A Year of War in Ukraine
The first year of war in Ukraine has cost at least eighty thousand lives (eight thousand civilians, thirteen thousand Ukrainian troops, and forty to sixty thousand Russian) and displaced an estimated eight to thirteen million. It has also wasted much of the country’s built environment.
From monasteries to schools to hospitals to post-communist shopping malls to civic monuments like the Mariupol Drama Theater, Russian forces have ransacked buildings, infrastructure, and landscapes—and much of Ukraine’s patrimony, with Russian forces, according to United Nations-appointed observers, deliberately targeting sites of cultural significance, in violation of 1954's Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. More than 335,000 homes have been destroyed, mostly in and around Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Kyiv, leaving a million people homeless.
As PLATFORM reflects upon the horrific losses, we are revisiting articles on Ukraine and Russia published both before and after the war began.
Figure 1. Gated entrances to one of London’s exclusive new high-end housing developments. Photograph by Rowland Atkinson, 2020.
In "Follow the Money: Geopolitical Crisis and the Impact on 'Londongrad,'" British sociologist Rowland Atkinson explores the UK’s complicity in enriching Putin and his regime in part by allowing oligarchs to launder money through high-end property in London. Atkinson highlights the corrupting influence of Russian money, which has made many in Britain reluctant to intervene. He also laments the spillover effects of this infusion of ill-gotten cash into London’s housing market, which has driven up prices, exacerbating inequality and displacement.
Figure 2. Arsenal’na subway station in Kyiv, Ukraine, 1960. Photograph by user AMY 81-412, 2010, via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons CC BY-CA 3.0.
Architectural historian Kateryna Malaia also write about housing—but in Ukraine. In "Finding Shelter from Russia: A City Guide," published the week that Russian invaded, she documents the anxious search for shelter in Kyiv in subway stations and in the basements of Soviet-era apartment houses, both of which were designed to shield civilians from nuclear attacks during the Cold War. While underground stations remained well-suited to the job of protection she find that in apartment buildings, many basements were converted into commercial space after liberalization in the 1990s.
Figure 3. User-modified balconies in Kyiv, Ukraine. Photograph by Kateryna Malaia, 2019.
In "Individually Generated Building Modifications in Response to Housing Precarity," which Malaia published in 2019 and 2020 (in English and in Ukrainian), Malaia examines these apartment buildings in more detail, focusing on the many ways in which post-Soviet tenants and homeowners modify their homes. The changes residents make are much less visible than other forms of DIY urbanism, but careful scrutiny of façades and interiors reveals a huge range of creative behind-the-scenes interventions—adding and removing partitions, enclosing balconies—that together, she argues, serve as a tactical response to housing insecurity.
Figure 4. Berlin Hauptbahnhof (Hbf), the main rail terminal in the center of Berlin, Germany, was the principal port of entry for refugees to the country from Ukraine. In spring of 2022, an average of 10,000 arrived here daily. Photograph by Mireille Moga, March 2022.
The photoessay "Letter from Berlin: The War in Ukraine Pushes the City's Limits," published in English and in German by photographer Mireille Moga documents efforts in the German capital to accommodate the thousands of Ukrainian refugees arriving daily in the early months of the war. The city government housed thousands in airports and train stations, Deutsche Bahn offered free transit, and individual private citizens volunteered as translators, collected donations, and hosted Ukrainians in their homes—Moga included. Her essay expresses pride in this response, while raising questions about disparate treatment of refugees from Ukraine and from other war-torn nations, including Syria, Afghanistan, and Myanmar.
Figure 5. Central Post Office, Kharkiv, Ukraine, architect A. Mordvinov, 1927-29. Photograph by Christina E. Crawford, 2012.
Finally, in "Love Letter to Ukraine in the Language of Architecture," architectural historian Christina E. Crawford, who has written extensively about the Soviet built environment, shares photographs she made of Ukraine’s architecture while touring for research twenty years ago. In her travels, Crawford explored whether a perceptibly national architecture was emerging after a decade of independence from the Soviet Union. Her images of palaces, fortresses, community centers, and more reveal a landscape of remarkable heterogeneity formed through an intertwining of cultures over time.
Citation
PLATFORM, “A Year of War in Ukraine,” PLATFORM, Mar. 6, 2023.
