Natalia Otrishchenko
Unplanned Spaces of Planned Districts: Sykhiv Case Study
Natalia Otrishchenko (Sociology/Center for Urban History, Lviv)
Sykhiv is the biggest (and the last) planned district of Lviv, Ukraine. It was constructed during 1980s as a worker’s settlement and was imagined to become an ideal place for living. At the same time, it faced a number of typical problems of a late Soviet neighborhood: monotony of the urban fabric, poor quality of buildings, absence of public spaces and human scale places, isolation from the city center etc. Planned spaces of Sykhiv had to be highly functional and state dominated. After the collapse of the Soviet Union they started to gain new unplanned functions and meanings.
Based on in-depth interviews with inhabitants and field observations, I want to discuss how people are deconstructing implicit ideological vision of the urban fabric and constantly change the meanings of the places. I would focus on a few cases from Sykhiv: street markets, religious sites and development of public spaces, which are assembled through everyday practices, interactions, and imagining. Combination of different methods will provide both verbal (level of images and identities) and visual (level of practices) dimensions for this research.