Fables of the Reconstruction #2

The rebuilding of Gaza and Ukraine from a geopolitical perspective

In November 2024 the Independent School for the City held its second Fables of the Reconstruction seminar, this time on the global financial, economic and political context in which reconstruction plans are drawn up. This essay is a reflection on its findings.

Urban planning is the continuation of war by other means. The victory of the free west over Nazi Germany was symbolised by the modernist principles on which the reconstruction of Rotterdam was based. The inclusion of Poland in the sphere of influence of the Stalinist Soviet Union found its expression in the monumental blocks and the Palace of Culture and Science on the rubble of destroyed Warsaw. Flash forward: at this moment, the Russian army is rebuilding the destroyed and depopulated Mariupol in true Russian style, for Russian settlers to further Russify Ukraine.

Near the front line lies Kharkiv, heavily under fire and with a large part of its population having fled to western Ukraine. For Kharkiv, the London-based architectural legend Norman Foster is busy using charrettes, competitions and visionary designs to sketch a vision of a future of unprecedented modernity, inclusivity, sustainability and optimistic entrepreneurship. The heavily damaged city, with an extremely uncertain future ahead of it, is already being absorbed into the eco-modernist urban consensus of 'The Global North'.

On February 24, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the annual three-month Dirty Old Town course had begun at The Independent School for the City in Rotterdam, with two Ukrainian participants with roots in the then-free city of Mariupol. We witnessed at close hand how, from day one, the two designers combined heated attempts to get in touch with their besieged family with making visionary plans for their city, to be implemented immediately after the inevitable victory over the enemy.

It took only weeks before the many Ukrainian architects and urban planners in the Netherlands had organized themselves and had rallied their Dutch colleagues to develop plans together and set up partnerships, supported by donations and subsidies. The war was obviously disastrous, but everyone agreed on the desirable future: Ukraine needed to mobilize a whole new generation of designers for its reconstruction, equipped with state-of-the-art design tools, such as those available in countries like the Netherlands.

The former Soviet state's unquestionable reorientation towards the West since the Maidan revolution in 2014 was met with political and financial support for the Republic fighting back. The young generation's embrace of Western European design techniques confirmed this. The optimism of organizations such as UNUN and Rebuild Ukraine, as well as that of the many Ukrainian designers who have presented and debated at our school, remains unbroken.

The reconstruction task for Ukraine was the reason for starting a seminar series on the reconstruction of cities destroyed by war or natural disasters as a design assignment: Fables of the Reconstruction. One of the speakers was Dutch architect and researcher at the Ministry of Defense Jan Willem Petersen, who has experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. He remarked that the reconstruction of Ukraine is a piece of cake compared to the challenges in the region he is familiar with. In Western Europe there is a convincing majority position on who the bad guys are and who the good guys are. There is a political consensus on economic and political cooperation, with support in both Ukraine and Europe. Moreover, Ukraine has an institutional framework that lends itself to modern planning along Western lines. All these things are lacking in the destroyed cities of the Middle East, where the West is associated with destruction, humiliation and chaos.

How different in tone and nature was the meeting Architecture and Spatial Justice in Palestine we facilitated together with Arna Mackic about the reconstruction of Gaza in 2024. After deliberation, we as a school had felt it necessary to post a security guard outside the door to keep our place safe. Here there was no tidy optimism against a background of official consensus about Dutch support for the victims of the conflict. The meeting was intense, emotional, and focused on the most basic rights of the Palestinian people to recognition, dignity and life. The repression by Dutch institutions such as the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft of meetings in solidarity with the residents of Gaza was discussed. The evening was a gripping combination of statements of support for the struggle of the Palestinians and personal expressions of fear, sadness and frustration. There were no representatives from large architectural firms, universities or government agencies here, as there were at the meetings about the reconstruction of Ukraine.

Yet there are similarities between the situations in Ukraine and Gaza. In both cases, the number of civilian casualties runs into the tens of thousands. In both cases there is a massive attack on a country by an immense foreign army. And in both cases this is happening against the background of a denial of that country's right to exist and fueled by an ideology that denies the country's inhabitants their cultural identity and wants to drive them from the territory. Both in Ukraine and in Gaza there is evidence of genocidal motivation. In both cases, the invading army makes no distinction between civilians and soldiers and both are equally affected by the bombings. In both cases, facilities necessary for the survival of the civilians, such as hospitals and power stations, are deliberately targeted.

The big difference between Ukraine and Gaza is of course that the Dutch government is supporting Ukraine with anything but direct military support, while in Gaza it supports Israel with anything but a few carefully considered expressions of concern. Even the most apocalyptic, genocidal aspects of the invasion and bombardment of Gaza are somehow tolerated. The official position of the Dutch government is that it supports the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and is in favor of a two-state solution. However, Netanyahu's cabinet in Gaza and President Trump are referring to the war in increasingly explicit terms as 'Nakba 2023' and Gaza and 'Trump Gaza', whereby the Palestinians are removed and Gaza is taken over by America and transformed into a hypercapitalist city-state modeled on Dubai or Singapore.

Although the Dutch government of Prime Minister Dick Schoof officially supports with international law regarding Gaza, the position of the largest coalition party, the PVV, is that Palestinians are 'a fake people' and that if they have a homeland, it is Jordan. The vision of Palestine held by the most important party in the Dutch parliament harmonizes with the Christian Zionist prophecy held by American evangelical conservatives: that a condition for the return of Christ to earth at the end of time is the return of all Jews to Israel. Protecting and expanding the Jewish state is therefore an obligation for fundamentalist Christians, as is uniting the Russian peoples and establishing Moscow as the capital of Christianity for Putin and his armies. Both a Ukrainian and a Palestinian nation state are obstacles to the fulfillment of these millenarian destinies.

The possible reconstruction of both Gaza and Ukraine, however, is determined by economic structures and political patterns that are greater than the wars themselves and more deadly and businesslike than the underlying megalomaniac apocalyptic dreams of the political leaders. The wars and the resulting devastation allow for the full exploitation of underlying spatial connections between countries and even continents. This is another phenomenon typical of the reconstruction of destroyed cities and largely determines the context for urban design.

For example, the reconstruction of Rotterdam and the Netherlands optimized the port's function as a European gateway for world trade and fueled the Wirtschaftswunder of post-war German industry. The same applied to the reconstruction of Japan during the American occupation, which not only rebuilt Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also established a constitutional monarchy and a modern, high-tech outpost of America in East Asia. The reconstruction of Japan and Europe after the Second World War, and the many tens of billions of dollars that America invested in it, was crucial to the establishment of a global free trade zone: Pax Americana. At the same time, the Soviet Union was building an equally strong family of communist countries. The competition between the two spheres of influence would expand to the decolonizing countries in Africa and Asia. There it led to impressive urban development projects in which capitalism was represented by plans for gigantic urban expansions in countries such as Ghana, Pakistan and Iraq, while in Tanzania, Cuba and Vietnam architects from the Warsaw Pact countries built people's palaces, universities, housing projects and factories, thus sealing communist cooperation.

Behind the striking similarities between cities in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America lie two parallel networks of political influence, financial support and internationally active consultancy and design agencies. At the moment, it is not much different from the Cold War. However, there are a few differences. Firstly, the competition from the east has shifted from the Soviet Union to the People's Republic of China. Secondly, ideology hardly plays a role in this new global competition. We are not being played off against each other with a capitalist or socialist utopia. We are merely being threatened with losing our own prosperity if we do not continue to grow, innovate and compete. Thirdly, networks are no longer primarily linked by political treaties between states, but by the systematic expansion of supply chain infrastructure, or in other words, corridor planning (Corridor Urbanism, Jonathan Silver).

In 2013, China announced its Belt & Road Initiative, a global policy of concluding trade agreements, constructing infrastructure, building distribution centers and investing in shipping companies and ports with a series of countries that now already numbers 150. But in addition to the 150 countries that have officially joined, we also see that China is taking enormous stakes in the infrastructure on 'our' side. For example, China controls 30% of the container transshipment in Rotterdam and owns the entire port of Piraeus in Greece (https://www.ftm.nl). Immense bundles of new infrastructure run through Pakistan, from where ships reach Europe via the Suez Canal or trucks reach the Black Sea via Turkey. Europe, India, America and Oceania have responded to this by stretching corridors between countries with historical ties to the Pax Americana. One of the most important corridors being constructed as a counter-offer to the Belt & Road Initiative is the India, Arabian Peninsula and Israel corridor: the India Middle East Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). Another is the Three Seas Initiative (3SI), a collection of infrastructure and trade zones between the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, which includes 12 EU member states, 10 of which previously belonged to the Warsaw Pact. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the former Soviet Republic has joined, bringing the network to 13 members.

Just as the Belt & Road Initiative is rolled out and exploited by Chinese state-owned and private companies in the fields of infrastructure, shipping, engineering services, financing and so on, the Western corridors are implemented by mostly American companies with strong ties to the American government. Recurring names in IMEC and 3SI are the construction company Bechtel and the engineering and design firm AECOM. Bechtel is a legendary and notorious family business that has been popping up since the 1930s – starting with the Hoover Dam – wherever the federal government and America's foreign policy are undertaking large-scale and extremely costly interventions, such as the infrastructure for the first and second Gulf War, but also the extinguishing of the Kuwaiti oil fires after the first Gulf War and the construction of railroads and highways through the Middle East (https://www.nytimes.com). They were also responsible for covering up the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, the Channel Tunnel and many more foreign projects. Bechtel now has contracts for the construction of railroads through Saudi Arabia for IMEC and for the repair of the transportation and energy infrastructure in Ukraine, contracts that were negotiated thanks to the revolving door between high-level government positions and the Bechtel board. Aecom is a firm that provides design and engineering services to the American government as well, from office buildings to prisons and infrastructure, but mainly operates abroad, where it makes master plans for new capital cities such as Nusantara, Indonesia. Aecom has also been awarded the contract by the Saudi government for the construction management of the NEOM mega-project, which is one of the hubs in the IMEC corridor between India and Europe. Following Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine, Aecom has also been awarded contracts by the Ukrainian government for the restoration of infrastructure at all levels.

In addition, Aecom has been working for more than a decade on plans for the reconstruction of Gaza and the West Bank, supported by the American RAND Corporation and the Portland Trust from London (https://www.vanityfair.com). These plans, which have been resumed at an accelerated pace since the Gaza war, are notable for their detailed elaboration and their neatly finished paper checklist of sustainable development, public space, heritage, economic growth and branding, according to a recipe that hardly changes whether Aecom is active in Indonesia, Gaza or Ukraine. One major difference with Ukraine, however, is that no contracts have been signed with a government, because it is still completely unclear what form of government Gaza will have in the future. The plans are like flags being planted, for when it becomes clear under which authority Gaza will be redeveloped. That it will be redeveloped is clear, and that it will be connected to railways and highways via NEOM with IMEC and via a new port on the Mediterranean with 3SI, is also clear. We now have to wait and see if it will happen within a two-state solution with an independent Palestine, or through the founding of a privately developed city-state under American mandate and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The plans are flexible enough and ultimately serve to guarantee a front-row seat for companies like Aecom and Bechtel to construct the physical infrastructure and shape the real estate strategies, under whatever political regime this takes place.

In Ukraine, we are already seeing a concentration of investments and contracts in the western part of Ukraine, where the connection to the 3SI is to be made, but also the part that will be able to maintain a certain independence from Russia even in the worst-case scenarios. The West has long since stopped investing in eastern Ukraine. The economic and infrastructural connective tissue being woven in Ukraine is in principle in the interest of the current Ukrainian population and is the realization of a widely felt desire to integrate into Europe. At the moment it is unclear how much of Ukraine will be involved and how much forced extraction of minerals they will have to endure under the Trump administration. But it is on this political-economic grid that the reconstruction plans for Ukrainian cities are being drawn.

Inside and outside of Ukraine, there is a fascinating scene of young designers and activists engaged in an extraordinary catch-up in the field of urban design. The enormous urgency, the uncertain future and the mass migration between Eastern Ukraine, Western Ukraine and Western Europe are causing a ferment of ideas and a steep learning curve for the young Ukrainians, who have already produced a whole series of extremely innovative plans and planning methodologies.

Alexander Shevchenko (Restart Ukraine) and Oleksandra Naryzhna and Anastasia Palii (Urban Reform) work in a broad and international network between the architecture schools of Kyiv and Charkiv, Dutch architectural firms, English research institutes and NGOs and are developing an urban development methodology that incorporates elements of participatory design and concept-driven spatial planning. Two realities are colliding: On the one hand, there is the bottom-up urban planning that has gained popularity in design programs in the Global North in recent decades, and on the other hand, there is the harsh reality of a nation that realises it will have to live with a daily existential enemy in the form of neighbouring and occupying Russia. This leads, among other things, to experiments with radically decentralising urban infrastructure to a network of local facilities, the whole of which is less vulnerable to attacks with drones, missiles or sabotage. The term Tactical Urbanism in Ukraine takes on a meaning that unites the acupuncture and the hyperlocal with the military-technical definition. The hope is to restructure Ukrainian cities and villages in such a way that they have an autonomous resilience to destruction, even if large-scale infrastructural networks are destroyed or blocked. This requires an integrated vision, a planning apparatus and an investment structure that connects regional and even international projects with local communities.

In Gaza, the destruction of the building stock and infrastructure is almost total and there is no prospect of a government apparatus that could coordinate or legitimize the reconstruction. Military urban planner Jan Willem Petersen learned from the reconstruction of other almost completely destroyed cities such as Mosul in Iraq that the very first steps are crucial for the long-term success of the reconstruction. The ruthless clearing of rubble that governments, builders, NGO’s and the army are inclined to do blurs property lines and makes it impossible for the original population to start over on their plot of land. Yet this is exactly what the Israeli army has already done, for example with the buffer zones along the Israeli-Gazan border and in the Netzarim and Philadelphia corridors that run right through the Gaza strip. The schematic plans that have already been published by the Trump administration and Prime Minister Netanyahu are based on a massive displacement of the Gazan population, temporary or otherwise, and then a top-down rebuilding of the strip, whether or not as a US colony, an occupied Israeli territory, an independent state connected to the West Bank or something else (https://www.archpaper.com).

Within this reality of schematic strategic planning that is projected onto the area from above and from the outside, the Brussels architectural firm Org Permanent Modernity is trying to carve out a role for a form of enlightened modernist urban planning. By quantifying, analysing and visualising the various interests and possibilities of the very diverse parties that have an interest in the reconstruction of Gaza with the software 'Org Systems', Org practices a form of diplomacy through design (https://www.architectura.be). The highly advanced cartographic data visualiasation methods that Alexander d'Hooghe ('We want to help save the world with ORG-Systems') showed during Fables of the Reconstruction could be a crucial tool in the hands of the UN Deputy for Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction, Sigrid Kaag.

But for the time being there is no certainty whatsoever that the UN will continue to play any role in the reconstruction of Gaza, not even that the current residents of Gaza will be allowed to continue living there. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza is both implicitly and increasingly explicitly the agenda of the dominant parties. This could lead to a reasonably linear and top down reconstruction process, with huge investments by the United States, Saudi Arabia and the UAE through the financial services, governance advice, infrastructure and real estate provided by corporations such as Bechtel, Aecom, the 'Big Three' of McKinsey, BCG and Bain, the banks JP Morgan, Bank of America or Citi Group and perhaps a builder like the Saudi bin Laden Group. The immense investments in the reconstruction of Gaza would flow back into the American and Saudi economies through such a structure, and perhaps the Dutch as well when our dredging companies would be able to get a piece of the pie. As a result, we can expect a Dubai/NEOM/Singapore hybrid.

But at the moment, over 2 million people are trying to survive in the ruins of Gaza and our attention must remain focused on their most immediate needs. We have learned from Jan Willem Petersen that it is precisely in the most acute interventions that the conditions for the long term are created. The long term is determined by what happens in the short term. Making the old settlement structures recognizable, keeping together or reuniting expelled communities, rebuilding neighborhoods by hand house by house with the existing rubble, whether or not sanctioned by a planning authority, can help the Gazans hold on to their land. From the ruins left behind by the earthquakes in Turkey, researchers and activists such as Tügce Tezer and Merve Bedir, who presented their work at the second Fables of the Reconstruction symposium in November 2024, learned how fundamental it is to work on family and neighborhood ties, on the traces of parcellization patterns, on the rituals of hospitality and exchange, even when the immediate necessities of life demand priority.

For an extreme situation such as Gaza, Rotterdam's experience as a city in reconstruction is an example of how not to do it. In Gaza, the property boundaries and the physical ruins and the presence of the population are the evidence and the witnesses of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Projecting new plans, vistas and schemes onto the area – however well-intentioned by some designers – reinforces the paradigm of the clean slate. The fable of the reconstruction city as a phoenix rising from the ashes could prove fatal for an area like Gaza because it is so easily abused by the dominant powers in the region, Israel and America. At the same time, the situation demands the restoration of large-scale infrastructures for the basic necessities of life, without a legitimate party with sufficient power to plan, let alone execute this. As a professional community, we are staring into a chasm of impossible design dilemmas with the reconstruction task for Gaza. How can we work bottom-up and contextually when it comes to hundreds of thousands of destroyed buildings? How can we work top-down when the occupiers are fundamentally acting in bad faith? The only convincing long-term strategy for the people of Gaza, is for them to try and survive from day to day, stay on and rebuild their homes. With every wall that is rebuilt and every bed that is put down, it becomes a little more difficult for the global empire of amoral engineers, genocidal politicians and real estate barons to wipe out the Palestinian nation. It is up to Sigrid Kaag and the UN to support the Gazan population in this desperate struggle to hold on to their land, like the mayor of an occupied city. We, as an international community of designers, could call it 'radical contextualism', or simply: resistance. In any case, let us refrain from drawing up 'visions' until a credible level of self-determination has been achieved. What can we actually do? There are countless Palestinian architects who are currently being prevented from going to Gaza to help with the reconstruction (https://www.dezeen.com). Their knowledge of the region, the climate, the culture and at the same time of the techniques and methods of building is crucial now. Who knows, they may turn to us with a specific question, but for the time being they are not even allowed to enter the area. Our universities, schools, organizations of architects and institutes could at least offer this group as much material, financial and organizational support as possible. Furthermore, we should take an uncompromising stance against our colleagues and parties from the construction industry who want to profit in any way from what threatens to become the most perverted example of reconstruction urban planning of this century.

This text was originally published in Dutch on Archined