Cross‑border collaboration to supply recycled building materials to Ukraine counters the exploitative forces of the global market In March 2025, around a hundred people gathered in a courtyard in Kalush, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine, to initiate the conversion of the dilapidated building in front of them into a dormitory for displaced people. Empty since 2002, the building was once a kindergarten, but in a few months it will house 150 internally displaced persons (IDPs). The project is part of the Co‑haty initiative, launched in February 2024 in response to the housing crisis that has emerged across the region as a result of the full‑scale Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022; the demand for housing in Ukraine is rising with every Russian bomb that falls on its territory, often specifically targeting civilian buildings. The project was started by Metalab, an urban laboratory part of the charitable foundation Teple Misto, which has been engaged in the regeneration of the site of the former Promprylad factory in the city of Ivano‑Frankivsk (30km west of Kalush) since 2017. The invasion has so far displaced 10.6 million Ukrainians, with 3.7 million internally displaced and 6.9 million seeking protection as refugees abroad. The influx of IDPs into western Ukraine aggravated the existing housing crisis: following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine’s housing market was mercilessly privatised, to the extent that the state does not have a social housing policy nor any social housing stock. As a result, housing provision is left to the market, which gives an upper hand to real‑estate developers and homeowners. Tenants are treated as inferior: renting is rarely accompanied by any written contracts or securities for them. The increased demand on the rental market driven by wartime displacement has further increased speculation and profiteering.  Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, around 2.5 million homes in the country have been damaged or destroyed (lead image, credit: Associated Press/Alamy). Several international initiatives aim to supply second‑hand building elements, in particular windows. The Swiss Re-Win programme sends lorries of windows (above) to those in need (below) Credit: Fabio Soldati / Verein RE‑WIN Credit: NGO Proactive Generation The Polish Brda Foundation’s Okno initiative includes a manual to install windows to damaged buildings Credit: Drawings by naive collective (Anna Bukowy, Dagna Dembiecka, Eryk Szczepański, Konstanty Kosma Mikołajczak, Kuba Marczewski) Co‑haty aims to create a viable housing alternative for the IDPs in western Ukraine. The initiative was founded by Anna Pashynska, Anna Dobrova, Tania Pashynska, Anastasiya Ponomaryova and Warwara Yagnyaheva – spatial practitioners from Metalab and the research agency Urban Curators – heading up a team of both employees and volunteers who are graduates of architecture, urban planning and industrial design. Projects are supported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Germany and international non‑profit Habitat for Humanity. In addition to the project in Kalush, Co‑haty is currently working on the conversions of two other buildings – another kindergarten and a former dormitory for farm labourers. On completion in early 2026, these three projects will provide 90 flats for up to 250 tenants. Seven other projects are already complete in western Ukraine, each providing tenants with single or double rooms with basic furnishing, kitchenettes and bathrooms. All together, these buildings house 1,500 tenants – a drop in the ocean considering the millions of IDPs in Ukraine, yet a major achievement for a grassroots initiative. The converted dormitories offer the necessities for long‑term inhabitation, without compromising privacy – a problem with many emergency shelter solutions, such as the Paper Partition System by Shigeru Ban that has been used in Ukraine as well as many other disaster zones. The dormitories are also situated within the existing urban fabric, a break from the prefabricated villages built across Ukraine since 2014, which often create exclusionary zones for displaced people. At Co‑haty’s dormitories, the tenants’ rights are always secured by contracts, and unlike the housing available on the market, they are affordable and secure. Rentals are not a means of profit for Co‑haty, which allows the organisation to offer rooms for approximately 2,000 UAH (£35) per month, when the market price for a one‑room apartment in Ivano‑Frankivskwith is around 12,000 UAH (£220) per month.  ‘Re-Win reveals an abundance of fully functional building components which are being landfilled daily in Switzerland’ The change in use of public property into a dormitory is currently a crucial challenge for the initiative. ‘The current system restricts work with the existing buildings unless they already hold the legal status of housing, making adaptive reuse extremely difficult’, explains Co‑haty co‑founder and manager of the Kalush project Anastasiya Ponomaryova. Land‑use regulations favour actors such as real‑estate developers who have resources to pay to get their plans passed through a lengthy and costly procedure. ‘Eventually’, Ponomaryova says, ‘the Co‑haty initiative will aim to lobby for political changes, which would support adaptive reuse, rather than the privatisation of public assets, demolitions and new construction.’  However, at this point, she explains, the members of the initiative are fully preoccupied with making their model economically sound. To this end, Co‑haty is looking to involve tenants in both the renovation and maintenance of the buildings they will inhabit. This is to allow long‑term use, lower operational costs, as well as the reinvention of a culture of maintenance in the post‑socialist context. Decades of communism have eroded the idea of caring for urban commons; expropriation of private property by the state spurred negative social attitudes to anything ‘public’. At the same time subbotnik, a communist custom of obligatory, unpaid civil service, has left further negative connotations around collective maintenance activities. The cost of the project in Kalush is estimated to be €1.3 million (£1.1 million), for a building which will house around 150 people. The cost is kept low through the use of second‑hand building components, repaired by their in‑house workshop as well as the IDPs themselves. These components include doors, windows and furniture salvaged from demolitions in Switzerland. This unusual supply chain is a laboratory of the circular economy on a regional scale, drawing on the involvement and enthusiasm of many, but in particular informed by the decades of experience of the Swiss architect and specialist in reuse Barbara Buser. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Buser started the Windows for Ukraine initiative, formalised into the non‑profit organisation Re‑Win. So far, the foundation has sent 51 shipments carrying approximately 6,500 windows and other reclaimed building materials to its Ukrainian partners in Kyiv.  The Co-haty programme has converted seven buildings into dormitories for displaced people in western Ukraine since its launch in February 2024, including the conversion of former student accommodation in the village of Zinkivtsi Credit: Oleksandr Demianiv Sanitary ware and furniture in the common areas was donated by Re-Win Credit: Oleksandr Demianiv The supply chain of second‑hand building components is an alternative to what Andrew Herscher and Daniel Bertrand Monk describe in their book The Global Shelter Imaginary (2021)  Another Co‑haty co‑founder, Anna Dobrova, is responsible for making a match between donor buildings in Switzerland and recipient buildings in Ukraine. In November 2024, she learned about the demolition of a 1950s office building in Zug which was being inventoried by the circular construction consultants Zirkular (also co‑founded by Buser). Zirkular persuaded its client Losinger Marazzi – a major Swiss construction company – to pay for the careful dismantling of a selection of materials to donate them to Ukraine. Around 100m2 of carpets, window blinds and  In addition to those already completed, Co-haty is in the process of transforming three further buildings into affordable housing. A kindergarten in the city of Kalush (above and below) will host 150 people at a cost of €1.3 million – a cost that is minimised by the use of donated elements as well as the collaboration of its future inhabitants in its renovation and maintenance Credit: Oleksandr Demianiv Credit: Oleksandr Demianiv But the Losinger Marazzi collaboration is an exception, rather than a rule. ‘We need the owners to contribute financially to the reclamation process if we want the materials In her essay ‘Supply Chains and the Human Condition’, anthropologist Anna Tsing observes that globalised capitalism benefits from differences across supply chains – for example, locating production where labour is cheaper and less regulated. One could add that long and diverse supply chains also enable the linear economic scenario of extraction, consumption and waste, as they conceal the full picture of the 2025-05-12 Kristina Rapacki Share AR May 2025CircularityBuy Now