Sustainability must be built into the reconstruction of Ukraine and Gaza City

The destruction inflicted on Ukraine and Gaza City is devastating, making it hard to imagine a time when they will be rebuilt and return to their roles as major urban centres. But history shows that renaissance is inevitable. This will give an opportunity to ensure they are renovated with sustainability built in.

Since 24 February 2022 Ukraine has been hit by repeated aerial attacks. The assault against Hamas in Gaza City is much more short-lived, starting on 7 October 2023, but the airstrikes have caused massive damage to the infrastructure while many residents have fled to the south of the Gaza Strip.

The history behind both conflicts and the debate over the rights and wrongs are complex and have been discussed in great detail elsewhere. This blog is about urban sustainability and will not look at the political, diplomatic or military issues. If you were expecting that, or are offended it is not covered, please click away.

Since the invention of airborne ordnance, military conflicts have often resulted in the destruction of the infrastructure of the combatants’ major cities. The most obvious example is the Second World War that saw a host of cities in the United Kingdom — London, Coventry and Bristol, for example — and Germany — Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg — suffer devastating damage from aerial bombardment.

The conflict culminated in the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Since then, conflicts have seen heavy damage to cities across the world such as Mali in Timbuktu, Mostar in Bosnia and Mosul in Iraq. But in all cases they have been rebuilt — as will happen in Ukraine and Gaza.

The way reconstruction is carried out reflects the contemporaneous thinking about architecture and planning. This partly explains why many British cities were rebuilt around cars, a practice ended by a popular rebellion against a motorway-box planned for London.

Opportunity for new thinking

This time, planners have an opportunity to ensure Ukraine and Gaza City can leapfrog cities whose structures were based on now-outdated thinking, by delivering urban sustainability, “green” transport and energy efficiency that will ensure they will find new lives as “smart” cities.

These rebuilt cities must be severed from previous dependence on fossil fuels and established as green, carbon-neutral urban economies. This will require major investment in renewable sources of energy to power households, business, industry and transport.

The transport network should also be designed to be inclusive of all areas of the city and all users, especially the elderly and disabled and particularly people with injuries from the conflict. It should also adopt smart technology such as card payment and easy-to-find navigation tools. At all costs, avoid building in a dependence on cars.

Reconstruction must embrace the digital economy — or inject that if it did not exist before — ensuring technology such as internet access, remote sensors, artificial intelligence and smart management networks are readily available and affordable.

The final ingredient for a post-war sustainable city is to improve — or more likely create — green spaces by encouraging tree coverage and natural plants to reduce pollution and improve air quality and the environment.

Get the urban political ecology right

While it is essential planners seize the opportunity to build sustainability into reconstruction, they must also realise this is not just a technical exercise but one that requires getting the urban political ecology right — in other words that citizens contribute to and so buy into the result.

This means the system of rebuilding is well governed. There can be no space for corruption, or even perceptions of it, as that will undermine people’s confidence that the rebuilding is for the greater good. A Smart City must have Smart Government.

Of course, the institutions that provide the funding are likely to have an influence on the design and the outcome, and in a post-war environment this might be contested. An example is Berlin where the divisions of the city saw the quarters under the control of the western Allies veer towards preservation while East Berlin under Soviet control was more focused on modernity.

It is therefore important that reconstruction plans both include views of various stakeholders and that their final form is the result of a public debate. This will avoid any feeling by certain groups that they have been ignored. One method of helping to deliver that is to collect maps and documents that planners can use as they get to work.

This can help demonstrate how new buildings fit in with previous patterns. It will also enable brick-by-brick reconstruction, if wanted, as took place in Warsaw’s historic centre — although nowadays that work would have incorporated more thinking on minimal impact, climate resilience and more equitable cities.

A fascinating essay on the rebuilding of Mosul in Iraq after the US-led invasion overthrew Saddam Hussein shows that key ingredients for its success were preserving heritage buildings and recreating them in their original style, swiftly linking all parts of the city via rebuilt roads and bridges, and working around the natural infrastructure of its land and waterways.

Although Ukraine and Gaza are still mired in conflict, that will end. At that point policymakers can deliver cities that can leapfrog to greener technologies, reduce dependence on fossil fuels and aim for a zero-emission economy to combat that global conflict — climate change.