Hi. I won’t be unique to say that I am same as everyone. On 24 February everything turned upside down. I had to move from Kyiv where I used to live with my family. My family moved further, and we are separated now. Almost all the projects have been suspended and the team has to get involved into active and more public activities, focus on analysis of infrastructure and lay the foundation for the country recovery after our victory. There is no sector that have not suffered as a result of the russian war against Ukraine. So, answering your question about how I am – weird but we keep on working.

We are activating spaces of different types and scales for different audiences. The LMA’s yard we are sitting in now is one of such spaces and our smallest project by size. For example, the biggest one may cover the entire territory of the city and all its components.

It is not so simple with abandoned buildings. It is sometimes easier to dismantle an old building and construct a new high-rise, because developers and construction companies have long been familiar with town planning schemes, they know how to do it. It is more complicated to restore an old building. Here activation is related to combining material and immaterial things. Old buildings have a history, they used to have other functions and their own geometry regarding these functions. Activation is not only about building something new to have something cool in the future. It should build a bridge back for us to remember the history of his place, the way it was before restoration.

If we bring an ordinary Ukrainian, with their eyes tied, to any spot of Ukraine, they will understand that this is Ukraine because their cultural code is in this space. If we bring the same person to russia, it becomes clear that everything is different here: buildings and shops seem to be the same, but commercials, nature are different, people speak differently, traditions and culture are not native to us. Our Ukrainian context and self-identification consist of these components – what is Ukraine and what is not. Activation should reveal what is really ours. If we copy things from abroad mindlessly and call it activation or revitalization, it is not necessarily about quality.

Actually, activation and revitalization are about the same thing – bringing life back to the space, rethinking. If you look at the city from above, the aim of space activation is to use what is inside, but not to expand. The city that is growing without control has a larger radius and residents need more time to go from the outskirts to the city centre, which creates additional burden for transportation, ecology and makes balanced development impossible. It is cheaper for the city to develop compactly rather than develop new fields; they should construct high-rise buildings and then solve transportation, engineering, and social issues. There are usually not enough services, medicine, kindergartens in the outskirts.

Not only Kyiv, but also Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv. I cannot say it is normal – this is the choice made according to the strategic documents. There is a master plan, and we (in Ukraine. — Ed.) have a problem with it. It is not clear what its objectives are and whether it performs its function as a working tool. Now communities started to create concepts and develop strategically. But we (the country. — Ed.) are still to walk a certain path for these developments to turn into a working tool, and not to be just a formal book in the drawer.

Yes, these are the first attempts of space activation here. To create any public space, one should walk the path of marketing, same as in any other project, understand what the target audience is, how it behaves, what hurts it the most. A person normally either wants or lacks something. And the trick here is that when you want to study this, you have to keep the frame that will include the respondents’ key answers because the list of what can be changed can cover five such spaces. It is important to hear people, see their context, not to harm what has already been created in this space and is convenient, and to preserve and highlight other processes, i.e., educational, organizational because it is, first of all, a medical academy.

We worked on this space during the quarantine, a little in a blind manner, because it was difficult to measure its effectiveness. We were not able to model all the scenarios we needed, so we took a certain statement as a hypothesis, implemented it with small investments in a start-up manner, measured the effectiveness that we managed to, and it can be scaled up further. We chose this approach because this space does not address any strategic issues or problems for the academy, but it opens a new direction towards improving students’ comfort. It can actually be done in a much simpler way, the result is not linear.

Lviv Academy has several buildings which are located in the centre of Lviv and form a certain ensemble of buildings with a patio. Students study, hold educational and organizational events here. Medical students spend a lot of time at university compared to students of other HEIs, they regularly run from building to building. We looked at all the buildings and started speaking to the users. The key target audience of the medical academy is students, but it was important not to forget about educators, administrators, and employees. Any education institution is a little hierarchical, so it is important not to go for 100% urban design with such projects, you should understand the nature of social processes. In the lecture rooms students and teachers have one type of relationship, in the space outdoors – another, they may or may not say hello to each other. Accordingly, we had to find out how to model this space, and what we want to achieve. Do we want to separate students and teachers? Do we want to create a spot where they will meet and, probably, spend more time together?

While communicating with the respondents we had a certain sociological cross-section with regards to their needs, sentiment, and senses. This research is quite a subtle thing, it is about emotions, states, it is important not to indulge in wishful thinking, as this substitution of concepts often happens. It is important to study a user and understand how to transfer their needs into the real world. We borrowed it from the marketing approaches. Asking the right questions will allow getting relevant answers and seeing that in this very space students have no place to sit, charge their phones, get some privacy without having someone hanging over their head and telling them what to do.

The key value of communication was that a window was opened up for the students and they were shown that things can be different. You can say to the administration that you need convenient premises, take the initiative, not to wait for the changes from the top, analyse your situation. In fact, reflection is a nice practice. If students have a starting point “changes are possible”, then, probably, such spaces will also appear in other corners of this institution, even without urbanists’ help. The space can be renewed without us, one can experiment. The main thing is to have a sense of space and understanding which users’ needs to address, to avoid formalism, which is especially difficult to overcome at education institutions because HEI is a formal and often heavily regulated structure. There can be numerous methodologies of creating public spaces – many urbanists, many approaches, there won’t be two alike.

Yes, but we haven’t completed our Kharkiv project yet. It has been on hold since the russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

As for the approaches, it’s a very experimental story. Today we have to use all the experience that we have gained before. A transfer from public space activation at Lviv Medical Academy to the country restoration strategies means a different scale of tasks. Taking into account the losses which amount to billions according to some estimates, it is evident that we will not cope with the restoration ourselves. We will need foreign investments and grants here, and we have to be sure where to send them, which institutional framework, who will do that, and who will pay. After the war, the framework of Ukrainian cities will be changed. Among the affected cities, for example, the function of Chernihiv will be reviewed, and the role of Kharkiv will be updated. The same thing is with the cities in the west of Ukraine, which have hosted a lot of refugees. This will change their demographics, economy, and they will have updated needs.

The main point is how can you design cities now without understanding the updated request which can chase us for years after the war is over? The analyst’s job is to look forward, understand this request, come back and communicate it to architects and urbanists for further design. For this restored space to meet the request at a certain moment in the future and coincide. We have the negative experience of post-war restoration when people lived in temporary homes for years and did not have decent living conditions or the cities shifted to become car-centric.

Paris is now actively developing towards a “15-minute city”, where one can access their daily necessities within a short period of time. This is a matter of compromise in terms of sacrifice for more people to have access to such services.

Today it’s the 82nd day of war and the society already has a desire to do something. No region of Ukraine is 100% safe now. Without taking into account Donbas, one can say that over 30 years of independence of Ukraine we haven’t had such experience. Now we have another scale of military operations towards our country, we have active hostilities on almost one-third of the territory of Ukraine. And there is no understanding of how to reclaim it. The ReStart Ukraine team started to think on what can become a benchmark, reviewed the existing practices of post-war restoration in hot spots – Syria, Lebanon, the Balkan countries, rebuilding Europe after World War II. Restoration of Ukrainian cities after WWII showed a certain pattern with two components: structural – to answer the question what is destroyed and how to restore it, and contextual – how this restoration is arranged institutionally - this is about technologies, construction materials, etc. Having analysed a great deal of information we started to put the puzzle together step by step, at least to put its pieces on the table. It is important to see it in a complex, because restoration of some buildings can be irrelevant.

We began our work based on our agency, but have been joined by other people interested in this work, people with different backgrounds, i.e. engineers, architects, sociologists, economists, and urban managers. We are now forming a team that is capable of seeing in complex how the restored city should look like, so far without any reference to where it is and what its name is.

This question should be divided into several parts. When the war is over, it is important to return those people who have gone abroad. It is not a question of capital infrastructure restoration which will last for years. The first step is to return the people. 14 million Ukrainians left their homes, it is almost one-third of those living in Ukraine. Correspondingly, their ability to return to their homes is important because economic recovery will be based on these people. Now people of different professions have left, they are all important and needed. The infrastructure of their return has to provide several short-time solutions, which can further be improved to the permanent ones by updating the function with thoughts about the future.

After the people are back, there will be a need to think about future needs. First, we have to restore strategic and technical infrastructure, refineries, water supply, water disposal, like in Irpin and Bucha. Meanwhile, there is a question whether they have to be restored to the pre-war state. For example, it refers to the restoration of potable water, electricity, heating supply, and alternative communication sources. We are grateful to Ilon Mask for sending us Starlink. There are already certain back-ups, solutions which contribute to restoration, and have to be in different sectors. Such solutions, most probably, will not fit into the structure that existed in our cities before, but we should have them now, it’s a must-have.

One should look ahead, think how to restore certain buildings and streets, whether a certain street should be exclusively residential, or we can include some commerce, places for work, culture, recreation for a person not to go to the central park but have a leisure spot in their district instead. It is a very primitive example, but the updated vision for all the communities will consist of such examples. It’s important here that all city residents could express their views.

I do not really know how such involvement should look like, but we have to take into account people’s psychological state due to the consequences of war and the fact that not all of them are now in Ukraine. There should be specific online tools for the people abroad to be able to influence this process. Their involvement is important for them psychologically, they are equal members of civil society. The main thing is political will, as we say in our country. A lot of people who have been working with the war now indicate that we shouldn’t underestimate people’s moral trauma due to the war. For example, in Bosnia children who were born during the post-war years are the biggest pessimists in the society. Why so? Because no one worked with this trauma and children were deprived of the part of their childhood. Therefore, in this case, participation will not be classic similar to the one when we involved students of Lviv Medical Academy a year and a half ago. This should be another story.

I am now picking up individual signals of first returns. This morning I got a message from one business team, they wondered whether we could talk about restoration of a specific community, because it is important for them. I do not know how systemic the work will be now, but, most likely, these requests won’t be rare, so we will have to open a second front in our work.

Any person’s experience beyond his/her usual environment and native country creates a new world where people do not only speak another language, but also behave and work differently, have different cultural and family traditions. It is not only another language that influences their mindset, it is about different coordinate system. Any country is a separate world and, by adding a certain country to our experience, we open a lot of new things. Working experience in this environment gives you flexibility. You can’t tell that having worked in the USA, you can now work with the entire world. Now you just understand how Americans work and can extrapolate this experience to the situations with your compatriots from Ukraine. This is about larger senses – what happens in Ukraine is not limited to Ukraine.

We can use the urbanistic approaches from IT, marketing, we can take frameworks that were used by other countries under other conditions and at other times, but we should separate the main things from decorations. The organizations I worked at are rather global, work in diverse contexts of different countries, have protocols they are guided by. Their advantage can be a quick response to the situations, which, for instance, took or are taking place in Bosnia, Namibia, Afghanistan. On the other hand, such organizations may lack the Ukrainian context. They can offer us, the Ukrainians, solutions beyond our cultural code and traditions. Therefore, we can get a modern Ukrainian product by combining global and Ukrainian dimensions.

I am very careful about giving advice. Five urbanists will have five different ways of life about what they are prone to, where they have been and what life experience they have. You cannot say: “Enter the engineering university and you will become a great urbanist”. It is important to listen to yourself and understand causal principles. Cramming professional literature is not a panacea, it is more about understanding how the world works. People have been on Earth for many years and there are countless combinations of their interactions.

I have discovered for myself that studying history is essential — you understand how things can be, how they used to be, who did what. I am now reading a book about Singapore “From Third World to First” by Lee Kuan Yew. It just describes how a person working for 35 years in the Singaporean government brought the country out of the third world, where citizens did not have their own potable water and depended on Malaysia, to the country that has the highest per capita GDP rate. The relations between Singapore and Malaysia are very similar to those between Ukraine and russia. Probably, in a less aggressive form, it shows the difference of cultures, which seem to be similar, but not fraternal, different, not literal. I would also advise to be more attentive and watch what is happening around, record it. It will then be useful to return to the days which we are living in the active phase of war. Everyone will have their own individual experience, in 5-10 years it may be very important. If you do not record the experience, it is forgotten.

Maybe, globality, innovativeness, realization where we belong, because today we can be a source of global decisions. I agree with those who say that this war is not only about Ukraine, but also about the world that is under transformation. This is not the last war, not the last transformation, but today it’s about what we can give to the world except for vyshyvanka, palyanytsya and Chornobayivka. New Bayraktars? New housing systems for the refugees? New systems of mental therapy for people who got thrown under the bus of the military aggression of russia? I do not know whether these are only three words.