29-09-25 // INTERVIEW WITH HARVARD UNIVERSITY’S EVE BLAU

Left: Destruction: a main street in Bucha, Ukraine, photographed on March 1, 2022 during a pause in fighting. The city, just northwest of Kyiv,
was the site of fierce battles from February 27 through to the end of March. Image by Radio Free Europe
Right: Reconstruction: the same Bucha street during roadworks in May 2023. Image by Radio Free Europe

Bernd Upmeyer spoke with Eve Blau, who is a Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Her research engages a range of issues in urban and architectural history and theory, and is concerned with the complex dynamics of urban transformation in the context of rapidly changing sociopolitical conditions. Her particular interest in “instabilities” and “transitions” when it comes to cities and buildings, which are both conditions that typically result from conflicts, made us want to speak with her about “Conflict-driven Urbanism”.

[…]

Ukraine Research

Bernd Upmeyer: Currently you are conducting a course entitled “Transition as Condition: Ukraine Research – Urbanism, Environment, Infrastructure” at Harvard. In the description of the course it says that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in the displacement of millions of Ukrainians and the destruction of housing, neighbourhoods, urban spaces, rural landscapes, physical and social infrastructure, and monuments and cultural institutions. What are you exactly examining in the course?
Eve Blau: The research seminar, which I taught at the GSD in spring 2024, was conceived as a pilot project for a larger collaborative research project in development. The focus is on the physical, material, built environment, and with exploring research methodologies for understanding issues and questions relating to sustainable reconstruction. The project is being developed in cooperation with a multidisciplinary team of practitioners and scholars in Ukraine, and in coordination with the Kharkiv School of Architecture (KhSA), Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), and the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv (CUH), with the support and collaboration of the Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
The course was a preliminary effort to develop methods for understanding conditions that are constantly changing – the displacements, the ongoing destruction, the project of reconstruction already underway in Ukraine, and the issues that these circumstances raise for the disciplines of architecture and urbanism. The research, which is ongoing, is being developed in close dialogue with scholars, architects, planners in Ukraine, who regularly participated in the class and helped us select and understand the four very different cities and sites on which we focused: Lviv; Kyiv Oblast, focusing on Bucha and Irpin; Kherson; and Odesa. The issues are different in each case so that methodologically the challenge is to examine the specific conditions, current debates and issues of sustainability, resilience and climate change relating to reconstruction in each city.
The specificity of the place and the conflicts is important. That is why there cannot be any overarching design strategies. I had to stop students from going into design, to come up with design proposals. The premise of the research is not to do that. At this stage it is to learn, to listen, and to understand. As I mentioned, this is only the beginning of an ongoing project in collaboration with people in Ukraine and we are in the early stages.

BU: You say that there cannot be any overarching design strategies. But how do you see the future of Ukraine’s cities and what do you think are the potential approaches to reconstruction?
EB: The biggest challenge facing those who are planning Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction is the need to respond to the enormous scale of the destruction and displacement. These conditions require immediate solutions from the design and planning disciplines. One of the most urgent tasks is to provide shelter and community for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons. But reconstruction also needs to respond to Ukraine’s longer-term needs to develop plans based on principles of sustainability and resilience, including strategies for mitigating the impacts of climate change that are directed toward replacing carbon-based fuels with renewable energy and improving the energy efficiency of Ukraine’s industries and building stock. In the research, these two temporalities are being considered in architecture, urban design, and planning practices and in the context of Ukraine’s long-term economic, governance, and institution-building policies and plans.
In Ukraine extraordinarily innovative urban and architectural projects are being developed and built by architects, planners and scholars in Ukraine. The Kharkiv School of Architecture, NGOs Ro3kvit Urban Coalition for Ukraine (one of the largest, with a network of professionals across Ukraine and Europe) and many other organizations, Think Tanks, and collectives are doing consequential research, developing housing projects of various kinds, including strategies of adaptive reuse of buildings, modular systems, and many others. And in all cases they are involving the people who are going to be living in them. I think it is absolutely essential to learn from the conditions in Ukraine and to collaborate. It is also important to do historical research including earlier reconstruction projects like the Marshall Plan…

… the complete interview was published in MONU #37 on the topic of “Conflict-driven Urbanism”.

Work in process for a “CO-HATY” housing project in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in western Ukraine, using strategies of adaptive reuse of buildings
Photo by Anastasiya Kubert

Volunteers renovating a shelter for IDPs (internally displaced persons) in Ivano-Frankivsk
Photo by Anastasiya Kubert

Volunteers make the final touch before the opening of a newly renovated dormitory in Zinkivtsi,
a village close to the city of Kamianets-Podilskyi in western Ukraine, April 2023
Photo by Oleksandr Demianiv