Research

Healthy & Future-Proof Neighborhoods

Panorama Ukraine

2024

With Healthy and Future-Proof Neighborhoods, Panorama Ukraine aims to explore and start with redefining neighborhoods for the twenty-first century and beyond. A three-day workshop will be hosted in Rotterdam from 12 to 14 June 2024, with an opening presentation on 11 June. The short time span will serve as a pressure cooker, where we will facilitate Ukrainian and Dutch stakeholders to come up with out-of-the-box solutions for specific cases. These cases can then also be used as examples for more systemic changes.

Participation

The workshop is open for participants! Please find more information and the application link on the website of our partner UNUN.

Date and Location

  • 11 June - Opening session at Nieuwe Instituut

  • 12-14 June - workshop at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS), Erasmus University Rotterdam

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Logo Workshop Neighborhoods. Image: Pavlo Gorokhovskyi
    • Credits

Thematics 

A neighborhood is an optimal civic/civil unit for comprehensive urban design. It’s small enough for people to know each other, take care of each other, and form a community together, and it’s large enough to warrant having an (in)formal leader, to affect physical and political change in their surroundings.

Historically, the Ukrainian Kozaks lived as a loose federation of independent democratic communities (stanitsas, the closest thing Ukraine has to the original meaning of neighborhoods) and they became a symbol of resistance against first the Russian monarchy and later Soviet collectivism. Russia has done its best to eradicate the neighborhood as a (Ukrainian) social and spatial construct and replace it with the ‘district/rayon’: too large and anonymous to fulfill neighborhood functions – effectively replacing community with collectivism and polycentrism with enforced utilitarianism.

While rebuilding Ukraine, neighborhoods will have to take center stage – as providers of housing and other basic urban functions but also as a cornerstone of a renewed, healthier Ukrainian society.

Framework

For healthy and future-proof neighborhoods, we will work with six case studies: Drohobych, Ohtyrka, Kherson, Voznesensk, Kramatorsk and Klesiv. The Panorama content team, together with our extensive network of Ukrainian and Dutch experts and designers, has identified a number of subthemes it sees as crucial for exploring the neighborhoods. These subthemes can be found in the workshop framework.

Subtheme framework for working groups:

- integral sustainability
- inclusive participation (diversity)
- human scale & community 
- gradation between public and private space
- local identity
- live, work & recreate (balance)
- active, diverse program
- healthy public space & landscape
- multimodal accessibility
- feasible development (finance + legislation)
- housing models and policy (incl social impact and IDP)
- migrant integration (housing, work, amenities)
- safety (bomb shelters)
- growing & shrinking strategies

For more information about the workshop, please find the Global Brief below. 

Workshop framework. Image: Elena Chevtchenko