Spring 2022. Kharkiv has just survived another Russian missile attack. Standing in the attic of a dilapidated office complex, historian, architect, and documentarian Maxim Rosenfeld presents his concept for the reconstruction of the city. A team of international and local architects, working with the support of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, embraced Rosenfeld’s vision: Kharkov is a frontier city.
“Seeing the whole city from the panoramic windows and the smoke from the fire (the shelling was an hour ago, they have not yet had time to put it out) you understand that our city is proud of itself, feels smart, educated, knows its worth “, says Maxim in an interview with UN News.
The Norman Foster Foundation, together with a group of local architects and urban planners, as well as the Advisory Board of International Experts, is voluntarily developing the Kharkov master plan. This work is supported by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) through a pilot project. To this end, the UN4Kharkiv working group has been created, which brings together 16 UN agencies and international organizations. Maxim Rosenfeld is one of the local specialists who also work as volunteers.
The situation is constantly changing
Rosenfeld was born and raised in Kharkiv. He is in love with her city, he makes movies about her, he can talk about her history and her people for hours. Since the beginning of the war, when Kharkov began to be systematically bombed, many have moved to other parts of Ukraine or gone abroad. But Maxim did not even think to leave.
“It is impossible to remotely understand what is happening here. It is difficult to understand even from the inside, because the situation is dynamic, it changes all the time,” he shares. For example, we make an appointment with a meeting of Zoom, and then there were nightly shelling. When we got to the subject of, say, energy security, the situation had completely changed.
The total damage caused to the Ukrainian real estate sector since the Russian invasion is estimated at more than 50 billion dollars. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, according to the city council, 3,367 apartment buildings and 1,823 single-family houses were destroyed and damaged. The city’s infrastructure suffered severe damage.
Dilapidated buildings in Kharkov.
border town
The border town is beyond the unknown, the “Ukrainian Wild West”, explains Maxim Rosenfeld. Kharkov was founded in the middle of the 17th century and became part of the historical region of Slobodá, freed from serfdom and taxes. “Therefore, people came here willing to take risks to take advantage of the opportunities that were opening up.”
And a hundred years after the first “border” jump, a university was created here, which in many ways forged the character of the city. Kharkiv, which in the 1920s was the capital of Soviet Ukraine, is also known for having given the world three Nobel Prizes at once.
“I had always believed that we had a lot in common with Berlin. Now I don’t compare Kharkov with anything. It’s different. To understand it, you have to come and live here,” says Maxim. It is a multicultural and multinational city, unique in that there have never been any pogroms. It is a city of great national tolerance. It is a city where, like in a melting pot, students from Africa, China, India and the United Arab Emirates study together, live together,” he says. “That is, we study until February 24 (the day the Russian incursion began in 2022)”.
“Therefore, when I prescribed the concept of Kharkiv is a border city, I had to give a master class in the fact that Kharkov has not become a border now, not February 24, this is its genetic code. And they (the Norman Foster Foundation) understood and accepted the concept,” he adds.
To stop the bombing…
The population of Kharkiv was invited to take part in a survey on the concept of rebuilding the city. But many left, fleeing the daily shelling, and those who stayed behind dreamed of one thing: to stop them. However, the voice of the people was heard. In the course of cooperation with Foster, Kharkiv architects and engineers formulated eleven starting proposals.
One of them, by the way, is the security framework, which includes the construction of a modern bomb shelter. “There is no concrete project, because this requires a number of conditions, one of which is financing, the budget, and the second is an understanding of the realities, and you yourself see this on the example of the situation with Kherson and the Kajovka hydroelectric power station: the situation is very dynamic”.
Last year, according to Maxim, two members of the Kharkov group cooperating with the Foundation were sent on a business trip to Helsinki to study the experience of building bomb shelters. On the ground, however, it turned out that the goals set for Finland during the Cold War involved temporary asylum for three days in the event of nuclear war. “We consulted a civil protection specialist from Helsinki and shared our experience in March 2022,” explains the architect.
Air-raid shelters were built in Soviet Kharkiv in the 20-30s of the XX century, and later they were reconstructed in accordance with the new realities. “But today it’s a rudiment,” says Rosenfeld. “In fact, a modern bomb shelter is an underground factory, underground universities, event centers, which should be dual-use facilities.”
Kharkiv city center.
Cultural life returns
According to Maxim, despite the constant shelling of the last month and a half, “a large number of people” have returned to Kharkiv, and cultural life has resumed in the city: theaters, concert halls and exhibitions open. “Recently we attended an amazing show based on a work written two months ago about the present,” says the architect. Puppet theater, a children’s play, the whole room was crying. Immediately after there will be a jazz festival. The alarms, the bombings, were not conditioning factors, really. The next day, there was an opening of the exhibition of an impressive Kharkiv graphic artist. And so on. A very important story about the return of cultural life.”
The happiness of being required
The concept of the future of Kharkiv is also born to the sound of an air raid siren, but Maxim admits that he and many of his colleagues are “happy” working on the project. “It sounds mocking, maybe for someone it sounds terrible, but at that moment you understand that you are doing something very important and necessary, you do not deal with far-fetched problems, you do not dedicate yourself to invented concepts. You want to be needed,” he explains.
“In general, after the start of the war, there were many happy people in Kharkov who understood: now they need me, I am useful. The doctor, the volunteers… they are not doing it out of vanity, they are just doing the right thing. This is colossal happiness I do several important things at the same time, and for free, they don’t give us a penny for it. Not a penny,” he adds.
“Our work with the UN is real, it is not unreasonable, it does not depend on the citation rate. You do not know what it will translate into, but you do everything conscientiously, in fact, you make experimental observations and draw conclusions, making the most of your abilities, talents, knowledge and abilities. Yes, it has to do with such a tragedy, it’s terrible, but you’re happy because you’re not vegetating, you’re living.”
Maxim Rosenfeld, architect from Kharkiv.
Knights of the Round Table
And Maxim also quoted a phrase that he remembered from what he once read: “You have to remember two things: nobody owes you anything and you have to be grateful. When you understand this and appreciate any help, you have a better sense of yourself.
“We do not agree with all the proposals of our colleagues at the Norman Foster Foundation. We are very grateful, but we do not agree with everything,” he says. “We became very close friends, we became a big family. As Foster is a gentleman, I have proposed that they call us Knights of the Round TableWe work on an equal footing. This is professional equality.”
