The City Cannot Wait for Peace
Conversations That Matter
Ideas rarely change the world on their own. They travel through people.
Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to meet people whose work quietly shapes communities, institutions and places. They are architects, firefighters, heritage professionals, civic leaders, emergency responders and community builders. Few will ever become household names, yet their thinking continues to influence how societies recover, remember and move forward.
Conversations That Matter is a series of reflective essays inspired by those encounters. They are neither interviews nor profiles. They are an attempt to capture the ideas that emerge when thoughtful people are given the time and space to think aloud. Each conversation becomes the beginning of another.
This first essay reflects on a conversation with Saodat Usmonova, a development strategist from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.
The City Cannot Wait for Peace.......
The conversation began with bus stops.
Not reconstruction.
Not politics.
Not international aid.
Bus stops.
Saodat Usmonova, a development strategist from the frontline city of Zaporizhzhia, was describing the ordinary decisions Ukrainian municipalities now face almost every day. Should anti-drone protection be installed above children's playgrounds or transport interchanges? If people spend longer waiting at bus and trolleybus termini than in parks, should those become the priority?
At first glance, they appear to be practical questions.
In reality, they are questions about the kind of city that emerges while the war is still being fought.
Before establishing her current practice, Saodat spent years working in institutional development and local governance, helping shape strategy from inside the very systems she now advises. Today she works with Ukrainian cities and hromadas to strengthen institutional capacity, build partnerships with European municipalities and navigate the opportunities and complexities of international funding. Strategic communications formed part of that work, but always in service of broader questions about governance, development and how public institutions create lasting change.
I expected we would discuss reconstruction.
Instead, we found ourselves talking about the everyday life of a city that cannot afford to wait.
Throughout our conversation, I was struck not only by the substance of Saodat's observations, but by the way she expressed them. There was no bitterness, no anger and no desire to apportion blame. Instead, she spoke with remarkable calmness and generosity, driven by a genuine curiosity about how cities might make wiser decisions for the people who continue to live there. Her concern was never abstract. It was always rooted in the everyday experiences of her fellow citizens.
One observation, in particular, has remained with me.
"Temporary solutions tend to become permanent."
At first glance, it seems almost self-evident. Yet the longer I reflected on it, the more profound it became.
Across the world, emergency responses have a habit of outliving the crises that created them. Temporary housing becomes permanent neighbourhoods. Makeshift infrastructure evolves into accepted urban form. Buildings erected to meet an immediate need continue to shape communities decades later. History is full of examples where provisional decisions quietly become lasting realities.
Ukraine is experiencing this process in real time.
Anti-drone nets now protect playgrounds. Underground schools have become part of everyday life in some cities. Modular settlements, originally established to house internally displaced people after 2014, continue to accommodate families today. Residential buildings damaged by missile strikes are already being rebuilt, each making decisions about resilience, protection and adaptation without an agreed wartime standard to guide them.
Reconstruction, in other words, has already begun.
It is simply taking place under conditions unlike those most of us associate with rebuilding after conflict.
This challenges one of our deepest assumptions. We often imagine war, reconstruction and peace as three distinct phases, neatly following one another. Yet Ukrainian cities cannot afford to wait for peace before they evolve. Every week brings new adaptations, new routines and new decisions about how public space should function. The city continues to change, whether strategic planning keeps pace or not.
Perhaps the most important idea to emerge from our conversation, however, was not about architecture at all.
It was about what Saodat calls the Ownership Gap.
She describes it as "the distance between who signs for development and who lives with it."
Or, as she later asked during our conversation:
"Who owns development between the signature and the outcome?"
It is one of those deceptively simple questions that lingers long after it has been asked.
Projects begin with signatures, agreements and funding decisions. Yet places are ultimately shaped by people who had little influence over those documents. The gap between those two realities is where many projects quietly succeed, or quietly fail. It deserves the attention of every donor, municipality, architect and development agency working in fragile contexts.
Who decides whether a rebuilt apartment block should include a shelter that never existed before? Should industrial areas repeatedly targeted by missile attacks continue to be served by public transport routes? How should limited resources be prioritised between protection, maintenance and the quieter investments that make a city feel cared for?
These are not questions that technical expertise alone can answer.
As Saodat observed, the people who use a city every day possess knowledge that no planning document can fully capture. Residents know where they feel safest, where they wait longest, which routes they avoid and how neighbourhoods function under conditions of constant uncertainty. Their experience is not an obstacle to planning. It is one of its richest sources of evidence.
This belief led Saodat to establish a civic platform in Zaporizhzhia in 2023, bringing together residents, municipal officials and a small number of urban specialists to discuss how their city was changing. What interested me most was that she did not describe the platform itself as the innovation. Having worked inside local government, she already knew that dialogue could work. The real challenge was ensuring that wartime urban deliberation had a permanent home within local self-government rather than becoming another one-off consultation.
Another of her observations challenged assumptions that many of us outside Ukraine continue to hold.
Road repairs, flowerbeds and park benches often provoke debate. Is this really the right time to spend money on such things? Yet, as Saodat gently pointed out, people have now lived through years of full-scale invasion. They continue to raise children, walk familiar streets and build lives despite the conflict. Maintaining the everyday quality of a city is not an act of denial. It is an affirmation that civic life continues and that the future remains worth investing in.
As I reflected on our conversation, I realised that many of these questions echoed themes I have encountered elsewhere, from Mosul to Scotland. We often focus our attention on spectacular acts of reconstruction, yet it is the quieter, everyday decisions that frequently determine whether places remain liveable, trusted and loved.
In my own work, I have increasingly found myself asking when a successful project becomes a successful place.
Saodat's reflections suggest another equally important question.
How do cities continue becoming places while the conflict itself has not yet ended?
As our conversation drew to a close, I realised that Ukraine is quietly challenging many of our assumptions about reconstruction. We often imagine that peace arrives first and rebuilding follows.
Zaporizhzhia suggests something different.
Cities continue becoming themselves long before the fighting ends.
Perhaps that is the real lesson.
The future is rarely built in moments of certainty.
It is built through thousands of ordinary decisions, made by thoughtful people, in extraordinary times.
….
After the Conversation
Before publishing this essay, I shared it with Saodat. Her response was characteristically generous:
"You heard the part I care about most."
She also encouraged me to name one of the central ideas discussed using the term she has developed in her own work: the Ownership Gap: "the distance between who signs for development and who lives with it."
I'm grateful for her thoughtful reflections, her corrections and, above all, for allowing this conversation to continue beyond the online room in which it began.
