Cooperation of the ЗMIN with the Museum of the City began within the framework of our first Grant Program in 2021.

Museum of the City is a culture institution, a place of communication with residents, to create modern urban culture, a platform for rethinking history, self-identification with heritage and research into the everyday life of the city.

The museum sees the city as a space of responsible freedom connected with the people who live here. Therefore, together with visitors, Museum explores and learns about urban identity. Through connection with the past, it tries to understand itself in a modern context and influence the future of the city. The museum gives you the opportunity to feel part of the city, to comprehend your responsibility for this place.

The aim of the Museum of the City is to build a community of conscious citizens who understand their role in creating urban space and to responsibly use it, while at the same time helping Lviv visitors to get a deeper understanding of the city's senses and contexts.

The “Like a Fish to the City.Center” project is a community of Museum and children who engaged in the mapping for the downtown of Lviv.

The kit “Like a Fish to the City” includes a mind map with pictures of places that children recommend to visit. The quest includes 10 unexpected locations and 10 unusual tasks. Each participant will receive tools to help them successfully pass all points on the route.

Lviv city center is a pilot stage of the project. In the future, such maps and quests will be developed for different parts of the city.

The first test run of the quest took place during the International Museum Day, on May 18, when 43 teams took part, or 117 participants from different cities of Ukraine.

The test run results showed that the tasks are interesting for children teams, families with children, and adults. The route takes you along the historic landmarks, it combines green areas and pedestrian streets, and allows you to view the panorama of Lviv and search for inconspicuous details within the urban fabric.‍

At the moment, more than 1000 people took part in the quest.

In March 2023, the team of the Museum of the City started testing the quest in the area of Naukova Street.

What would you show your friend who came to visit Lviv? Opera House, monuments, University building, Market Square? These locations would most probably be mentioned by city residents. The so-called “residential” and “industrial” neighbourhoods are rarely perceived as places presenting anything interesting. We wanted to see the Naukova Street through the eyes of children who are not guided by the criteria of adults in choosing the most interesting places in the area. Children are equally interested in running on the heaps staying after construction works, and in looking at the mosaics and drawings on the walls of houses. - comment of the Museum of the City

When implementing the quest at Naukova Street, lectures were delivered in history, in urban planning, architecture and urbanism to help participants better understand the project of the city functioning, its history and prospects for future developments. The project team involved a historian, architect, designer, branding and quest design people. During the program implementation, field trips were organized to explore the area. The children went on a tour to the trolleybus depot, the Optima-Plaza business center, to the Horihovyi cinema, and took part in a quest around the central part of the city. In total, there were 20 lectures, meetings, excursions, and workshops. During these activities, children produced a map of their neighborhood, identified points for the quest, and encrypted them through tasks.

In total, 16 children participated in the project, eight of whom built a team of developers. The participants included those who have long lived on Naukova Street, as well as three girls who moved to the area from Kharkiv at the beginning of the war. Children analyzed their own needs in the city, built their vision of the most interesting sites in the area, felt the subjects of change and ambassadors of modernism.

You could take the quest “Like a Fish to the City” very soon. Find more about the start of the project in the social networks of Museum of the City.

We cooperate with the team of the Museum of the City within the framework of the sustainable partnership of ЗMIN 2021-2023.

Photo: The Museum of the City