Rehousing Ukraine: AHI brings together Ukrainian and global experts in housing, urban planning, finance and post-conflict relief and recovery to discuss the challenges and opportunities that Ukraine’s post-conflict housing reconstruction will bring.

For information on the Rehousing Ukraine Initiative which this series formed a part of click the button below.

David Smith is the founder and CEO of the Affordable Housing Institute, a global non-profit consultancy that develops sustainable housing financial ecosystems worldwide. David is also co-director of the Rehousing Ukraine Initiative. With 45 years’ direct experience in affordable housing, David uniquely combines the roles of practitioner and theoretician, participant and policymaker. He has worked in 50+ countries and pioneered the housing ecosystem and housing value chain approaches now widely in use.  A 1975 Harvard graduate, he is an award-winning author with more than 400 published articles in real estate, valuation, and policy periodicals, and a textbook. Click here to view introductory slides

Derek Long is a Director at arc4, the housing and data consultancy and co-director of the Rehousing Ukraine Initiative. In a 30+ year career, he has developed national programmes for affordable housing as an investor, regulator, policy maker working in national government, NGOs, academic consultancy, and the trade body for non-profits. An experienced leader at municipal and city region levels, Derek is serial collaborator with the Affordable Housing Institute. He is an Oxford-educated economist, an experienced national broadcaster and writer, he contributes questions to the BBC’s “most fiendish quiz”.

Panel 1: The First Day of Rebuilding: Situation, Challenges, Priorities

Watch the video in Ukrainian here

Oleksiy Feliv is a Managing partner at the Ukrainian law firm INTEGRITES. He is a recognized Ukrainian legal practitioner with over 19 years of experience in consulting mainly foreign businesses in Ukraine. He focuses on real estate, infrastructure and energy projects which involve foreign investment and project financing. Oleksiy is particularly experienced in structuring real estate transactions, investment in construction projects involving financing by IFIs, investment funds and international banks, government and stakeholder relations, and actively contributes to the policy development in the areas of land issues and construction in Ukraine. 

Natalia Khotsianivska is the current Deputy Minister for Communities and Territories Development of Ukraine. She has more than 25 years of work experience in Public Administration. She has spent most of her career working for the Ukrainian State Tax Administration. She graduated as an engineer from the Potlava Civil Engineering Institute (1990) and as an economist in accounting and business analysis from the Zhytomyr Institute of engineering and technology (1996).

 

Dmytro Chasovnikov. Dmytro Valerievich Chasovnikov is the founding member of the root community group “Housing for teachers from Mariupol”. He holds a CLS (the equivalent of a PhD in Law) and he is an  Associate Professor at the Chair of Economic Law and Economic Security Chair at the Donetsk State University of Internal Affairs. Dmytro is also a head of the Donetska and Luhanska Oblasts Securities Market Participants Supervision Sector of the National Securities and Stock Market Commission. Click here to view presentation slides

Daryna Marchak is the Head of the Center of Public Finance and Governance at the Kyiv School of Economics with extensive experience in public administration. She was an Advisor to the CMU Minister for Public Administration Reform (2017-2018), expert of the EU project “Supporting Integrated Public Administration Reform in Ukraine (EU4PAR)”, COO for the SOE “Prozorro.Sale.”  Daryna is a graduate of the KSE Master’s Program in Public Policy and Governance (2019), as well as the KSE Program “Leadership in Public Finance’ (2016). She is the author of the research “How to maximize the potential of program budgeting in Ukraine” (2019), and has a number of publications on budget planning. Click here to view presentation slides

 

Emily Channell-Justice is the Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research in Ukraine since 2012. She has pursued research on political activism and social movements among students and feminists during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations. Her ethnography Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine is in production at the University of Toronto Press, and her edited volume, Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Lexington Books) was published in 2020.  Click here to view presentation slides

Oleksandr Anisimov is an urban planner and scholar specializing in local governance and urban housing development with a background in political science. Since the start of his career at an urban NGO Agents of Change, he has been working on different private and municipal urban projects and strategies. He has a body of work related to the urban planning and architecture of the 1980s in Kyiv, Ukraine. The project aftersocialistmodernism.com is the end result of such inquiries. In his thesis project, he researched local urban development projects in the Kyiv agglomeration highlighting path-dependencies and policy-making procedures. More recently, he has been engaged in working in the office for street infrastructure in the Lviv municipality and developed a better personal understanding of municipal management procedures. Click here to view presentation slides     

Panel 2: Rehousing the Returnees: Building Better, Smarter, Faster, Fairer

Watch the video in Ukrainian here

Oleh Zahnitko is a Ukrainian legal practitioner with a principal focus on corporate finance, IFIs, and capital markets. Active on the market for over 20 years, he gained experience in transactional legal work related to corporate loan and interbank market, project financing and secured transactions. Oleh has successfully advised financial institutions regarding housing and real estate finance, such as a celebrated EBRD project finance to design, erect and operate a shopping center in downtown Lviv. In his career, he advised impact and retail finance institutions on their operations in Ukraine, one of which involved the transformation of the National Bank’s unit and its setup as a publicly owned independent impact finance entity. Dr. Zahnitko’s expertise gas been recognized by international legal rankings and directories, such as The Legal500 EMEA 2022, Best Lawyers 2022, Chambers Global 2020.   

Yuriy Dzhygyr is a World Bank consultant working in Kyiv, Ukraine. He contributes to the World Bank’s ongoing programs in health and social protection sectors, providing technical expertise, diagnostic analysis, and assisting in the production of policy recommendations. His latest work focused on assessing the progress and designing options for strengthening Ukraine’s health financing reform, helping to learn the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, and developing a resilience framework for Ukraine’s human capital development in the area of healthcare and social protection. Prior to joining the World Bank, Yuriy acted as Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Finance, covering public spending on human capital development programs. He was also part of the team working on developing Ukraine’s health financing reform in 2016-2017.

 

Svitlana Startseva is the Deputy Head of the Department of Housing Policy and Land Management, Head of Department of Formation and Implementation of Housing Policy, in the Ministry for Communities and Territories Development of Ukraine. Holding her master’s degree in public administration from Donetsk National Technical University, Svitlana has 35 years of experience in public administration management. For the last 10 years she has been focused on the housing policy and utilities. Svitlana is one of the most active advocates of the utilities reform, particularly in the residential housing management. 

Mykhailo Sapon is the Head of the Department of Urban Planning and Architecture of Irpin, the town in Kyiv region which saw the vastest devastation and infrastructure damage from the Russian attacks in early 2022. Mykhailo is a graduate of Kyiv National University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, majoring in Industrial and Civil Engineering. Since the liberation of Irpin from the Russian occupants in late March 2022, Mykhailo has been actively involved in strategic planning related to the rebuilding and renovation of the city. Click here to watch the video from Mykhailo’s presentation

 

Grzegorz Gajda is Senior Urban Specialist at the European Investment Bank. He appraises projects submitted for the EIB financing both from the European Union countries and from outside of the EU. Previously, while he was with the IFC he lead Ukraine Residential Energy Efficiency Project. Prior to the IFC, he was with European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, where he appraised, negotiated and implemented urban investment projects in Poland and Ukraine. He is from Warsaw, Poland and holds MA Econ. from Warsaw University.

Wolfgang Amann. As Managing Director at the Institute of Real Estate Construction and Housing Ltd.(IIBW), Vienna (Austria), Wolfgang Amann has executed more than 300 research and consulting projects on housing decarbonisation, housing finance, housing policy and housing legislation. A main focus in his professional activities is the implementation of PPP Housing sectors in transition countries. In this context, he has executed consultancy and implementation projects in countries such as Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Monte­negro, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. He is a consultant to international organisations (UN and World Bank), national governments and the private sector and teaches real estate economics at several graduate programmes in Austria. Click here to view presentation slides

Panel 3: Housing the Disrupted: Refugees, IDPs, and Dispersed Families

Watch the video in Ukrainian here

Emily Channell-Justice is the Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research in Ukraine since 2012. She has pursued research on political activism and social movements among students and feminists during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations. Her ethnography “Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine” is in production at the University of Toronto Press, and her edited volume, Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Lexington Books) was published in 2020. She has published academic articles in several journals, including History and Anthropology, Revolutionary Russia, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She received her PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in September 2016, and she was a Havighurst Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies at Miami University, Ohio from 2016-2019.

Lidia Kuzemska is a sociologist with an interdisciplinary interest in forced migration, internal displacement, borders, and citizenship. In particular, she works on counter-hegemonic citizenship practices of Internally Displaced Persons in Ukraine. She holds a PhD in Sociology and an MA in Economy and Society from Lancaster University (UK), an MA in European Studies from the College of Europe (Belgium-Poland), and an MA in Sociology from Ivan Franko Lviv University (Ukraine). Lidia is a co-managing editor of the Refugee Review journal (ESPMI network). She is also a research affiliate at the Internal Displacement Research Programme (SOAS University of London) and a peer-reviewer of the Knowledge Platform and Connection Hub (UN Network on Migration). Click here to view presentation slides

Tamas Vonyo is a historian of economic growth and an economic historian of war. In 2019, he was appointed Associate Professor of Economic History at Bocconi University. He is also a CEPR Research Fellow and elected trustee of the European Historical Economics Society. His research work has mainly focused on the impact of the Second World War on postwar economic growth in Europe and on the socialist economies of Eastern Europe. Born in Hungary, Tamas holds an MPhil (2007) and a PhD (2010) from the University of Oxford. He was Junior Fellow at Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, postdoctoral researcher at Groningen University, and Assistant Professor at the LSE. Click here to view presentation slides

Friedemann Roy is Advisor to the Vice President, Economics and Private Sector Development, International Finance Corporation.  Based in Washington, DC, he has worked in over 50 countries covering areas in banking, housing finance and microfinance. Previous positions held were at the World Bank, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Association of Private Bausparkassen and Commerzbank AG. In addition, he worked as an editor for the “Housing Finance International” Journal which is published by the International Union for Housing Finance (IUHF). He holds a PhD in business administration. Click here to view presentation slides

Olena Lukaniuk is a legal expert currently working for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as Ukraine’s National Legal Officer. For the last 7 years has been a part of the international humanitarian and development organizations: Norwegian Refugee Council, GIZ, IOM. Previously, she occupied various positions in governmental authorities. She has extensive experience in providing analyses of different countries’ contexts on the matter of adherence to the international law standards, particularly related to humanitarian and development interventions in conflict-affected regions. Olena holds a Master Degree in International Law from Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University. Click here to view presentation slides

Drita Shabani has 15 years of experience in housing, construction, and the energy efficiency field with a focus on legislation and regulatory frameworks. She has institutional experience of more than 12 years. She is experienced in policy identification and development, as well as in the development and implementation of different programmes and projects aiming at strengthening the capacities of local, regional, and national authorities dealing with housing/construction, spatial planning, and energy efficiency issues, solutions and challenges. Her work has focused on the development of national legal basis and of regulatory policies on Housing, construction, spatial planning and energy efficiency in buildings. Moreover,  she has conducted institutional analyses of municipal services dealing with urbanism and construction and proposed the institutional reform aimed at increasing the efficiency of the directorate. Her experience covers architectural designs, construction practices, policy development, participation in the development of several national and international strategies regarding housing, and participation in Energy Audits in several buildings. Click here to view presentation slides


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