Rebuilding a suburb that people still live in

The commuter towns north-west of Kyiv were damaged in early 2022 and then, unlike much of the damaged territory, became accessible again within weeks. People returned quickly, often to buildings that were only partly habitable.

Why that makes reconstruction harder

An empty site can be surveyed, demolished and rebuilt on a schedule. A building with forty occupied flats and twenty destroyed ones cannot.

Work has to proceed floor by floor around people who are living there, with water and heating maintained, access preserved and noise limited to working hours. Every one of those constraints raises cost and extends time.

And the legal position is more complicated, because repairing a privately owned flat in a multi-owner building requires the consent of owners who may be displaced, abroad or unreachable.

What the towns did

Triage. Buildings were categorised by whether they were structurally sound, repairable or beyond repair, and the middle category received attention first because it produced the most restored housing per unit of money.

Roofs and windows before anything else, since a building that stays dry deteriorates slowly and one that does not is lost within two winters.

And a documented damage register, because compensation and eventual reconstruction financing both depend on records made at the time.

What is visible now

Streets where a repaired building stands next to a ruin, and where the pattern of repair follows the order in which claims were filed rather than the order in which damage occurred.

The lesson

Reconstruction is not one project. It is thousands of small ones with different owners, and its speed is set by administration rather than by construction capacity.

Working somewhere people still live is nothing like working on an empty site: machine hours, dust, noise, temporary access — all of it becomes a negotiation. I have met this often on urban jobs and the cost always shows up in the programme rather than the budget. What the towns north-west of Kyiv achieved was social rather than technical; they learned to build alongside their residents.