The Shape of Recovery

The Shape of Recovery brings together reflections, practices, and analytical perspectives emerging from Ukraine’s ongoing processes of struggle, adaptation, and renewal. The book explores recovery as a transformative process intertwining civic engagement, governance, architecture, ecology, and cultural memory. It highlights how material rebuilding, institutional repair, ecological care, and collective imagination shape conditions for resilience and a shared future.

Swiss Network with Ukraine members Anna Dobrova, Yegor Vlasenko, Natalia Mysak, Jonathan Banz, and Basil Roth, are among the book’s contributors. It’s edited by Anastasiia Zhuravel and published with the support of the Research Institute of Sustainability (RIFS) at GIZ.

The publication, featuring eighteen essays over three sections, traces a spectrum of recovery practices. It forms a composite picture of recovery as an evolving and relational process. Sustainability in the Ukrainian context cannot be reduced to metrics or frameworks but must be understood as a practice of care—toward territory, community, and environment alike.

The Shape of Recovery is available for download. It will be launched on 23 January 2026, 19:30 at Café Tiergarten in Berlin.