A truckload of windows arrived: too many sizes, too many shapes. "They were heavy as hell," recalls Nazar, an architect at METALAB, "and we didn’t have any proper equipment. Eight people were needed to rework one window. Still, we dismantled the windows separately — aluminium, plastic, glass. And when we started making wooden frames for them, some of the pieces turned out crooked — they just didn’t fit."
Yet the partition walls look impressive. Today they stand in POLE workshops as demonstrative walls — reminders of sustainability, ingenuity, and exhaustion. Visitors admire them, but few are eager to repeat the heroic journey. The sheer handwork required to turn scrap into architecture is daunting.
When asked what reuse really means in social projects, Nazar smiles: "We always underestimate reuse, because it looks like free material. Cool. Super. But beneath it all there are plenty of hidden rocks. Even if you solve the logistics — the demolition, the truck, the warehouse — you still need time to sort it, integrate it into design, and know how to implement it all together."
"When asked what reuse really means in social projects, Nazar smiles: 'We always underestimate reuse, because it looks like free material.'"
It was November, cold already, and the project site lay close to the frontline. Maryana, from METALAB’s sustainable lab, was trying to implement a ‘Roman concrete' structure, based on a recipe developed in POLE. On paper the formula was precise: Tanya, the biotechnologist, had calculated every ingredient down to the gram. On site, builders translated those figures into shovelfuls. "Instead of 4 kilos and 200 grams, it turned into eight shovels … and nobody knew how many grams that actually was."
The builders cursed constantly at the "nonsense" of experimenting with natural materials when reinforced concrete was available. "This will collapse anyway," they muttered. And it was hard to argue when even the project team wasn’t sure it wouldn’t. Every time the formwork was removed, Maryana prayed that the mixture would hold. Nobody cared anymore that the intended coloured layers had blended into dull grey-yellow, or that fragments of rubble had fallen out.
"To avoid too much irony," she says, "it’s best to present every such project openly as an experiment. Then, if it collapses, you can at least say that was part of the plan. But is this really the time and place for such experiments, when the war is still ongoing and devastated areas lie so close to the battlefield?"
"Is this really the time and place for such experiments, when the war is still ongoing and devastated areas lie so close to the battlefield?"
And yet, even under such conditions, the team improved both the technology and the recipe. Without these self-ironic failures, it is hard to reach results anyone can be satisfied with.Stories like Nazar’s and Maryana’s make more sense when seen against the global agenda of buzzwords. Policy papers promise elegant fixes: environmental, social, and climate gains all bundled together. In humanitarian crises, however, they collide with cost, time, and urgency.
According to The Sphere, nature-based solutions (or NbS) are defined as "actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and manage ecosystems that address social, economic and environmental challenges, while simultaneously providing human well-being, resilience and biodiversity benefits".1 On paper, the appeal is irresistible: upcycling rubble rebuilds homes without cement, hemp-lime walls capture carbon while insulating houses, wetlands buffer storms, mangroves reduce floods.
But the UNHCR’s Guidelines for Integrating NbS in Humanitarian Settlements warn: the benefits come with extra planning, longer horizons, maintenance, and the need for buy-in.2
Ukraine’s recovery debates reflect the same ambitions. At COP28, the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Dubai in 2023, WWF-CEE 1 stressed that NbS must be central to rebuilding. The WWF-BCG report goes further, arguing that reconstruction must integrate circular construction and ecosystem restoration from the start.3
These frameworks mirror what METALAB faces daily. Its reuse of building elements and experiments with sustainable materials show that in settings affected by war and displacement nature-based solutions are anything but neat. The UNHCR guidelines recognise the same barriers: uncertifiable materials, uncertain performance under extreme conditions, labour-intensive installation, delays.4 Buzzwords are beautiful and easy; practice is painfully hard.
And yet the war goes on. Each bomb is another burst of CO₂, another wound in the landscape that nature-based solutions cannot fully compensate. Still, Ukraine has a rare window of opportunity: decisions made now will shape the built environment and ecosystems for decades.
"And yet the war goes on. Each bomb is another burst of CO₂, another wound in the landscape that nature-based solutions cannot fully compensate."
If reuse and experimentation are sidelined as "luxuries," recovery risks repeating old vulnerabilities. But if Nazar’s crooked windows and Maryana’s crumbling Roman concrete are read as lessons, recovery could become a laboratory for humane, nature-centred rebuilding.
Before February 2022, METALAB was an experimental urban laboratory with a simple, if somewhat utopian, mission: to make Ukrainian cities more sustainable, more circular, more human. We organised festivals on the circular economy, created participatory projects, and filled them with prototypes of circular design. POLE, our makerspace was meant to embody that ambition — a thousand square metres of workshops where hemp-lime panels could coexist with kombucha lamps, Roman concrete with recycled textiles, and where the words "repair" and "reuse" were aspirational.
It was a fragile ecosystem: part community centre, part alternative school, part research lab, part playground. The main challenges were the usual ones faced by any NGO: too little funding, too many spreadsheets, and, from time to time, the need to convince a councillor that preserving a hidden natural oasis in the neighbourhood, rather than covering it in concrete, was a worthwhile goal.
Then came Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The circular economy gave way to a circular logic of survival. Buildings for creative reuse became shelters. Meetings about "urban resilience " were replaced with checklists for mattresses and washing machines. In this scramble, the CO-HATY project2 was born: a grassroots initiative to transform abandoned spaces into homes for those who had lost theirs.
It began as a volunteer-led effort to repurpose vacant buildings into temporary housing for internally displaced people. Since the invasion, it has refurbished seven buildings, housing about 1,700 people, challenging legislation and positioning itself as a non-profit housing provider.
CO-HATY focuses on retrofitting existing structures and reusing materials, both local and donated by international partners. It is with these mismatched, oversized, crooked, and sometimes cracked building components that Nazar and the team wrestle. What policy documents call "circular construction strategies" look, in practice, like volunteers arguing over how to fit a Swiss radiator to a Soviet pipe.
Nothing tests sustainability goals quite like an air-raid alarm. The urgency of need leaves no time for debates about hemp versus concrete. For us, this is not the end of experimentation, but its forced mutation. Sustainability became less about elegance and more about improvisation under duress.
Even in the midst of an emergency, we keep trying. Sometimes not out of conviction but out of necessity. Budgets are tight, supply chains are broken, and reuse becomes less a sustainability slogan than a survival tactic. A chair from Germany, textiles from the Netherlands, sanitaryware from Switzerland — each shipment and finding is less a design choice than a puzzle of what fits in a truck and clears customs.
Occasionally, the experiments look more intentional. In Kalush, glass blocks from the Promprylad were repurposed into bathroom walls, letting in daylight and saving electricity. In other locations, residents themselves carved out community gardens. Nothing in donor reports would call this "green infrastructure", but for those who planted the tomatoes, it was exactly that.
These gestures are fragile, symbolic, rarely scalable. Yet they refuse to give up on sustainability. We see their microcosms in a patched wall, in a meal shared in a donated kitchen. They are fragments — but fragments that keep alive the possibility of another future, a future beyond this state of emergency.
So what does sustainable recovery mean for Ukraine — during war and after? If our experience has taught us anything, it is that there is no clear answer. METALAB exists as a paradox: POLE as a space for experimentation, CO-HATY with the urgent demand for housing. Both are necessary, neither sufficient.
If war is the visible enemy, then law, time, and money are the invisible ones. Soviet-era codes, EU certifications, endless paperwork, burned-out teams, donors who fund but not hemp panels — all paralyse projects as effectively as a missile strike.
Perhaps our greatest nature-based solution is not hemp or mycelium, but the human capacity to adapt. To bend, improvise, reuse — not just materials, but. One day, our grandchildren may live in towers or walk through cities cooled by restored ecosystems. For now, we settle for forcing Chinese fittings to work with donated Swiss sanitary ware.
Book
The Shape of Recovery (ed. Anastasiia Zhuravel, supported by RIFS and available for download here) brings together a constellation of reflections, practices, and analytical perspectives that emerge from Ukraine’s ongoing processes of struggle, adaptation, and renewal. Bringing into dialogue community-based practice, governance, architecture, ecology, and cultural memory, it examines reconstruction not as a linear sequence of restoration but as a multi-layered process of transformation. In this understanding, recovery is inseparable from the reconfiguration of social and territorial relations, the redistribution of agency, and the reimagining of collective futures.
Bios
Anna Dobrova is an architect and researcher whose work investigates the formation and development of architectural institutions as sites of collective knowledge production, social engagement, and sustainable urban transformation. In 2015, she co-founded the NGO MistoDiya, dedicated to urban interventions, research, and curatorial projects, and in 2018 co-founded METALAB, an urban laboratory in Ivano-Frankivsk. Since 2022, she has contributed remotely to the strategic development, fundraising, and international representation of METALAB and the CO-HATY Charitable Foundation, while co-founding the Swiss Network with Ukraine at ETH Zurich and serving on the board of Verein Re-Win. Since 2024, she has also worked with CSD Ingenieure in Zurich, consulting on sustainable and circular construction practices.
Anastasiia Zhuravel is a researcher in urban and spatial Studies. Her work focuses on critical urban studies, with an emphasis on collective civic actions, urban governance, and sustainable urban systems. She is the editor and initiator of the book The Shape of Recovery. In addition to her academic work, she is a consulting researcher on the reconstruction of Ukraine, contributing to projects aimed at sustainable urban recovery and resilience. Anastasiia is the founder and curator of the international design lab re:imagining your city, based in Berlin. Currently, she is a researcher at the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS) in Potsdam, and contributes as an urban manager at the HOPE HOME • НАДІЯ project based in Berlin, Germany.
Notes
1 Unpacked Guide: Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Resilience in Humanitarian Action. Geneva: Sphere (Sphere Association 2023) https://spherestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/Sphere-NbS-23-04-2023-english.pdf
2 Nature-Based Solutions in Humanitarian Settlements: Guidelines for Integrating NbS in Settlement Planning. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (UNHCR, 2024) https://www.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/2024-05/nature-based-solutions-humanitarian-settlements-guidelines-integrating-nbs-in-settlement-planning.pdf
3 Ukraine: A Sustainable Economic Recovery for People and Nature. World Wide Fund for Nature & Boston Consulting Group. (WWF & BCG 2023) https://www.wwf.eu/?7631816/Ukraine-needs-a-sustainable-climateand-nature-positive-reconstruction-New-WWFBCG-report
4 UNHCR 2024, Op. cit.
