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"The European code of Ukraine’s cities" Żanna Komar
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At the beginning of the 21st century Western Europe revisited the concept of the city, identified the problems facing metropolises, and devised ways to overcome them.

Among the tools designed to support the future development of cities are documents such as “The Leipzig charter on sustainable European cities” (2007) and the Europe 2020 strategy, proposed in March of this year by the European Commission. In short, their purpose is to prepare Europe’s cities for the challenges of the coming decade. The fundamental principles behind “The Leipzig charter” and the Europe 2020 strategy – smart growth, and sustainable and socially inclusive development – have not even been registered as issues in Ukraine. The lack of interest in these questions reveals that this is a country at an entirely different stage of development – though this is by no means a new discovery.

Ukraine – without a doubt a European country, but not a member of the EU – is entirely beyond the remit of European thinking on cities. Yet its cities are to a large extent dogged by the same ills to which the West is actively seeking solutions. One example of this is the chaotic, entirely unregulated expansion of Kyiv and the deepening stagnation and provincialisation of the country’s other cities.

This does not mean that Ukraine’s cities – both the large and the smaller – are not developing at all.
On the contrary, significant improvement is visible in the overall better state of the cities compared to their condition in the early 1990s. This is often cited as proof of our rapprochement with Europe. Over the past decade examples of good new modern architecture have been built, and individual projects have brought successful implementation of technological innovations and architectural solutions. Here, however, I wish to focus on cities. Their fabric also reveals certain elements that betray a spirit of sustainable development, such as green pedestrian promenades and a trend towards reducing road traffic flow in favour of pedestrian zones, particularly in city centres.

Developing city centres with an awareness of the impact of this process on the identity of its citizens is currently a very important factor in the evolution of Ukraine’s cities. This process is connected with the drive to bring out local and regional flavours in response to the need to overcome Soviet unification. It also reveals the full complexity of the urban code and its regional variety. The most frequent expression of respect for the historical urban fabric tends to be museification, or rather the creation of tourist “reservations”, and this leads to a variety of forms of reconstruction and a rather quasi historical brand of monument erection. It also, inevitably, leads to depopulation of city centre areas and relocation of their erstwhile residents to the outskirts. “Commodification” of heritage is also increasing – under pressure of the free market local governments are starting to treat heritage as something with commercial and marketing value.

In the Ukrainians’ as yet unformed collective consciousness, reference to European heritage has an important role as virtually the only real link between East and West. For it must be stressed that ideas flowing from Europe did find reflection across Ukraine, including in its urban traditions. This continues today, though with a certain time lag that is fairly natural for places at a distance from the centres of civilisation where these ideas had their genesis. The awareness of this delay gives grounds for confidence that sooner or later modern urban concepts will be assimilated and implemented in Ukraine. (That this will come as something of a revolution is another matter.) This has been the case in other areas of life too – education, technology, the social order. Periods when Ukrainian lands have been part of larger states have always been conducive to reception of European ideas and models, no more so than during the time of the former Polish Republic and the Habsburg empire.

An overview of the European urban concepts that have influenced the development of the fabric of Ukraine’s cities should begin with Chersonesos Taurica, Feodosiya and Panticapaeum – the cities founded in Crimea from the 6th century bce by Greek colonists from Miletus. Not until the Middle Ages was the civilisation emanating from the south superseded by that from the west, which through “Polish window” brought models devised in Latin Europe, as testified to by the many castles and magnates’ residences still standing today.

One of the prime factors in the Europeanisation of Ukraine’s cities was Magdeburg law. It regulated and unified the structure of the state and local authorities in the cities, as well as the courts, financial administration, and the organisation of the urban space. Cities under Magdeburg law had a marketplace with a town hall and a regular, chequerboard street layout. From the 14th century increasing numbers of Ukrainian towns assumed this form of law, so gradually taking its influence further and further eastwards. As recently as in the 18th century many towns in the east of the country were still keen to adopt it, even though in Europe it had been obsolete for a long time. Yet at a distance such as that of the eastern Ukrainian lands it could continue to function – is that not an example of a lasting solution?

The biggest wave of Europeanisation of the cities here began under Austrian rule; it is to this period that contemporary Ukrainian urban planners refer most frequently. The process extended across the western part of Ukraine, today known as Halychyna – the eastern end of Austrian Galicia. The culmination of this phase should be seen as the time when Lviv (as Lwów), Ivano Frankivsk (Stanisławów) and Kolomyia (Kołomyja) were cities in one of the most important countries in Europe: Austria Hungary, a time when solutions were grafted here directly from Vienna. The city fortifications, no longer of use, were demolished to make way for a splendid public space after the “Ring” fashion. In Lviv, in fact, this was done even before it was in Vienna, so that in a way the Galician capital served as a space for experimentation.

Another area subject to similar influences was Transcarpathia, which once shared close links with Hungary, Austria and Austria Hungary, and after their collapse became part of Czechoslovakia and Romania. This latter also played a significant role in the case of the cities of Bukovina and Bessarabia, though Odessa, as a port, should be treated as a separate case. Crimea and the Azov Sea coast absorbed such a variety of often opposing influences that today it is hardly surprising that tensions are constantly emerging there. At the beginning of the 20th century the steppe regions, such as Donbas, became a Mecca for European industrialists engaged in the industrialisation of Ukraine (then part of tsarist Russia). And this is one of the curiosities of Ukraine – that Europeanisation also came here from the “East”, from Russia, the window opened up onto Europe by Tsar Peter the Great. French was “de rigueur” both in the capital and in the provinces. A naval fleet modelled on that of Holland sailed the seas. European engineers supported the development of mines and foundries in the southern steppes. It was in these regions that small settlements were engulfed by new cities, now the bastions of industry in Ukraine, and in these times that the significant civilisational identity of the regions began to emerge. For the cities of western Ukraine received their development stimuli direct from the source, from the West, while in the eastern cities they came filtered through Russia.

In the 20th century a new concept exerted a major impact: garden cities (a concept in fact close in ideological terms to the later strategy of sustainable development). Initially, Soviet town planners embraced this idea with enthusiasm – as a concept founded on communal ownership and residence it seemed to harmonise with the hurrah propaganda of the early Soviet Union proclaiming improved living standards for the proletariat. Soviet architectural policy and Howard’s idea were nevertheless diametrically different in their construal of the meaning of such communities; for Howard the focus was the life style itself, while the communist residential estate was subordinated to the supreme value that was labour, or service to industry, and it was this that dominated living conditions absolutely. Before long the garden city concept came to be seen as incompatible with the doctrine of the Soviet authorities, which gave rise to a virtually official ban on implementing elements of its ethos in practice, and its eradication from Soviet urban planning for many years.

In the second half of the 20th century, with complete disregard for any sense of organic fabric, Soviet cities were encompassed by rings of high rise residential estates, which produced the unattractive panorama of Ukrainian cities that we have today – whole dormitory estates with nothing but commercial buildings to relieve the monotony. Today the average Ukrainian city is still oriented more toward work than toward offering comfort of living or leisure.

Repeated declarations of the European choice are a constant feature of the two decades of Ukraine’s independence. The practice is somewhat different, however: “Euro renovations”, “[Second hand] clothes from Europe”, studying at Cambridge, and only some way behind all this a conscious awareness of the civilisational benefits. The best that can be said of regulations important from the angle of Brussels, such as the concept of sustainable development, Natura 2000 and Agenda 21, is that they are not formally rejected. Neither are they implemented or popularised, however. They function at the lowest possible level in order not to inconvenience anyone. In practice, administration of the Ukrainian economy is light years away from the intelligent growth referred to in the Europa 2020 strategy. Or so it seems today. For now.

Although these backwardnesses are blindingly obvious, although we have been flooded by a second hand culture, although we are primarily a strategic buffer zone for Europe, our cities should be seen as future adepts and beneficiaries of European concepts, we should be seen as a region where these ideas will find a new lease of life, in a different space time continuum. Europe should see Ukraine’s cities as an experimental space, and sometimes as a reason for reflection on its own history.

Żanna Komar – PhD, born in Ukraine, lives in Poland, art historian, theoretician of architecture, and museum curator, member of the academic staff at the Institute of European Heritage, part of the International Cultural Centre in Kraków. Author of numerous publications on the history of architecture and art, including the book „Trzecie miasto Galicji. Stanisławów i jego architektura w okresie autonomii galicyjskiej” [The third city of Galicia.
Stanisławów and its architecture in the period of Galician autonomy, 2008]. She writes about Art Nouveau, historicism, modernism, contemporary art, and totalitarian and modern architecture in present day Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.
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