Which institutions and organizations — public ones, municipal, regional, national — create culture in Lviv? Searching for the answer, this year Cultural Strategy Institute implemented first stage of comprehensive research of the city’s culture sector, in particular, those activists who form it.
During an online research «Lviv culture landscape: institutions, activities, interactions» in February – May 2019, we collected information about (co)creators of culture sector in Lviv and proposed tools for analyzing received data. The poll became the starting point for the formation the database of cultural figures in the city and helped us understand better the peculiarities of cultural institutions and interactions between them. The network analysis based on the collected materials allows to estimate the structure of connections, type of partnership between cultural figures, features of clustering etc.
The network of Lviv cultural institutions has a weak connection in terms of interaction – there is a big distance between institutions’ nodes. This structure has several central nodes ( Lviv city council or Bookforum for example), so our network is hierarchical to some extent. The most popular form of cooperation between creators, who took part in the pole, is a common projects, then – information support, financing, exchange of experience/staff and at least – the common quest for project implementation. Our research argues that the decentralizations of culture in the city have not taken place yet. Discover more information in a report below.
The first stage of research CSI realized in cooperation with sociologists Inga Kozlova (UCU) and Natalia Otrishchenko (Center of Urban History). The network analysis was performed by Petro Sarkanyh (Institute of Condensed Matter Physics, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Coventry University). Interim results of the research were previously presented during the Culture Congress «Transition 1989» (October 12, Lviv) as well as at the Institute of Cultural Strategy (December 16).
Collected data will be used to form a special information resource (maps and catalogs). In perspective, the database can be supplemented, make appropriate changes. Further researches will concretize the obtained results, particulary in-depth interviews with representatives of those institutions that are involved in the creation of culture in the city.
The research of the city’s culture is one of the SCI’s core directions and meets the priorities of the Lviv culture Development Strategy 2025. Among the urgent tasks in this direction was a quantitative survey of citizens and in-depth interviews with experts within the Culture Code project, which CSI realizes with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation.