CULTURAL STRATEGY IN LARGE CITIES OF UKRAINE FROM 1991 TO THE PRESENT: TRANSFORMATION OF URBAN CULTURAL POLICY

Abstract

This article provides a culture-studies and policy-analytical interpretation of the transformation of urban cultural policy in Ukraine’s large cities from 1991 to the present. It conceptualises the large city’s contemporary culture as a network-based, multi-centred system that combines everyday cultural practices, institutions, environments, and governance, and shows how municipal policy has shifted from a post-Soviet, sectoral-institutional model oriented to maintaining public cultural networks toward strategic planning and policy strategizing based on indicators, cultural mapping, participatory instruments, and infrastructure priorities. The paper identifies key institutional stages of this trajectory: the 1990s transition under resource scarcity; the 2000s stabilisation with event- and tourism-driven urban branding; the 2010s expansion of strategic planning under decentralisation; the post-2014 growth of partnerships, grant-support models, and multifunctional hubs; and the post-2022 reframing of culture as an element of urban resilience, social cohesion, mental recovery, memorialisation, and international representation. On this basis, the study compares approaches to cultural planning through municipal strategic documents and programmes, illustrating how shared policy motifs (human-centredness, heritage, accessibility, digitalisation, infrastructure modernisation, and international communication) are adapted to different urban identities and risk profiles, including wartime threats to heritage that require risk-informed governance. The article argues that the key governance implication for the 2020s is the need to strengthen the analytical capacity of municipal cultural policy – data, harmonised definitions, monitoring, evaluation, and participation – so that cultural strategies operate as implementable mechanisms of recovery and long-term urban development rather than as declarative documents. Methodologically, it synthesises indicator-based measurement and cultural-infrastructure perspectives with the normative-institutional effects of decentralisation and European cultural cooperation, while foregrounding the structural problem of fragmented city-level data and definitional variability of cultural and creative sectors.

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