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

If you are working on the reconstruction of Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Sudan, or any city emerging from conflict, there is a familiar set of questions:

How quickly can we rebuild?

What should be prioritised?

Which structures are beyond repair?

These are necessary questions. But there is another question that rarely appears in planning frameworks or design briefs: What should we do with buildings that remember violence?

The buildings that don’t fit

Post-conflict reconstruction tends to treat buildings in two ways.

They are either:

• technical assets to be repaired or replaced

• heritage objects to be preserved or restored

Most funding, planning, and political attention sit within these categories. They are legible, measurable, and relatively straightforward to justify.

But there is a third category that sits uneasily between them: Ordinary buildings that carried violence.

These are not monuments. They are schools, offices, apartment blocks, churches, and factories. During conflict, they may have been used for detention, interrogation, execution, or control. After conflict, they remain embedded in everyday life.

They are rarely formally acknowledged. Yet they are widely known. And they do not return to neutrality.

Lessons from Mosul

In Mosul, after the occupation by the so-called Islamic State (ISIL), I encountered a city trying to resume ordinary life while carrying an extraordinary memory.

People spoke quietly, but consistently, about particular buildings.

A school where executions took place before it reopened as a place of learning.

A central building associated with public punishment that was later demolished.

A church used as a detention site that was restored as a symbol of resilience.

None of these places were hidden. They were part of everyday movement through the city.

Yet they were largely absent from formal recovery narratives.

Each was handled differently:

• one normalised

• one removed

• one symbolically purified

But in each case, the outcome was the same:

The memory remained, but without a stable place to sit.

Why erasure doesn’t work

There is often an understandable impulse to move forward quickly after war.

Fresh paint, demolition, and restoration can all signal recovery. They create visible progress and political reassurance.

But these interventions do not resolve what happened within these buildings.

They reposition it.

When everyday sites of violence are:

• reopened without acknowledgement

• demolished without context

• restored without their histories

Memory does not disappear.

It becomes:

• quieter

• more fragmented

• more difficult to speak about

• and more vulnerable to distortion

Communities continue to carry it, but without shared frameworks for recognition.

This is where reconstruction becomes fragile.

Buildings as “ex-combatants”

One way to understand this condition is to think of certain structures as “ex-combatant buildings.”

They are not neutral ruins.

They are not simply heritage.

They are spaces that played active roles in systems of violence and continue to shape social relations after conflict.

Like former combatants, they cannot simply be:

• ignored

• erased

• or returned to normal use without process

They require negotiation.

Adaptive re-use as a peacebuilding tool

This is where adaptive re-use becomes more than an architectural strategy.

In post-conflict contexts, it can become a peacebuilding method.

Not all buildings should be preserved.

Not all should be demolished.

Not all should become memorials.

But many require intervention that acknowledges their histories while allowing them to rejoin everyday life.

This is not about monumentalising trauma. It is about avoiding enforced amnesia.

What “rebuilding without erasing” looks like

Working with these buildings does not require large-scale, highly visible interventions. In many cases, the most effective approaches are modest and locally grounded.

They can include:

• Identifying sites of violence through community knowledge

  Not all relevant spaces appear in official records. Local memory often provides the most accurate map.

• Assessing social impact before intervention

  Understanding how a building is perceived can shape whether it should be reused, altered, or removed.

• Designing light-touch architectural responses

  Subtle changes—material, spatial, or programmatic—can acknowledge the past without overwhelming the present.

• Supporting everyday forms of remembrance

  Informal practices, such as inscriptions or community use of space, often carry more meaning than formal memorials.

• Allowing ambiguity where necessary

  Not all sites require a single narrative. Some may need to hold multiple meanings at once.

This approach could be described simply as:

The art of touching without erasing.

What happens if we don’t engage?

If these spaces are ignored, they do not become neutral.

They remain active (socially and emotionally) within the city.

In Mosul, memory circulated through:

• conversations in homes

• discussions in displacement camps

• quiet warnings about particular places

Without recognition, these narratives can:

• fragment

• shift

• become polarised

• or be mobilised in ways that deepen division

This is not an argument for preserving everything.

It is an argument for recognising that space carries memory, whether institutions acknowledge it or not.

A wider relevance

These questions are not specific to Iraq.

They are already present in:

• Ukraine

• Gaza

• Syria

• Sudan

• Lebanon

In each context, there will be:

• apartment blocks associated with detention

• schools linked to violence

• religious spaces repurposed during conflict

• neighbourhoods marked by collective trauma

Reconstruction will move quickly. It always does.

But speed without attention to these spaces risks producing cities that look stable while remaining socially unsettled.

Rebuilding cities that can live with their past

Post-conflict recovery is often framed as a return to normal.

But for many communities, “normal” no longer exists in the same way.

Buildings that carry violence become part of a new landscape, one that must be negotiated rather than erased.

Adaptive re-use, when approached carefully, offers a way to do this.

It allows buildings to:

• remain part of everyday life

• carry memory without being defined entirely by it

• support social repair rather than suppress it

Final thought

Reconstruction is often judged by what is rebuilt.

But long-term peace depends on what is recognised.

Cities do not forget what happened within them.They carry it in their spaces, their routines, and their silences.

The question is not whether memory will remain.

It is whether we choose to work with it, or build around it and hope it stays quiet.

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