Fables of the Reconstruction
In October 2023 the Independent School for the City organised a seminar called Fables of the Reconstruction; the first of an ongoing series on the reconstruction of cities destroyed by nature or war. The first seminar included as speakers Michelle Provoost (on Rotterdam) Bengin Dawod (Aleppo), Alexander Shevchenko (Ukraine), Jan Willem Petersen Afghanistan) and Jacopo Galli (Cities under pressure).
Once upon a time Rotterdam was the most famous reconstructed city of the western world. Its modern city centre was visited by architects, planners, and dignitaries from all over the world. The reason was not just that here the first pedestrian open air shopping centre was realised, but especially the values that the sparkly new centre seemed to embody. Modernity and industry rose up from the ruins of the pre-war period of dense suffocating historic city centres. Democracy, commerce, progress, and capitalism were the new truths. Then there was the specific nature of Rotterdam’s destruction that gave it its importance: the city was bombed by the German Wehrmacht to force Holland into capitulation and was an example of the brutal threat of Nazi Germany at the beginning of the Second World War.
Reconstruction is perhaps the wrong word for the rebuilding of Rotterdam after the war; the new plan was specifically designed to achieve a maximum contrast with the old city, and to project a new city form, a new economy and even a new society. Rotterdam became a symbol for the astronomic ambitions of post-war western Europe.
Digging into the history of the reconstruction complicates or rather enrichens the story of Rotterdam. As it turns out Rotterdam was already ‘rebuilding’ before it was even bombed. Enormous demolition and construction projects had been going on in the city centre for nearly half a century; a new type of urban planning focussed on modern buildings and car traffic was being rolled out and the harbour of Rotterdam was already a place of futuristic modernity and scale.
The bombing of Rotterdam allowed its most radical tendences and ambitions to be realised and to be impregnated with symbolic meaning as a global example of the new world after Nazism and as an alternative to communism. Also, the reconstruction was presented as a destiny for the community of Rotterdam, with its inhabitants taking part in the collective effort of rebuilding their city as an entirely new, anti-nostalgic place, embodying the presupposed pride of the Rotterdammers in their own modernity.
Rotterdam shows us how the reconstruction of a demolished city is always a combination of the addressing of economic and physical needs, like housing and industry, and of a heavily value-driven projection of political ideas. Also, reconstruction is not just rebuilding what was there before, and neither is it the tabula rasa building of a new city. As much as Rotterdam seemed brand new after the war, the ideas for its reconstruction had been simmering for decades and at the same time even after the reconstruction was finished some of the ancient historical structures and features could not be suppressed entirely. Rotterdam also showcases the political and propaganda-like nature of the reconstruction.
All these aspects are visible in the planned reconstruction of devastated cities in recent years and will be in the coming years. Recently Sigrid Kaag, former minister of finance of the Netherlands, has been appointed the special UN representative for humanitarian aid and the reconstruction of Gaza. Also here, the nature and political background of the destruction will play a role in the symbolic meaning of the rebuilding; also, here a choice will be made for either historical form or an entirely new structure. Also, here not just the immediate physical needs will be addressed but also the values, the symbolism and the political meaning of the reconstruction will take centre stage. Also, here decades or even centuries old ideas, political alliances, and economic structures will find their way into the new plan, wanted or not. And here, the world will be watching the reconstruction as a project of global geo-political significance that transcends its local scale, just as Rotterdam was after the Second World War.
The Amsterdam based Syrian architect Bengin Dawod, speaking of the reconstruction of Aleppo, has remarked that the destruction of a city often reduces it to one layer: one layer of meaning of needs, of programme, of identity, leading to one dimensional reconstruction plans, either reconstructing the original or replacing it with an entirely new and futuristic ‘Dubai’-model.
In his own proposals for Aleppo, he tries to understand the complexity of the city and use this as the basis for its reconstruction. Aleppo is a hybrid, dense and compact city of which the largest part is made up by informal settlements. Of these, 67% has been destroyed, necessitating the rebuilding of 40.000 houses, most of which will again have to be self-built. How to reconstruct in such a context? The Rotterdam model with its top-down managed, modernist, architectural approach will not be very helpful. The east of the city is informal and poor and mostly destroyed; the westerly part is more formally built and more middle class. Without a masterplan the inequality between both parts will only deepen; a well-thought-out plan could however soften the harsh borders between both parts of the city; allowing more affordable housing in the west-part, and more formal developments in the east.
A similar opportunity is that the reconstruction of the city’s infrastructure could, according to Dawod, allow for open green spaces that penetrate deeply into the city. In other words, the horrifying destruction caused by Syria’s civil war facilitates changes to the city that were necessary and desired before the war. The reconstruction could also add a little bit of planning and design to the process of self-building entire neighbourhoods now that these need rebuilding; starting with replanning the urban tissue and planting it with trees and shrubs and moving on to rewarding inhabitants for building water reservoirs with free solar panels, for example.
Dawod’s vision for Aleppo contrasts sharply with the classic idea of a top-down planned, technocratic reconstruction. It sees the city as a process in which design and planning can play a role, but which has a force of its own, that should be understood and harnessed. Like ‘classic’ reconstruction it however makes use of the destruction and ensuing reconstruction process not just to rebuild, but also to implement ideas, to make the city better than it might have been without the catastrophe. Destruction as an opportunity is a constant factor in thinking about the reconstruction of cities.
What to do in a country that, even historically, hardly has any institutions on which to graft a reconstruction strategy, and for which war and destruction are chronic conditions? The Dutch architect and adviser Jan Willem Petersen has studied the effects of the reconstruction efforts by the Dutch army in Uruzgan (Afghanistan) and came back with fascinating but worrying conclusions, and even some practical advice. Afghanistan has seen 43 years of near constant conflict. Not only the buildings have been destroyed, but also the systems, structures, and relations. Only since 2021 there is relative peace. The capital city of Kabul is growing immensely, since even during the conflict it was and remains the only relatively safe place. Eight million people moved to the city from inside Afghanistan and from the Afghani diaspora. They brought with them housing typologies from Pakistan like the mirrored glass and Byzantine-balconied mansion houses that are in fact unsuited to the Afghan climate, and that must be fortified, masked and shielded to withstand the pressures of Taliban rule and the threats of crime. This kind of misfit architecture became the new standard and symbolises status. Protection and security have taken priority in design, visible in the many barricades, walls and watch towers.
The reconstruction in Kabul is not a centrally planned effort by state institutions; 80% is being constructed outside or without a masterplan. It is an agglomeration of real estate tactics by (former) warlords, creating new roads and allotments? [PM] and selling the lots for fortunes. In a mimicry of classic planning, the strongmen offer areas and real estate that provide security of ownership, a scarcity in anarchic and war-torn Afghanistan. At the same time the official state masterplan itself, although it looks professional and sensible on paper, hardly leaves any recognizable trace on the terrain. Also, the international communities of foreign representatives and NGO’s have no interest or position on urban planning or the spatial-economic aspect of the reconstruction.
The harsh conditions on the ground in Afghanistan question which tools are the most realistic to implement when classic instruments and institutions for planning or reconstruction are absent. Should we engage with the warlords? Is there a possibility to find common ground between the different formerly warring parties? Is there a possibility to talk about public institutions and public space with the Taliban rulers etc. Petersen has studied these questions close up in Uruzgan where the Dutch army was engaged in reconstruction, among other things with the building of schools, new roads, an airport et cetera, to help civil society to develop.
The problems with the Dutch solutions in Afghanistan (of which only 20% can be called successful) can be summarised as being caused by the generic nature of the solutions and that the assumptions they were based on clashed with local conditions. A new school building was not taken apart out of hostility against the idea of educating girls, but because the population needed the building materials for their houses. An airport terminal was built but never used. A new road caused deaths because the asphalt allowed for the unprecedented speed of scooters and cars and was sabotaged because it was unclear which community it benefitted. A new jail was built to (high) international standards, which caused the guards to use the prisoners’ facilities for themselves and the and force the prisoners to stay outdoors. The projects documented and presented by Petersen to the Dutch government show how a deep knowledge of context is a condition for successful reconstruction projects, and how the process - the how – is more important than the project – the what – itself. Reconstruction needs to be comprehensive, focusing on process, research, local networks and local technical know-how. Its aim should be humble: to raise a low bar a little higher.
To bring the question closer to home, in Ukraine the reconstruction has been planned nearly from the day the country was attacked and plans and concepts are being developed while the war and its destruction rages on. Architect Alexander Shevchenko proposes an alternative to soviet-style rebuilding with his Re-start Ukraine initiative. His research, design and advisory efforts transcend the purely quantitative and humanitarian approach that is necessarily? dominant in destroyed cities in the developing world. Money is not the first problem, he states, much has been pledged by the EU and the United States; neither is building capacity or even housing shortage. Six million Ukrainians have left the country, and it is unclear when or in which numbers they will be coming back.
What is needed first and foremost in Ukraine is vision, new working methods and new, types of building that will be sustainable in the long term. Time and space are not the enemy of the project to rebuild Ukraine, there is plenty of it. It would be better to slow down the building, than to build large amounts of a low quality at short notice, since that would hamper development and innovation later on. Indeed, overdevelopment is actually one of the risks of a physical reconstruction that happens too rapidly.
Ukraine is now in a completely different geo-political context than it was when its cities were built. There is a need to move away from the heavily centralised soviet style city structures to a more community based decentralised model. A carefully planned restructuring of the functions and the infrastructure could be an opportunity offered by the destruction. One of the cities were this long term, structural approach is being proposed is the regional centre of Chernihiv. The war was useful to study the mobility patterns of the city as its inhabitants were fleeing, revealing weak and strong points in its infrastructure. Other long-term structural concepts are those on the creation of a green-blue infrastructure that would be designed to fit the heat map of the city.?
Another point touched on by Shevchenko is the role of heritage and public spaces in the creation of places of remembrance of a national trauma that is still ongoing. Certain buildings and places should be pre-emptively conserved and protected from further damage, for the day they will play a role as sites of memory. The reconstruction as a form of urban reformation? is also informed by the fact that maybe this war is temporary, but the threat of aggression from Russia is not. Cities will have to be rebuilt to become resilient not just in a climatological or a social economic sense, but also to be less vulnerable to attacks. Drone and missile warfare will codetermine the structure of the city. Therefor essential services like food, water and electricity will have to be decentralised, anticipating new aggression. Also, a system of safe or protective? spaces is needed for people to flee to when their buildings are being bombed. These demands of a military, defence nature overlap with the demands of a social, economic and qualitative nature. Preparedness for war will become one of the key elements in urban planning.
Reconstruction requires both immediate action and long-term master planning, with details sometimes coming before broad strokes and general principles. This combination of needs that need to be fulfilled acutely like housing and food, with long term structural development defines reconstruction. As does the combination of purely physical needs and ones of a more cultural and symbolic nature, such as heritage and public space. In Rotterdam during the war temporary shopping and housing areas were built while the masterplan for the reconstruction was being drawn. In this masterplan, huge areas were deliberately left empty, to leave space for yet unknown developments in the future that should not be frustrated by filling everything up.
Areas as strikingly different as Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria or Palestine and even Rotterdam, seemingly incomparable they are, can still learn from each other and inspire each other with experiences, mistakes, best practices and innovative methods. We see similar dilemmas and phenomena in the reconstruction of Chernihiv, as we see in Uruzgan, Alleppo or Rotterdam. This does not mean there is a universal approach to reconstruction, since it is often the lack of sensitivity to the local conditions that creates problems. But there is a common ground on which the experiences in different places can be compared and shared. The Venice based architect Jacopo Galli has made an inventory of reconstructed towns and cities throughout the world and has come up with generally applicable principles but also with a critique of generic solutions. He proposes a more bottom-up approach that would be an alternative to the global, often World Bank supported reconstruction efforts in which generally only 10 to 15% of the funds is spent in the local economy. On the other hand, he sees the great advantage cities worldwide have in their destruction to improve their structures, to become polynuclear and integrate self-building with maser planning. Jan Willem Petersen has been working on a manual that could help states and NGOs with the reconstruction of devastated cities and regions in different parts of the world. Of interest could also be the matrix-approach to reconstruction that Bengin Dawod has been using in the earthquake regions of Turkey recently, setting off short term, middle term and long-term initiatives to make sure that not everything is done all at once and long-term opportunities are not missed. Maybe this matrix approach could be combined with a hierarchy of collective needs, inspired by Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of human needs. On the Y-axis we could put food and water, followed by safety and security, in turn followed by working places, meeting places and places of culture and remembrance. This could organise the programme and the process of a reconstruction project. It could inform the inventory of needs, but also could be used to structure the process and define the plan. On this level of analysis and observation, process and programme, a shared method can be developed, even while the bombs are still falling and the drones still flying.