How is it possible to envision rebuilding when the field is in a constant state of flux? How long will it take until any strategy proposed is rendered obsolete? What value can scholars offer when war, destruction, and resistance are still underway and there is no end in sight?

Reconstruction is a project by e-flux Architecture drawing from and elaborating on Ukrainian Hardcore: Learning from the Grassroots, the eighth annual Construction festival held in the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture on November 10–12, 2023 (2024), and “The Reconstruction of Ukraine: Ruination, Representation, Solidarity,” a symposium held on September 9–11, 2022 organized by Sofia Dyak, Marta Kuzma, and Michał Murawski, which brought together the Center for Urban History, Lviv; Center for Urban Studies, Kyiv; Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture; Re-Start Ukraine; University College London; Urban Forms Center, Kharkiv; Yale University; and Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv (2023).

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18 essays
Yuliya Yurchenko
Decades of socio-economic difficulties, waves of diasporic migration, and more than ten years of Russian invasion have presented Ukrainians with overlapping challenges that have been insufficiently met by the state and market alike.
After the invasion of Ukraine, many cultural practitioners and artists were faced with the question of how to be useful and help our country in its struggle against Russia. We personally found the answer to this question when we arrived in Mykolaiv to volunteer.
Tania Pashynska and Yuliia Holiuk
A man opened the door with an ax. We were laughing and wanted to film it, but he said, “Better not.” The building was previously a sports school, so the rooms were filled with boys’ sneakers.
Alina Stamenova, Kateryna Rusetska, and Andrii Palash
The benches on Katerynoslavskyi Boulevard are gray and cold. We sit on this granite, not particularly afraid of catching a cold, laughing a lot and discussing plans for the future. It is October 2013: one month before the beginning of Euromaidan in Kyiv, which would quickly spread to Dnipro and the rest of Ukraine. It is also the beginning of Kultura Medialna.
Sofia Pinedo-Padoch
Traveling into, around, and out of Ukraine, to the factory where the housing modules are built and to the region where the modules are delivered and installed, my thoughts kept returning to the theme of mobility, to the freedom to move.
Ada Wordsworth and Kseniia Kalmus
About six months after we started working there, a friend who was still volunteering in Przemysl met a family from Slatyne who were returning from Germany because they had heard people were doing repairs in the village.
Michał Murawski, Kateryna Rusetska, and e-flux Architecture
Not merely since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, but since the start of its invasion, occupation, and obliteration of Ukrainian territory in 2014, Ukrainian grassroots reconstruction initiatives have sifted through, cleared up, and re-used bricks, rubble, and ruined matter.
Joanna Kusiak, Oleksandr Kravchuk, Simon Johnson, Vladyslav Rashkovan, and Denise Ferreira da Silva
We all are now witnessing what globalization is all about. We realize that our degree of interdependence is such that it is not only our shared humanity that makes us care about what’s happening to the population of Ukraine, but also our daily lives, sometimes in painful ways.
Amidst these ongoing debates and reconstruction efforts, past experiences of rebuilding are continuously being invoked. There are comparisons being made not just with reconstruction precedents, but also with regard to the war itself. Reconstruction is indeed often linked to the type of war fought, the levels of destruction, the impact on cities, the morale and cultures of memory connected to it.
Polina Baitsym
Narratives that brashly equate “Soviet” with “russian” have been noxiously amplified both within and beyond Ukraine since the beginning of russia’s full-scale invasion. These narratives are complicit in the obliteration of Ukraine’s twentieth-century cultural heritage, which was already threatened by the indiscriminate process of decommunization and scornful ambitions of urban developers.
Ammar Azzouz and Ievgeniia Gubkina
Allowing myself to talk personally is something that’s helped me a lot during wartime. I’ve had to lean on these emotions, on the belief that it’s okay to feel all these things. It’s really difficult to allow yourself to go through such a traumatic experience and try to understand, to feel everything.
These numbers are immense. Where the funds to rebuild will come from and in what form (loans, investments, grants) are questions of great importance. But of equal importance are the questions of what gets rebuilt, where, when, and how.
Lost lives cannot be rebuilt. The human psyche and culture has, however, developed mechanisms to cope with loss. This is the work of the living to mourn and remember. But the lives of the dead will be never repaired. Reparation is a gift to the living, those who can repair and reconstruct their lives and their environments.
Joanna Kusiak, Oleksandr Kravchuk, Simon Johnson, Vladyslav Rashkovan, and Luke Cooper
The expert panel and open roundtable “Restitutions: Appropriation, Expropriation, Regulation” was held on September 11, 2022 as part of the international symposium “The Reconstruction of Ukraine.” An edited transcript of the panel is below, and a transcript of the roundtable which followed will be published separately.
Through the systemic protracted destruction of networks and connections between bodies, places, and things, trauma gains a “collective, spatial, and material dimension.” This trauma, or rather multiple traumas, is also emplaced in the urban fabric, as cities and the urban way of life has become a particular target of attacks in attempts of what can be called “forced demodernization.”
It was the summer of 1989. Residents of Fergana, one of the largest cities in what was then the Uzbek SSR, brought carefully picked garden fruits, vegetables, and herbs to the bazaar, their sweet-spicy smells beckoning. Cats crawled around, trying to get any kind of attention. Locals and tourists alike flocked to the square.
As the most social, eternal, and solid form of heritage, architecture is also the most vulnerable and fragile during the war. It’s impossible to protect it.
Daša Anosova, Michał Murawski, Dan Jonas Roche, and e-flux Architecture
How is it possible to envision rebuilding when the field is in a constant state of flux? How long will it take until any strategy proposed is rendered obsolete? What value can scholars offer when war, destruction, and resistance are still underway and there is no end in sight?
Category
War & Conflict
Subject
Architecture, Ukraine, Politics

Reconstruction is a project by e-flux Architecture drawing from and elaborating on Ukrainian Hardcore: Learning from the Grassroots, the eighth annual Construction festival held in the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture on November 10–12, 2023 (2024), and “The Reconstruction of Ukraine: Ruination, Representation, Solidarity,” a symposium held on September 9–11, 2022 organized by Sofia Dyak, Marta Kuzma, and Michał Murawski, which brought together the Center for Urban History, Lviv; Center for Urban Studies, Kyiv; Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture; Re-Start Ukraine; University College London; Urban Forms Center, Kharkiv; Yale University; and Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv (2023).

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