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Renaming and Reclaiming Urban Spaces in Ukraine: The Perspective of Internally Displaced People

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2021

Valeria Lazarenko Open the ORCID record for Valeria Lazarenko [Opens in a new window]
Valeria Lazarenko*
Affiliation:
Laboratory of Mass and Community Psychology, Institute for Social and Political Psychology, Kyiv, Ukraine
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

For more than six years, Ukrainian society has been constantly searching for ideas as to how to write a new “national biography.” In a society divided by armed conflict, the so-called decommunization process is considered to be an idea capable of uniting a nation. This process started back in 2015, with the passing of a specific law that required not only the deconstruction of Soviet-time monuments in public spaces, but also a huge decommunization of place names. The article will explore the main practices of place (re-)naming during the different stages of the decommunization (but not de-ideologization) of spaces, as well as describing the problems that may emerge in society as a result of a rapid transition from one narrative to another. Based on a case study of spatial identities of internally displaced people, I am going to answer the question of how people perceive renamed spaces, and how they reclaim and re-appropriate these spaces in the midst of an identity crisis.

Keywords

post-communistUkrainehistorical narrativememory politicsinterviews
Type
Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , May 2022 , pp. 430 - 449
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for the Study of Nationalities

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