A National Academy of Sciences publication, this is the first Ukrainian contribution to the series of European Atlases of towns, which currently lists more than 500 volumes. Lviv (Polish – Lwów, German – Lemberg) – the biggest town in present-day Western Ukraine – was founded in the mid-thirteenth century by Prince Daniel of Galicia/Galician Rus’ (a historical region divided between Poland and Ukraine). It has one of the richest historical archives in Ukraine including a significant collection of maps and town plans, some of which are published for the first time.

The publication consists of two parts: textual and visual. The visual part comprises 25 historical maps and town plans (seventeenth to twentieth centuries), 6 views of the town (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) and 11 cartographical reconstructions created by Lviv historians to visualize their recent finds. The textual part represents a collection of articles summarizing the present state of research on Lviv's history as well as the information on the maps and a bibliography. The articles are organized in a chronological order starting from archeological studies of pre-historic settlements on the site: ‘Settlements on Lviv territory from the fifth/sixth till the mid-thirteenth centuries’ by Y. Lukomsky and V. Petehyrych.

The most important event in the early history of Lviv was obtaining the town law (called German or Magdeburg law), even though the precise date of the first grant is unknown. As a result, the urban space became divided into two parts: the ‘old’ one, centred on the princely stronghold, continued its existence under the ‘local’ or ‘princely’ law; the ‘new’ one, regularly planned and centred on the market square with a town hall in the middle, soon evolved into a typical European town with a great degree of legal immunity. Two articles describe this process: ‘The planning structure of Lviv prior to its town charter’ by Y. Dyba and ‘The development of Lviv under Magdeburg Law between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries’ by M. Kapral and M. Dolynska.

Challenging views expressed in the older historiography, which dated the legal foundation of Lviv to the second half of the fourteenth century (i.e., the time when the region was incorporated into the Polish kingdom), M. Kapral and M. Dolynska present their own chronology of Lviv's development under Magdeburg law. Accordingly, the first foundation took place around the year 1270 and was initiated by the Rus’ prince; later foundations (1356–68) of the ‘Polish period’ and the grant of 100 Franconian hides to the town were a repetition and extension of the first grant; the final formation of the urban territory including suburbs and dependent villages could be dated to 1415–44.

The period of the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries and the social topography of the town are studied in ‘The development of the town during the late medieval and early modern times: space and residents’ by M. Kapral, M. Dolynska and A Feloniuk. During this period, Lviv turned into a large multi-ethnic and multi-religious centre with four major groups inhabiting the town: Catholics (Poles, Germans, Italians, etc.), Orthodox (mostly indigenous Ruthenians, but also Greeks, Walachians, Moldavians), Armenians and Jews; also, three Christian bishoprics (Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian) were established in Lviv. The article discusses the settlement patterns of religious groups within the urban space and the formation of ‘national quarters.’ In addition, the legal status of different suburbs and the rise of private estates as well as areas exempted from the town law (called jurydyka in documents) are analysed.

In ‘Spatial development and urbanism at the end of the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries’, M. Dolynska and U. Ivanochko discuss how the ‘long nineteenth century’ in the history of Lviv coincided with Habsburg rule: this was the time of the demolition of medieval walls and the modernization of urban space. It was also a time of territorial expansion and growth of the urban population from 90,000 in 1870 to 220,000 in 1914.

‘The urban development of Lviv in the twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries’ by B. Posatsky describes the impact left on the town space by different political systems and regimes: the Polish Republic, Nazi occupation, Soviet times and finally the present-day Ukraine. The detailed chronology of Lviv's development presented by the above-mentioned articles is supplemented by articles on ‘Lviv cartographic sources of the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries’ by U. Kryshtalovych and ‘Lviv fortifications of the seventeenth century’ by I. and O. Okonchenko. Even though a large part of the volume is devoted to the medieval and early modern times, the authors manage to present a chronologically balanced overview of Lviv's history. All texts and map information are bilingual (Ukrainian–English) thus making this information accessible for the wider scholarly community and bringing the case of Lviv into a broader comparative context of European urban studies.