Dear All,
Like all of you I find myself sickened and heartbroken by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Watching the news over the last couple of days has become like a bad dream- the sick fantasies of a megalomaniac destroying real lives; the video game like images of suffering and horror rendered in real blood and tangibly broken flesh. The resistance and fortitude of the Ukrainian people has been inspiring and I am willing them to succeed; but I wish with every fibre of my being that they had never had to prove themselves in this way.
Years ago I studied the way places, cities and urbanism are weaponised in conflict and many of the descriptions I read of medieval conflict are coming to life before our eyes. Architecture has been manipulated during conflict for centuries- there is almost no more powerful propaganda than the image of a defiant St Pauls in 1940, or the ruins of Palmyra following its destruction by ISIS in 2015; and this week I realised there is almost nothing that shows the banal evil of war so well as the images coming out of Ukraine of rockets in living rooms or children playing in front of an apartment block ripped open by shelling.
We are in the early days of a war that could change so much. Land and politically significant space are being fought over and leveraged, streets have become front lines and metro stations bomb shelters. The rules of normal city life have been ripped up and all the urban planning principles I have ever learnt have been flipped on their head in Ukraine’s cities as the urban fabric is re-imagined and re-leveraged in a fight for the existence of a nation and its people.
Where a good peacetime city is walkable, permeable, welcoming, legible; now Ukraine’s cities must become hostile, fragmented; full of dangerous dead ends. These cities must confuse and confound the invading forces in their existential battle.
Roads and transport infrastructure are the lifeblood of any nation- pulling people, resources and money from its commercial centres to its remoter provinces. We have already seen how Ukraine are attempting to fragment their country in an effort to subvert Russian attacks and progress. The roadblocks, the demolished bridges, and the ultimate price payed by Vitaliy Skakun Volodymyrovych when he realised he could destroy a bridge or save his life; but not both.
Putin may be hoping for personal glory, for Russian glory, for a resurgent Imperial Russia. He may be simply mad. There is however no doubt, as Thomas More so succinctly puts in ‘Utopia’ that: “there is nothing more inglorious than that glory that is gained by war”.
With hope that by the next time I write Ukraine is again peaceful and free.
Eleanor