Tools for Post Conflict Urban Recovery

The International Scientific Conference “Architecture of Challenges – Rebuilding Ukraine” will be held from 3.07 to 4.07.2023 at the Royal Łazienki Museum in Warsaw.
Find the link to the conference website HERE:

Registration for the conference and abstract submission cab be done via this FORM:

You are cordially invited to participate in a conference on the broad topic of post-war reconstruction in Ukraine. This post-war reconstruction will encompass all aspects of the living environment: architecture and infrastructure at the scale of cities, towns, and villages. It will require preparation, cooperation and human solidarity on an international scale. 

The reconstruction of Ukraine is part of a series of activities that represent global challenges. One of the most critical is ensuring access to the dwindling resources of arable land, and water and maintaining biodiversity. The experience of limited access to these basic survival resources raises the question of how to shape housing development. 

Another is the problem of obtaining energy sources that will not adversely affect climate change or cause pollution. The rational planning of the investments to be made, the use of infrastructure, the use of available materials, including recycled ones, and finding the right answer to both function and form become important reconstruction problems. 

War shatters the social structure, brings the death of family members, and forces one to make difficult and sometimes dramatic decisions about one’s fate and that of one’s loved ones. Finding the right spatial form and function to rebuild social relations is one of the most important issues of the post-war era. In addition to the obvious, functional answers to these questions, there is a deeper one that touches on the foundations of human identity, the understanding of the meanings of spatial forms and the cultural code.

The Conference aims to bring together the academic community and cultural, scientific, technical, economic elites in the context of the war crisis in Ukraine and to discuss together the following challenges:

Challenge 1: Directions for the reconstruction of Ukraine. 

Challenge 2: Architectural heritage and its protection in the context of the reconstruction of Ukraine. 

Challenge 3: Principles of sustainable development in relation to the reconstruction process in Ukraine. 

Challenge 4: Architecture in response to the refugee crisis in Ukraine. 

Challenge 5: Urban planning for the revitalisation of war-damaged areas. 

The discussion should follow the direction set by the ideas of the New European Bauhaus describing issues of design based on the functional regularity of spatial forms, supporting the complexity of the natural environment and creating members of a democratic human community. 

The opening lecture will be given by special guest architect Shigeru Ban (Japan).

Contact person: Professor Arch. Anna Maria Wierzbicka, Head of Department of Architectural and Urban Design, Laboratory of Sacral and Monumental Architecture, Reconstruction Team of Ukraine at WAPW.

Organisers:

The Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology

The Royal Łazienki Museum in Warsaw 

The National Heritage Institute

Partners:

Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw

Kyiv National University of Building and Architecture (KNUBA)

National University “Zaporizhzhya 

Polytechnic”

National University “Lviv Polytechnic”

National Union of Architects of Ukraine

Association of Polish Architects (SARP)

Honorary patronage: 

Rector of the Warsaw University of Technology

Ministry of Foreign Affairs Republic of Poland

Director of the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning

Chairman of the Committee on Architecture and Urban Planning of the Polish Academy of Sciences

President of the Polish Investment and Trade Agency

President of the Association of Polish Architects