Editorial

Reconstruction is a project by e-flux Architecture drawing from and elaborating on “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. It features contributions by Oleksandr Anisimov, Ammar Azzouz, Gruia Badescu, Polina Baitsym, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Ievgeniia Gubkina, Kateryna Iakovlenko, Simon Johnson, Joanna Kusiak, Oleksandr Kravchuk, Vladyslav Rashkovan, Galyna Sukhomud, and Yuliya Yurchuk.

One year ago, over eighty speakers convened virtually to discuss the toilsome, almost unimaginable task of rebuilding Ukraine following Russia’s unprovoked invasion starting in 2014 that led to a full-scale assault in February 2022 and is still ongoing today. At the symposium, speakers addressed the paradox of discussing reconstruction during wartime. 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? Unfortunately, these questions remain unanswered today. There is still in no end to the destruction in sight.

Since then, however, many more questions connected to Ukraine’s future have begun to crystallize. Myriad actors—local and global, public and private, empathetic and extractive—have mobilized to exert influence on the country’s postwar settlement. Two major “Ukraine Recovery” conferences have been held, in July 2022 in Lugano, Switzerland, and in June 2023 in London. These elite global summits—rejigged versions of the Ukraine Reform conferences held annually since 2017—brought together politicians, financiers, and a smattering of scholars to talk about “donor coordination,” “de-risking,” and “building back better.”1 The Marshall Plan was invoked. In a side event to the London event organized by LSE, there was even some discussion of “insourcing,” allowing the specter of the public sector into the (fringes of the) room.2 But almost nothing was said at any of the conferences about housing, architecture, or culture; about trauma or about ecology; about shelter, or about justice.

By contrast, our symposium was horizontally-organized and multidisciplinary, including perspectives from architects, planners, artists, economists, politicians, psychoanalysts, and more. The majority of the speakers were Ukrainian, but there were also Brazilian, Syrian, Polish, Bosnian, French, Palestinian, Polish, American, Romanian, German, and British participants. All were working to make sense of the impact of Russia’s invasion and the ongoing war on Ukraine, and to imagine and work on multiple dimensions of Ukraine’s reconstruction. As part of its organizing team, we aimed to re-conceive of reconstruction as not merely a process of amelioration or reconstitution, but as a “heterodox, experimental process of re-imaging and re-thinking, as well of transformation and decolonization.”3 The intention was not to provide the final word on reconstruction, but rather to generate follow-up initiatives—and imaginaries—which may, via indirect and uncertain routes, feed into the process of Ukraine’s reconstruction.

Over the past year, we have been working together with e-flux Architecture to look back at what was discussed, revisit some of the symposium’s most inspiring contributions, and fill in some missing gaps. While wide-ranging, the symposium, as well as this resulting publication, does not aspire to be, and cannot be comprehensive. Instead, it aims to foreground a radical approach to reconstruction. Etymologically, the word “radical” emerges from the Latin word radix, meaning “root.” The origin of this word highlights the fact that seemingly revolutionary ideas, which seek to imagine and enact more just and equal worlds, are in fact those most firmly-grounded: in the real, material worlds of human beings, in the communities they create and in the forms of solidarity, empathy, and resistance that sustain them.

A radical (that is, rooted) approach to reconstruction aims to refocus the conversation on rebuilding away from the abstract and top-down schemes dreamt up by supranational bodies, investment funds, and recovery conferences. Instead, it foregrounds the experiences of grassroots initiatives carrying out life-saving emergency rebuilding work in vulnerable communities, and seeks to develop ideas and strategies towards a politics, economics, and ethics of reconstruction rooted in the deep fabric of Ukraine’s society, heritage, and environment.

This publication, and the idea of radical reconstruction, is dedicated and indebted to the memory of the left-wing economist, activist, and journalist Oleksandr Kravchuk, co-editor of the journal Spilne (Commons). Following his career as a railway conductor, Oleksandr earned a PhD in economics and later became a pioneer advocate of sovereign debt cancellation and a just reconstruction for Ukraine. Oleksandr died unexpectedly, and far too young, in Kyiv on July 21, 2023. He would have been a powerful and radical voice in postwar Ukraine. His contribution to the symposium is also reproduced here. The words he leaves behind in Spilne and other outlets will undoubtedly continue to inform and inspire those who seek to reconstruct a just, equal, and sovereign Ukraine.