Kharkiv: rebuilding a large industrial city

Kharkiv is the second largest city in the country, a major industrial and university centre, and it sits very close to the border. It has sustained extensive damage and has remained inhabited by a large share of its own population.

What that combination requires

Repair carried out around people who are living and working there, which is slower and more expensive than working on an empty site and is the only option when the population has stayed.

Services maintained continuously: water, heating, electricity, transport, hospitals and schools, in a city of that size, without the option of suspending them until conditions improve.

The underground schools

The most discussed engineering response and the one worth understanding properly. Purpose-built underground facilities allowing in-person teaching to continue where a surface building cannot be used safely.

They are not shelters with desks. They are designed as schools: ventilation, lighting, acoustics, circulation and sanitary provision to a standard children can spend a school day in.

The metro has also been used for teaching, which is an improvisation rather than a design, and it worked because the metro exists and is deep.

The industrial question

Kharkiv's economy was built on machine building, electronics and a very large university and research sector. Some production relocated; some stayed; the university sector dispersed and continues.

What the city rebuilds towards is an open question and a genuinely important one, because a border city with a technical university and an engineering tradition has options that most damaged cities do not.

What the case demonstrates

That a large city can continue to function under sustained pressure if its services hold, and that the services holding is a matter of municipal capacity and engineering rather than of morale.

That an industrial city of this size, this close to the border, kept working was something my own business planning did not anticipate. What Kharkiv shows is that an industrial base stands on the people who stay rather than on its plants. Machines can be moved and a line rebuilt; there is no method for replacing the foreman who stayed.