Eugénie Birch (seated right) and David Gouverneur (standing, second from right) and students with the large map of Bucha created as part of the course. First row: Jose Fernandez, Mansha Kohli, Chenxi Zhu, Birch. Second row: Lauren Pawlowski, Laura Frances, Alex Nelms, Anushka Samant, Leo Wagner, Gouverneur, Suzie Kazar. (Photo Eric Sucar)
Bucha, a small city in Ukraine about 30 kilometers from Kyiv, was one of the first to be hit by the Russian invasion in the spring of 2022. Hundreds of people were killed, some with their hands tied behind their backs, their bodies left in the street. As Ukrainians continue to fight, they’re already working to rebuild cities like Bucha and memorialize the victims of the war.
For the Fall 2023 semester, a group of Master of City Planning students at the Weitzman School of Design worked to create a framework for Bucha’s future development as part of a partnership with the US Department of State. The research was solicited by the Department through its Diplomacy Lab program, a collaboration with US universities which organizes courses around State Department priorities. Working with limited data, changing conditions, and no chance of visiting the city in person, the students proposed a network of green infrastructure—trails and bicycle paths knitting various parts of Bucha together—and a series of recommendations for developing the city according to “green and just” principles. The course—it was a course rather than a studio because of students’ other commitments—was led by Eugénie Birch, the Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research & Education, and David Gouverneur, associate professor of practice in landscape architecture and city and regional planning, and was co-sponsored by the Penn Institute for Urban Research (Penn IUR). Students will present their work in Washington to the Ukrainian ambassador to the US, representatives from the State Department and Bucha (via Zoom) later this month.
The work began with considering how to make useful recommendations for a place shocked by recent traumas and beset by ongoing uncertainty, students say. Birch, who also co-directs the Penn IUR, had met friends from State Department at the 2022 World Urban Forum in Katowice, Poland, and learned about the Diplomacy Lab program from them. On her return to Philadelphia, she asked Penn’s Office of Global Initiatives to apply which they did. When the Department sought student work on Ukrainian cities affected by the war, she applied and, along with University of Virginia and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was successful.
For Weitzman students, the Bucha course was both a rare opportunity and a daunting challenge. Typical planning studios pair students with partners who act as clients, seeking clearly defined outcomes and providing data and on-the-ground perspective. In this case, students had access to a single Bucha resident, Andrew Melnyk whom the president of the Bucha City Council recommended as a liaison and the Ukrainian representative of C-40 Cities. They provided valuable direction for the project, including the “green and just” framing. But other sources of information about conditions in Bucha, and residents’ aspirations, were lacking.
Leo Wagner, Laura Frances, and Chenxi Zhu met up ahead of their class's January 26 presentation to the State Department. (Photo Eric Sucar)
So students turned to social media for real-time images of the city. They used Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb, and the equivalents of running and hiking apps like Strava and AllTrails. Those sources all provided a sense of how people use the city today.
“I was looking for trends and patterns that are generated by the folks that live there since we didn’t have much access to talking to folks on the ground,” says Laura Frances, a second-year Master of City Planning student in the smart cities concentration. “We were looking for, essentially, desire lines: Where do people want to go? … If you can show them what people already want, I think it’s easier to show them what they will want.”
Also, city leaders in Bucha are already at work on redevelopment plans, some of which began before the onset of the war.
“We were constantly checking, when was this picture taken? When was this plan formulated?” says Delfina Vildosola, also a second-year Master of City Planning student. “The reality on the ground changed radically at the onset of the war, but beyond that, there’s been a lot of reconstruction—a lot of work that is happening all the time. It’s evolving.”
Students were committed to developing a plan that would be adaptable to local priorities, and valuable on its own merits. Their ultimate recommendation is a series of paths, trails, and parks, linking developed parts of the city with areas where new projects are planned, including a large-scale “techno garden” with new industrial buildings. They also made recommendations for how to design the street grid in newly built spaces to maximize connections with existing transportation infrastructure. They incorporated some elements of a network that already exists, and proposed improvements for others.
“The reality on the ground changed radically at the onset of the war, but beyond that, there’s been a lot of reconstruction—a lot of work that is happening all the time. It’s evolving,” says Master of City Planning student Delfina Vildosola.
“A network of trails and pedestrian bike paths can be pretty low-lift in terms of infrastructure development, and it layers in, in an iterative way, to the existing streetscape,” Vildosola says, expressing a pragmatism that was paired with optimism among her classmates. “It allows for degrees of formality. Not every running trail has to turn into a paved path.”
Birch, who has worked on post-disaster planning in places like New York after 9/11 and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, says the students rose to the occasion, meeting an aggressive deadline and overcoming unusual constraints to produce thoughtful, detailed, and ambitious proposals.
“They just rolled up their sleeves,” she says. “And they did studio-level work. It was amazing.”
The class will present its project at the Penn Biden Center on January 26. (Thanks to Alex Jarymovych, who is of Ukrainian origin, Weitzman’s director of IT Services, they will provide the Ukrainian viewers with a full translation of the text.) Although it’s not clear how the recommendations will be used in Ukraine, Melnyk has been sharing the research with local leaders in Bucha. Students say they hope it can help the State Department refine its Diplomacy Lab partnerships for future courses. The project “exemplifies the spirit of the Diplomacy Lab partnership,” said State Department Special Representative for Global Partnerships Dorothy S. McAuliffe.
“Through Diplomacy Lab, the Department of State gains access to top-tier research while providing students of all academic backgrounds opportunities to prepare themselves for future careers in development and diplomacy,” McAuliffe said. “While architecture and urban planning aren’t typically the first things that come to mind when people think of the State Department, this collaboration exemplifies how critical these fields are to addressing the complex global challenges we face.”
Finally, students knew from the beginning of the course that there would be some sort of memorial built for the victims of the massacre in 2022. They debated making proposals for what that might look like. They chose not to try to make recommendations for that project from afar, but instead to develop a plan that could improve the city while leaving space for residents to create their own memorials. It was a semester built around a lot of uncertainty, but a lesson in how planners can sensitively engage in cities affected by violent conflict.
“I think that sort of situation is something that we are going to be seeing more often in the future, unfortunately,” Vildosola says.
View Slideshow
