Reclaiming the City
On January 17, 1945, German occupying forces were driven out from Warsaw by the combined forces of the Red and Polish Armies. Following the military, a stream of people entered the city. Among them was Helena Rozmarynowska, who at the time was an army nurse. Decades later, in an oral history interview, she recalled the landscape she encountered: “It was like a landscape after an eruption, like after a volcano eruption: mountains, pits, and graves. It was like mountains. There were these pits after the bombs. And crosses everywhere, crosses everywhere.”1
The Germans destroyed Warsaw in what amounted to a prolonged and multi-stage process of urbicide.2 Half of the one million pre-war inhabitants of the city had been killed or perished, including almost the entire population of Jewish Varsovians. These atrocities were accompanied by a destruction of the city, including methodical demolitions planned by German architects, and conducted by the special units of the Wehrmacht.
Assessing and quantifying the alien landscape of destruction became one of the first tasks of BOS (Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy, or Warsaw Reconstruction Office), a central architecture and planning office established in February 1945 by the new Stalin-backed government of Poland. The inventory completed in 1946 found that 85 percent of the main part of Warsaw on the left bank of the Vistula River had been destroyed. This translated to approximately 17,000 ruined structures standing at the time as a spectrum of damage and destruction, from unrecognizable piles of rubble to structurally sound buildings with burned roofs or walls pierced by mortar.
People heading towards the temporary crossing on Vistula River. Photo: Zofia Chomętowska, April 1945. Source: Museum of Warsaw.
Despite the extent of its destruction, Warsaw’s postwar urban landscape was populated immediately. In January 1945, at the time of liberation, the left bank of Warsaw was inhabited by 22,000 people (140,000 people lived in the Praga district, which had been less destroyed). A year later, the same area had over 290,000 residents (with 205,000 living in Praga). The architects employed by BOS were surprised by the speed and the scale of this resettlement. Without the capacity to control it, the proponents of planned reconstruction were left to observe the spontaneous and chaotic process of reclaiming the ruins.
The first waves of returning populations were predominantly women, children, and the elderly. The men who managed to survive the war would return only in the following months, after their discharge from the military, concentration camps, or forced labor deep in the Reich. Photographer Zofia Chomętowska captured the female frontier of inhabiting ruins in early 1945. Her images depict the daily exercise of survival in the postwar city: groups of women entering ruins to forage for any objects of value. While various objects were recovered, Chomętowska shows women carrying interior timber elements such as floor planks and fragments of doors and window frames. These elements were gathered and used as fuel for stoves, to cook and keep warm in the harsh winter months.
Toloka
The practices of salvaging persisted beyond the initial period of reinhabitation. In her recollection of the 1940s, Maria Nowicka, an architecture student at the time, notes: “With great pleasure, in the time free from lectures and studying, we participated in the clearing of rubble [odgruzowywanie]. This involved picking up good bricks. We even had special tools for cleaning the bricks from the mortar, so they could be reused. They were stacked neatly in piles. The rest was loaded onto the cart.”3 She goes on to explain the reason for these activities: “Warsaw was very important and valuable to all of us, which is why it was so tragic when we lost it, and why we were the ones who brought it back to life.”4 Before renovation or rebuilding, the practice of salvaging reclaimed the city from the ruins.
Over time, acts of clearing, sorting, and salvaging rubble transformed into a distinct form of political solidarity that manifested in the willingness to rebuild the city. Maria Nowicka was among thousands of people who took part in the actions of rubble clearance organized in Warsaw in the 1940s. The actions were overseen by BOS and initiated by political parties, civil associations, and factories. Students, scouts, and politicians worked alongside confectioners, photographers, and actors. Regardless of background or social status, everyone engaged in the same tasks: moving rubble away from streets and pavements; salvaging bricks, scrap metal, and any other materials of value; leveling the ground; and planting greenery. These actions became a formal way of expressing enthusiasm and reclaiming the city.
Between 1947 and 1955, each September, the so-called “Month of Warsaw Reconstruction” was organized by BOS, the Ministry of Reconstruction, and other branches of the state. These celebrations transformed rubble into a stage for political theatre. In September 1948, Bolesław Bierut, chairman of the Stalinist Workers’ Party and the president of the Polish People's Republic, was photographed in a white uniform shoveling rubble alongside the fellow party men and women. Beyond this, photoshoots and film recordings became obligatory elements of foreign visits. British and American politicians, like US attorney John Rogge, pushed carts with excavated earth, while youth from the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Sweden, and East Germany salvaged bricks alongside intellectuals from across the globe visiting Poland for the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in 1948.
Postage stamp from 1957 showing Vladimir Lenin at the All-Russia Subbotnik in the Kremlin grounds, Moscow, May 1, 1920. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The imaginary of collective labor has been deeply ingrained in the history of socialism. The October Revolution established a custom of unpaid civic service in public space called “subbotnik” (Cуббо́та). The first subbotnik in the Soviet Union was held on May 1, 1920, during which particular attention was paid to clearing the rubble around the Kremlin in Moscow. This event has been depicted in multiple photographs and paintings which all focus on a group of men carrying a log of timber. Among them is Vladimir Lenin, who engages alongside other revolutionaries. Unlike wartime civilian mobilizations, like “Dig for Victory!” (1940) in the United Kingdom, or “Salvage for Victory!” (1942) in the United States, the top-down mobilization around maintenance, recycling, and clearing has been a relatively consistent feature of socialist political economies.5 When the rubble was cleared, works moved on to include cleaning streets, fixing public amenities, and collecting recyclable material. In this way, the subbotnik can be understood as an urban reinvention of a longstanding rural tradition in the region.
Peasant communities throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries, and Scandinavia have similar names for collective self-help: Tłoka in Polish, Toloka in Ukrainian, Talka in Lithuanian, Talkoot in Finnish, and Talko in Swedish.6 This was a customary way of organizing the involvement of the village in larger works, such as harvest, barn construction, or reconstruction after a disaster of fire. The obligation to participate was balanced by the right to request help when needed. This bottom-up practice can be seen reemerging today in Europe as a response to the proliferation of demolition waste and rubble.
Urban Abundance
The construction industry is responsible for 37 percent of all the solid waste produced on Earth today, and the volume of construction and demolition waste is predicted to reach 2.2 billion tons a year in 2025.7 This is a mass two times larger than that of the rubble estimated to have covered urban areas of Central and Eastern Europe after the entirety of World War II.8 These exuberant quantities are tied to the incessant capitalist drive for profits, which as Marshall Berman has aptly described, leads to the situation where buildings are built in order “to be torn down.”9 Interestingly, it is in this context that the concept of urbicide gains traction, even before being applied to urban warfare: it is deployed by architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, and later by Berman, to describe the violence inherent to urban regeneration projects.10
In post-socialist Poland, the force of architectural obsolescence started to be felt just after the market economy celebrated its thirtieth birthday. In 2022, news broke about planned demolitions of iconic examples of postmodernism, such as SOLPOL in Wrocław (1992–2022), Atrium A in Warsaw (1995–2023), and Galeria Malta in Poznan (2010–25). The cuteness of this early capitalist architecture in comparison to the coldness of the glass and steel buildings bound to replace them caused public outcry, though largely ineffective. In the case of SOLPOL, people went so far as to ask the demolition crew to give them pieces of the building so they could keep material memories of the iconic structure in their homes. With Atrium A, however, salvaging components from the demolition site became much more than just nostalgia for the capitalist past. Instead, it became a part of a broader social response to the full-scale Russian invasions of Ukraine.
Since the onset of the invasion, 10.6 million Ukrainians have been displaced, with 3.7 million internally and the rest, 6.9 million, seeking protection as refugees abroad. In the months immediately following the invasion, starting in February 2022, hundreds of thousands of people started arriving in Poland. This mass displacement triggered bottom-up acts of solidarity, including help at arrival points and train stations, as well as sharing homes. Soon, municipalities followed suit by establishing large-scale refugee shelters. One was organized in Atrium A, which was temporarily rented out by the city for the purpose. The emergency revealed a trajectory of adaptation, as opposed to amputation, yet it was not further pursued by the real estate developer.
When demolition commenced in the spring of 2023, the emptied-out Atrium A become a site of reclamation. The windows of the building have been carefully removed and donated to grassroots renovation initiatives that emerged across Ukraine like District#1 in Kyiv and Unity & Strength in Kharkiv. The whole procedure was performed in the framework of OKNO/ВІКНО (“window” in Polish/Ukrainian), initiated by activist Zofia Jaworowska and architect Petro Vladimirov after assessing the needs emerging on the ground in Ukraine.
Talking to people engaging in wartime renovations in Ukraine, Zofia and Petro quickly understood that the invasion produced an acute need for windows. The shockwaves that follow missile strikes can break windows hundreds of meters away from the actual blast. Moreover, while windows are an essential element of architecture, one that most clearly distinguishes a ruin from a habitable building, they are also among the most fragile and expensive components, and hence difficult to replace. OKNO/ВІКНО was therefore established to gather in Poland usable second-hand windows otherwise slated for landfill or recycling, and donate them to Ukraine instead.
Since October 2022, the project has supplied nearly 3,000 windows to its Ukrainian partners. Among them, almost 200 were distinctly pink and sourced from the demolition site of Atrium A. Together with new materials bought in Ukraine, these components became vital tools for fighting displacement through renovation. They allow the people who remain in war-ravaged territories to continue living in their homes, rather than relocating to distant mass-shelters or prefabricated villages that creates zones of exclusion.
In Ukraine, renovation with second-hand components has become a way to reclaim the city from the destructive spell of the occupier. This also has an importance to the place of their origins, i.e. Warsaw. It has effectively made the reality of the market—which turns fully functional, historically relevant, and architecturally pleasing buildings into demolition sites, and perfectly good components into demolition waste—a matter of public debate. The exhibition “Live Fast, Die Young,” organized in November 2023 by National Institute of Architecture and Urbanism as a symbolic funeral for Atrium A,11 and the story of pink windows has been publicized by leading newspapers throughout the country. Simultaneously, OKNO/ВІКНО moved the debate about circular economy in construction beyond the realm of industrial discussions, bringing a social dimension into consideration. This has resulted in various spin-offs of the project, organized in collaboration with real estate developers, including OBIEG, which collects corporate office interiors (which are replaced every five years on average), and donates them to NGO organizations.12
Arrival of Atrium A’s pink windows at the storage of Unity & Strength foundation, and their installation in damaged houses in the Kharkiv region. Photos: Marcin Banasiak, June 2023.
Commoning
In the last decades, renovations has become a new field of competition between the ultra-rich. This can be seen in projects which turn remnants of industry into spaces accommodating art, like the High Line in New York, the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, Fondazione Prada in Milano, Luma Arles, both the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and GES-2 House of Culture in Moscow, Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, and Löwenbräu in Zurich. Adaptive reuse, repair, and conservation are wielded in this context as a means of appropriating urban space for the needs and wants of the elite. They become tools of what Arnaud Esquerre and Luc Boltanski have recently described as “enrichment,” i.e., an instrument to extract value from places which the process of industrial production has left behind.13
A distinct wave of enrichment projects is currently sweeping through Switzerland, where postindustrial areas become prime sites for new finance and technology elites. It is often from such regeneration projects that the Fenster für die Ukraine (“Window for Ukraine”) project sources its second-hand materials and components. Initiated in 2022 in Switzerland by Barbara Buser and currently run by Félix Dillmann under the aegis of the Re-Win Foundation, the organization operates an ad hoc supply chain of second-hand components similar to OKNO/ВІКНО in Poland. As of March 2025, the foundation had completed fifty-one transports, sending approximately 6,500 windows to Ukraine.
Re-Win also organized transports with a dedicated selection of materials carefully salvaged from demolitions and renovations like fireproof doors, kitchens, bathroom interiors, and many others. These materials were specifically selected by Anna Dobrova, co-founder and representative of the Co-Haty initiative in Switzerland. Co-Haty identifies, claims, and converts vacant municipal building into dormitories dedicated for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).14 Launched after the full-scale Russian invasion, the project has been able to adapt seven buildings, with an additional three currently under renovation. The working Co-Haty dormitories provide secure and affordable housing to 1,500 displaced individuals. This is small when compared with the 3.6 million IDPs currently living across Ukraine. Yet it is radical within the context of the country’s largely privatized housing stock. In the practice of Co-Haty, the right to ruins is slowly transforming into a right to the city.
Magda Szymańska ed., Warszawa zapamiętana. Powroty 1945-1949 (Warsaw: Dom Spotkań z Historią, 2020), 42. All translation from Polish by the author.
The concept started to be used widely only in the 1990s in the context of Bosnian war, see: Martin Coward, Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction (London: Routledge, 2008).
Szymańska, Warszawa zapamiętana, 103.
Szymańska, Warszawa zapamiętana, 103.
Zsuzsa Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
Lyudmila Kuznetsova, “Customary law basis for workforce employment in Ukrainian village: historical and legal aspects,” Legea şi Viaţa no. 11/2(299), (2016): 62–64.
Mark Jarzombek, ‘The Quadrivium Industrial Complex’, e-flux Architecture, accessed April 19, 2025, ➝.
The estimates for Germany, Poland, Soviet Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia published in: Kazimierz Tyszka, “Problemy odgruzowywania miast” {Problems of rubble clearance}, Inżynieria i Budownictwo {Engineering & Building} V, nos. 1–2 (1948): 3–9. The estimates were based on the amounts self-reported by the administration of respective countries and should be treated as very rough estimates.
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 99.
Ada Louise Huxtable, Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? A Primer on Urbicide (Springfield, OH: Collier Books, 1970).
See ZODIAK Warsaw Pavilion of Architecture website: ➝.
See Obieg website: ➝.
Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020).
Tania Pashynska and Yuliia Holiuk, “On the road,” e-flux Architecture, accessed April 19, 2025, ➝.
