The Shape of Recovery

This publication brings together a constellation of reflections, practices, and analytical perspectives that emerge from Ukraine’s ongoing processes of struggle, adaptation, and renewal. Bringing into dialogue community-based practice, governance, architecture, ecology, and cultural memory, it examines reconstruction not as a linear sequence of restoration but as a multi-layered process of transformation. In this understanding, recovery is inseparable from the reconfiguration of social and territorial relations, the redistribution of agency, and the reimagining of collective futures. Material rebuilding intertwines with the repair of institutions, ecologies, and meanings, revealing reconstruction as a political, ethical, and aesthetic practice that shapes how societies learn to inhabit uncertainty and to persist.

The project began with the desire to document a moment in time, Ukraine in 2025, when the act of believing in the future has itself become a form of resistance. The publication reflects an urgent need to capture how, under conditions of prolonged war and uncertainty, professionals, researchers, and communities direct their work toward the regeneration of the country’s social and ecological foundations. Structured around three interrelated thematic movements, the publication traces a spectrum of recovery practices that extend from the civic to the spatial and the ecological. 

The first part examines the transformation of governance, territory, and collective life through the lens of civic engagement and decentralisation. Here, the emphasis is on how communities and institutions cooperate across scales to rebuild not only administrative capacity, but also the trust and participation that underpin democratic resilience. Recovery is presented as a civic process, one that redefines power relations and creates new forms of shared responsibility.

The second part addresses the domain of dwelling and reconstruction. Housing, architecture, and urban form become sites through which the meanings of care, stability, and belonging are renegotiated. In the context of displacement and material scarcity, design operates less as a technical discipline and more as a medium of adaptation and imagination. The discussion extends from affordable housing and circular construction to the democratization of architectural production, situating the built environment as both an infrastructure and a social practice that shapes collective recovery.

The third part turns toward ecological transformation. War has rendered Ukraine’s natural systems—rivers, forests, soils—both casualties and witnesses of violence. Environmental degradation, water crises, and the devastation of ecosystems raise profound questions about the ethics of restoration and the political dimension of environmental care. This part explores how damaged landscapes might still serve as grounds for regeneration and how ecological repair intertwines with questions of justice, memory, and sovereignty.

Taken together, these three trajectories form a composite picture of recovery as an evolving and relational process. They suggest that sustainability in the Ukrainian context cannot be reduced to metrics or frameworks but must be understood as a practice of care—toward territory, community, and environment alike. The contributions gathered here reflect a collective authorship that resists fragmentation, offering instead a vision of transition grounded in solidarity and hope.

Anastasiia Zhuravel