"Some "gods" already want to help." Oleg Drozdov and Iryna Matsevko about Foster's participation in the reconstruction of Kharkiv

This is what they are about told in an interview with LB.ua.

In particular, according to Oleh Drozdov, the decision to cooperate with world architects should be considered, because "the result can be good, but it is of the category of "guess what a gift".

Iryna Matsevko notes that the story with Norman Foster "raises the question of which of the experts should be involved. It seems to me that, first of all, it should be those architects who already have experience working in Ukraine, who understand what are the peculiarities and obstacles here, who understand how developed the local community is and how much it can be involved."

They should know what language the officials speak, how to convince them

"Also, these should be specialists who already had experience working with post-war trauma and urban reconstruction. It seems to me that Foster does not have any of the above, but has a lot of his own - and these are Russian projects."

Drozdov added that "Foster worked very successfully with large supranational corporations - Credit Swiss, for example. His career is about big business and vertical projects. 

Foster's second large group of orders is authoritarian regimes, when you receive direct orders instead of going through competitive procedures. These are Astana, Moscow, the Arabian Peninsula, new cities. And that's where the approach to the architect comes from as a "god" who can decide how to live and drive thousands of people into these settings."

The architect proposes to change the approach to the selection of those who will work on the reconstruction of cities destroyed by the war. In particular, he believes that this should be done by those specialists who have already created projects in Ukraine and understand the peculiarities of Ukrainian settlements, as well as the obstacles that may arise in the process.

"A sustainable and developing city can only be created by those who live in it. It should accumulate a certain number of professionals, and for a long time. It can be foreigners or not, but it must be done together, then it will be a joint city capable of continuation and development."

In order for the reconstruction to be of high quality, the experience of other cities that were destroyed as a result of the war should be analyzed. And the main thing here is to draw the right conclusions, say the speakers.

A sustainable and developing city can only be created by those who live in it

"In general, no one did anything with our cities, did not rethink them. We have an unprocessed Soviet heritage, which was gradually marginalized and with which no one worked. Cities moved only with the speculative goal of making money, communities had no ambitions...

Take Rotterdam. Its destruction was one of the most tragic episodes of the Second World War. An extraordinary number of years have passed since the war, but only now is the stage of the city's post-war development coming to an end. This is also connected with the conversion: when the port moved to the ocean, to the North Sea, and everything that was a port before that became a city itself, Rotterdam became the center of various new post-industrial economies", Drozov summarized.

He notes that in order to repeat Rotterdam experience, a "road map where the political and economic component must be modeled" is needed, as well as human resources.

"It seems to me that in Ukraine it is impossible to talk about any development without migration policy. We ourselves will not do anything here," says the architect.

 

 

 

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