Karina Stashisak is lucky, she tells me, and I think to myself: I know. A competitive dancer from Odesa, Ukraine, Stashisak lost part of her leg during an adolescent illness several years ago. But she can still dance professionally, and she doesn’t need a wheelchair.
Then Stashisak tells me about her apartment building in Odesa—and then I really know. “We have a veteran,” Stashisak told me last month. “He lives on the eighth floor. And it’s no secret that we have a huge problem with the lights, basically we have no power most of the time. So the boys need to go and fetch him.”
Indeed, every time the power goes out, the elevator stops working. And when Stashisak’s neighbor wants to leave his apartment, local volunteers have to carry him (and his wheelchair) up and down eight flights of stairs. Stashisak’s neighbor is not alone, however. He and Stashisak are two of the three million people living with disabilities in Ukraine. For a country that still experiences daily bombings, missile strikes, and power outages, this number is only expected to rise, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Social Policy.
This past month, I have had several conversations with leading Ukrainian architects where I heard the same conclusion echoed again and again: The main priority in rebuilding Ukraine will be designing for disability. Can a country with a long history of stigmatizing the invalid pivot into a sanctuary for the impaired? If so, how?
“We need new norms”
Approximately 300,000 Ukrainians registered for disability in the first 18 months of the war. Most of these people are veterans who were promised handsome sums for their sacrifices. According to a recent Kyiv Independent investigation, the Ukrainian government has made it prohibitively difficult for many to claim their disability payment, with corruption and obsolete military protocols marring the process. Furthermore, increased disability has forced Ukrainians to confront an uncomfortable reality: Most of their built environment is not accessible. One Ukrainian accessibility nonprofit, the Kyiv-based Dostupno, claims on their website that “only 4 percent of urban infrastructure of Ukraine is completely convenient and comfortable.”
Oleg Drozdov, cofounder of the Kharkiv School of Architecture (KhSA), told me that designing for disability has not only social, but also political weight. “There are a lot of people traumatized by the war in different ways, and we have to adapt these spaces for them,” said Drozdov. “We are at war. We have made our civilizational choice, and we are moving toward the European Union.”
Ukraine has long pined for E.U. membership, but to join, it must demonstrate a commitment to democratic—what Drozdov calls “civilizational”—values. Drozdov suggests that far more of this onus is on architects than a layperson may expect. If minority rights are a litmus test for democracy, then the way that architects do (or do not) incorporate accommodations into their buildings may well dictate whether or not the country succeeds in democracy.
But until more permanent buildings are realized, some architects believe that the current state of refugee housing needs a reboot. Slava Balbek, principal of the Kyiv-based balbek bureau, believes that most refugee housing underway in Ukraine has no human dignity—and that it comes at a cost. “What do we pay for it? We pay for the comfort of human mental health,” said Balbek. Refugees and the internally displaced are among society’s most vulnerable. And to usher them into shipping container–style housing, Balbek criticizes, is to dehumanize them.
Victoria Yakusha, principal of the now Brussels-based Ukrainian architecture studio Yakusha, agrees with Balbek in principle but differs in approach: There are plenty of abandoned villages in western Ukraine in good condition, Yakusha told me. It would be more comfortable and economical to house the temporarily displaced there, instead of building new, poorly-designed housing. Otherwise, architects “need to start designing spaces that contribute not only to physical recovery, but to morale,” she continued.
Toward that end, for Yakusha, one way is to design for solitude. “It’s not the first time that people from the army have told me that they’re always with their colleagues. In small spaces with other people. Every day,” said Yakusha. “And now they really need to be in solitude. So it’s time to rethink our new norms. But that doesn’t mean everyone needs this—it just means we need new norms.”
Yakusha continued that her new master plan for the heavily bombed city of Chernihiv has clear evacuation routes, signaling a new approach to Ukrainian architecture due to the war. Many buildings are designed to be built with repurposed war debris; others, to integrate sensitively with the surrounding ravaged ecology.
In Kyiv, Zikzak Architects is currently working on an easily reconfigurable elementary school. In times of war, it can be easily converted into a medical center or shelter. Dmytro Sivak, of Sivak + Partners in Odesa, said that when he plans his budgets he assumes that he will be buying extra materials: Windows on his projects can be installed one day and then bombed the next.
Next year, the KhSA plans to open a new graduate-level degree program. It will exclusively look at designing cities in postwar societies. Olha Kryvoruchko, KhSA’s codirector, wrote via email that the war has forced Ukrainian architects to reckon with the reconstruction of largely outdated, Soviet-era buildings. They are largely energy inefficient, inaccessible, and unclean: “Is it worth rebuilding within the framework of these planning decisions, or should new, relevant ones be applied? Is this process still reconstruction? What context needs to be kept so that a place keeps its spatial memory?” Kryvoruchko then reflected: “There are actually more questions than answers here.”
Learning From Postwar Austria
Ukraine is lucky, I tell myself, because there is precedent for such a transformation. It wasn’t long ago when Vienna, Austria, reckoned with its own inaccessibility after the Habsburg Empire’s collapse, setting in motion a major change in the way that society was redesigned for disability.
After World War I, thousands of wounded veterans returned home to the Austrian capital only to find disease and overcrowding. The Viennese government subsequently embarked on an ambitious plan to build 64,000 housing units. First, it imposed taxes to fund its real estate ventures, targeting luxury goods, traffic, land, and brothels. Then it took a clever organizational approach. David Gissen writes in The Architecture of Disability that it appointed war veterans and widows as citizen-builders to construct what would be their future homes; in effect, organizing what we see today as a design-build construction approach at a massive scale with accessibility at the forefront. Almost a century later, Vienna is considered one of the most accessible cities in Europe.
Applying post–World War I Viennese strategies to postwar Ukrainian urban revitalization could benefit Ukraine in a multitude of ways. It would partially address Ukraine’s massive labor shortage in a country where 6 million refugees have migrated abroad, and an additional 3.7 million Ukrainians are internally displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration as of January this year. Meanwhile, the elderly and disabled have mostly stayed in place because these demographics are the least likely to immigrate during war time, according to the United Kingdom Disasters Emergency Committee.
Following Vienna’s playbook would also provide agency to Ukraine’s disabled, but maybe even more importantly, visibility. After all, it was only in 1980 that a Western journalist asked Soviet officials in Moscow if the U.S.S.R. would participate in the first Paralympic Games. Their reply? “There are no invalids in the U.S.S.R.!” During the Soviet era, disability was so stigmatized that the Soviet state preferred to push the lie that disabled citizens did not even exist.
Agency and visibility aside, there’s something else—more critical than the able-bodied might imagine—that Vienna’s construction experiment tacitly promotes. It builds both the physical and social infrastructures that promote community by asking its future inhabitants to work together. Up to 74 percent of disabled individuals experience overwhelming feelings of loneliness, cites one study, so living with disability becomes as much about fighting ableism as it does isolation. Ukraine is not Russia, but given that the same research study suggests that more people with disabilities experience marginalization in Russia than other Western countries, Ukraine would do well to catch itself from falling into old Soviet traps of thinking.
All Ukrainians are marred in some way or another by what this terrible war has cost them, whether that is through their loss of limbs or their hope. But unlike many of the disabled that came before them, they are also united in their common struggle—and through this, war remains a rare moment that they can seize on to build a better world.
Iryna Ivanivna Humenyuk worked as an architect before graduating from the Columbia Journalism School.
