostering a cat!

Public historians, history teachers, art curators and scholars alike will definitely find this Open Space(s) episode particularly meaningful.