Kyiv

Mosul

Uniform November: Peacebuilding through Place, Memory, and Adaptation

Uniform November is a peacebuilding consultancy rooted in the belief that architecture, space, and memory are powerful tools for resilience and recovery after conflict.

Founded by a former UN staff member with years of experience working alongside NGOs, civil society, and international organizations, we bring deep insight into the strategies, communications, and practices needed to support communities living with the legacies of violence.

We believe that peacebuilding must begin in war. It cannot wait for silence or stability. It has to be shaped in the very conditions of violence, breathing the same air as the people it claims to serve, air choked with drone buzz, sirens, distant shelling, bad bread lines, and flickering generators.

Our work combines consultancy, training, and original research with critical reflection on how societies adapt to conflict, displacement, and trauma. From heritage reuse to housing, land, and property (HLP) solutions, from mapping sites of violence to developing trauma-informed approaches to memorialisation, we focus on practical interventions that strengthen social cohesion and reduce the risk of renewed violence.

Ukraine: Peacebuilding in Real Time

Uniform November has been working in Kyiv, engaging with those shaping peacebuilding under the direct pressures of war. This work goes beyond cultural heritage, it is about understanding how societies improvise resilience while under fire, and how peace must be crafted in parallel with survival.

Our research and fieldwork there has included dialogue with:

Civil actors searching for and recovering the missing from battle lines
Private security operatives and emergency responders
Psychologists and trauma support providers
Housing, land, and property (HLP) specialists navigating displacement and return
Civil alliance group founders shaping collective responses to crisis
Journalists and researchers documenting violence and resistance
Military commanders and activists balancing survival with long-term vision

These encounters inform both our practical consultancy and our research outputs, grounding our conviction that recovery and reconciliation are not abstract ideals but lived processes forged in conditions of exhaustion, scarcity, and danger. The lessons drawn from Ukraine deepen and expand our global work on post-conflict recovery.

What We Do

Heritage Reuse: Breathing new life into buildings and cultural landmarks damaged by war, enabling communities to reconnect with their histories while shaping their futures.
HLP Solutions: Addressing complex housing, land, and property challenges faced by displaced populations to support return, resettlement, and recovery.
Memorialisation & Trauma-Informed Practices: Exploring how memory and place shape recovery, and helping communities create spaces that acknowledge violence without being trapped by it.
Research: Conducting original field-based and theoretical research into peacebuilding, recovery, and resilience — from mapping sites of violence to documenting everyday practices of survival, adaptation, and social cohesion.

Our Partnerships and Track Record

We have collaborated with UNESCO, ICCROM, the British Council, UN-Habitat, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and The HALO Trust, alongside grassroots groups, military stakeholders, and local leaders in Iraq, Syria, Indonesia, and beyond.

Key contributions include:

Designing an urban park for youth in Mosul on land once occupied by ISIS.
Mapping sites of violence in Mosul and Tal Afar with IOM’s MHPSS unit.
Conducting national HLP assessments to support IOM’s resettlement strategies.
Training local and international staff on post-conflict memory, persecution, and place.
Supporting UNESCO and ICCROM’s Revive the Spirit of Mosul project, empowering Iraqi architects and engineers to reuse cultural landmarks.

Why Uniform November?

We don’t see peacebuilding as a template, it’s a process that requires sensitivity, creativity, and honesty. Our approach draws on years of fieldwork, policy expertise, and research to help organizations and communities navigate the complexities of recovery.

Through our writing, consultancy, and partnerships, we aim to deepen understanding of how the built environment, cultural memory, and everyday survival can contribute to stability, dignity, and peace.

Uniform November exists to ask difficult questions, share critical insights, and design practical strategies for recovery and resilience.

Heritage & Memories of Violence

IDP & HLP

Urban Recovery

About Uniform November

Uniform November was launched by Frazer MacDonald Hay in 2016. Since then, it has grown into a consultancy and research platform that connects practice, theory, and lived experience of conflict.

Our work is rooted in field engagement, critical research, and collaborative learning. We share knowledge, exchange ideas, and develop tools that help communities, practitioners, and institutions adapt to violence, displacement, and the long process of recovery.

We offer training, workshops, and tailored educational programmes built around the themes that define our practice:

Peacebuilding in War: Understanding how peace must be shaped under fire, in conditions of fear, scarcity, and trauma.
The Fundamentals of Peacebuilding: Strategy, communication, and adaptation in volatile environments.
Heritage and Socially Significant Buildings: The adaptive reuse of cultural and everyday spaces, and their role in community identity.
The Power of Place: How architecture, memory, and space shape resilience and social cohesion.
The Everyday: Why ordinary spaces and routines matter in both conflict and recovery.
Housing, Land, and Property (HLP): Navigating the legal, social, and political challenges of displacement and return.
Trauma, Memory, and Violence: Working with built environments imbued with difficult histories, silences, and contested narratives.
Cultural Heritage and Protection: Safeguarding heritage under threat, and rethinking its role in recovery.

Knowledge Sharing

Take time to explore the Uniform November Blog, our knowledge-sharing platform for developing collaboration, dialogue, and awareness across the peacebuilding and humanitarian fields. Here we publish reflections from the field, research insights, and thought leadership on recovery, resilience, and memory in conflict and post-conflict environments.

Articles

Frazer is a peace-building consultant and writer whose work explores the intersections of architecture, memory, and violence. He is the founder of Uniform November, a consultancy working internationally on post-conflict recovery. He has worked in Iraq, Ukraine, Mexico, and Indonesia with organisations including the UN’s International Organization for Migration, UNESCO, ICCROM, The Halo Trust, and a range of NGOs and universities in Norway, the UK, and the Netherlands. He holds a Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of St Andrews and writes regularly on how everyday places carry the weight of war and resilience.

Frazer's Articles

Articles

Returning Is Not the Same as Going Home

The Minefield Beneath Memory

Rebuilding Without Erasing: Why Adaptive Re-use Matters After War

Unsaid

Whose Heritage Is It, Anyway?

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Whose Heritage Is It, Anyway?

( French / Arabic ) When we talk about heritage, whose heritage are we really talking about? It’s a question that has stayed with me over the years of working in this field. Not as an abstract provocation, but as something that emerges repeatedly in practice, in projects, in conversations, and in the spaces between intention and reality. Heritage is often presented as an unquestionable good: something to be protected, celebrated, and passed on. And in many ways, it is. But

Buildings, Memory, and Mediation

Exploring peacebuilding as a lens for adaptive reuse I have been thinking about the relationship between peacebuilding and adaptive reuse. At first, the connection may not seem obvious. One operates in the aftermath of conflict, working with fractured societies, contested narratives, and fragile relationships. The other is often understood as a technical or architectural process, adapting existing buildings for new use. But the more I work across both, the less separate they

A Building Speaks Before Demolition

In conversation with a building scheduled for demolition ..... The manuscript I have recently completed, Adaptive Reuse: Conflict, Climate and Conservation / What Buildings Know , is structured as a conversation. Each chapter opens with the voice of a building facing demolition. It reflects on its condition, its memories, and its uncertainty about what comes next. These openings are not decorative. They frame the themes that follow, adaptive reuse, conflict, climate, conserva

What Buildings Know & Why It Matters Now

I have recently completed a manuscript exploring adaptive reuse, not simply as an architectural method, but as a way of thinking about how we live, remember, and change. At its core, the book asks a simple question: What happens if we stop treating buildings as objects to be replaced, and start understanding them as things to be read? Over time, that question became something else entirely. It became clear that adaptive reuse is not only about buildings. It is about how we re

Why Are So Many Buildings Butchered in the Name of Adaptive Reuse?

Image AI Generated By Frazer Macdonald Hay Upon the table, raw and worn, A structure lies—a life forlorn. Its walls once whispered, doors...

From Ruin to Renewal

Author: Frazer Macdonald Hay The Art and Impact of Adaptive Reuse: Grafting the New onto the Old In the words of Bartok (1962), "Only a...

A Response to Upheaval & Place

Image By Artist: Mathieu Bernard-Reymond from his amazing Disparitions Series Why Place Matters Place is more than a backdrop — it shapes...

““whatever is true for space and time, this much is true for place: we are immersed in it and could not do without it. To be at all - to exist in any way – is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place”.

"No one therefor can conceive anything, but they must conceive it in some place”.

Owner:

F.M.H..... MLitt Peace & Conflict, Msc Architectural Conservation BA (Hons) Int. Architecture; MCSD, PgC TLHE

F.M.H is a Post-conflict, consultant - Specializing in Social Cohesion, DDR, Memorialization, Architectural Conservation, Housing Land and Property (HLP) issues.