Podcast: The power of reconstruction

Transcript

Voiceove

This is a podcast from the Bartlett Review, sharing new ideas and disruptive thinking for the built environment, brought to you by the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London. 

Sam Godfrey   

The fact that 10% of the population of the world is living in these areas affected by conflict, puts us in a position where it's no longer a luxury; it's a necessity. We need to come up with innovative solutions to address the needs of the people living in these conflict affected countries… 

Priti Parikh   

People are smart. They will respond positively to things if they are fit for purpose. And whilst we focus on reconstruction, is it around making sure we build better? 

Stergios Mitoulis  

Unlike narrow political discourse driven by short-term interests, I think that this science-led approach would place the people, the Ukrainians, the Gazans on the pathway for reconstruction based on equity and sustainability 

Priti Parikh 

Hello. I'm Priti Parikh, Professor of Infrastructure Engineering and International Development, and the Director of the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction. This is the 200th year of UCL, a special occasion to celebrate science and contribution to society. We are in 2026 where we have seen several examples of how geopolitical events are having a massive impact on countries and people across the globe, either directly or indirectly. These are added to the ongoing instability in Ukraine, the Middle East, and parts of Africa, all of which make the job of constructing and reconstructing in this area significantly more difficult. The total cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine was estimated to be over $500 billion over the next decade. 

If you think about Gaza, over 200,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, and 95% of hospitals are nonfunctional, and we've seen an economic contraction of 83%. So that is a gloomy background, but I hope to bring some positivity with the help of my two excellent guests, both of whom have a wealth of experience and expertise in this field. First is my colleague, Stergios Mitoulis, who is an Associate Professor in Engineering and Project Management at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction. Stergios is internationally recognised for his work on civil and strategic infrastructure projects, particularly bridges and transport networks. He's also an authority on the growing use of AI and machine learning to construction work. Welcome, Stergios. 

Stergios Mitoulis 

Thanks for having me. 

Priti Parikh 

Also with Stergios and me is Dr. Sam Godfrey. Sam is an industry leader and honorary professor here at the Bartlett, who specialises in all matters related to water. He has worked for the UN in India and across Africa, focusing on issues related to water supply, energy and sustainability. Sam, it's very good to see you. 

Sam Godfrey 

Thank you, Priti. Happy to be here. 

Priti Parikh 

So let's think about the big picture here. The need for construction and reconstruction, which is clearly increasing at pace. What is the scale of construction and reconstruction we need? 

Stergios Mitoulis 

Yes. Thank you for the question. As you mentioned before, Priti, Ukraine is faced with the immense challenge of reconstruction that's going to cost them just over half a trillion dollars over the next decade. And it's not just the scale. It's the complexity of this reconstruction. Ukraine's bridge and transport networks, for example, show how damage cascades across regions, not just assets. Very recently, we have seen an immense attack on energy infrastructure. We are not so sure of whether people will repatriate, will go back to their communities, to their cities. This is a very complex technical, social, and economic problem.   

Conflicts now target infrastructure strategically, transport, energy, hospitals, schools. And we are facing now layered risks, which is war, extreme weather, and ageing assets. So the way to think about the level of destruction, if we're thinking about Ukraine is about reconstructing an entire country, and the whole world and the European Union and the UK will need to support this immense endeavour of reconstructing countries. But not only Ukraine, obviously, as you mentioned before, the Gaza Strip needs to be reconstructed and there is worse happening all over the world at the moment where infrastructure is targeted. 

Priti Parikh  

And it's interesting that you mentioned warfare has changed now. It's really about targeting critical infrastructure around the world, because as soon as you target critical infrastructure, energy, water systems, it has a detrimental impact immediately on society in terms of health, education, community, social networks 

Stergios Mitoulis 

Absolutely. So reconstruction is no longer about replacing the assets, the buildings, and the bridges, and finding the resources and the materials to reconstruct structures. It's about restoring network resilience and societal functions. And in a very recent publication in Nature Cities, which is part of the research and the educational programmes that we are currently delivering within the Bartlett School, we have emphasised the fact that we should break free from the pattern of this bottom up approach of reconstruction is about materials and buildings. Reconstruction is about thinking at systemic level, what are the actual needs of the people? How do we strategically invest in infrastructure so that we maximise the functions, the services and the operations of cities and peoples and societies?  

Priti Parikh  

Yeah. We are rebuilding countries after all. And Sam, you've spent a lot of time in the field working on reconstruction. What do you think are the major risks and challenges around reconstruction? 

Sam Godfrey  

Yeah, thank you, Priti. And I would agree with Stergios that it's not only about the assets and the physical infrastructure that needs to be reconstructed, it's also the human infrastructure. One of the recent reports that we've been involved in with the World Bank indicates that about 60% of the skilled labour also leaves countries in conflict as a result of lack of employment. Obviously, as assets get destroyed or affected, then the need for technicians also reduces and people look for work and livelihoods outside the countries. So this affects, of course, the whole sort of programme cycle, the planning, the procurement, the financing, the administration, the contract management of assets, but also of course affects the operational maintenance, the sustainability of those assets in the future. So one of the key areas to focus on in reconstruction is not only the physical infrastructure, but the human infrastructure and ensuring that the human infrastructure is also taken care of, which clearly for the Bartlett School puts the Bartlett School and UCL in a very good position, given the excellent work that the Bartlett School does in building capacity of different universities and different engineering groups to both build, but operate and maintain assets in countries affected by conflict. 

Priti Parikh  

And if we talk about skills for construction, engineering, built environment, even in places without conflict, we are seeing a shortage of the skills. So then if we unpack some of the context of conflict, if people are leaving, how do you reconstruct? How do you acquire those skills back into the country? 

Sam Godfrey  

The innovation is very important in the way that we do assets and we rebuild assets within this context. Most of the needs for the skills need to be somehow tied with some sort of financial contracts. So as we know within the construction sector, we have a lot of PPPs, public private partnerships, which often are written on paper. But in the context of reconstruction, they're a very important tool to build capacity of both the public and the private sector for sustainability. Public and private sector contractor capacity is the key to ensure the sustainability. So as an outward sort of look for reconstruction, again, saying the human infrastructure component needs to be central in any discussion that we're having. 

Priti Parikh  

And if we think about reconstruction and reconstruction for whom, ultimately it's for people. And once we go through the reconstruction process, we have the asset base, but then that asset base needs to be maintained. They need to be operated. And what experience do you have with regards to that? And what technical innovation perhaps would you use in operating and maintaining assets? 

Sam Godfrey  

My experience in reconstruction is that you need to have a very detailed damage assessment of the infrastructure before you begin the process of reconstruction. And the challenge within the context of conflict settings is that you have a lot of unexploded ordinance, which limits the access you can get to the assets. I remember in the late '90s working in Angola when the Princess of Wales, the late Princess of Wales Lady Diana, she was there and she described the fact that there are more landmines in Angola than there are people. Now it's the same thing in the countries where I work today, where if you don't have access to the infrastructure due to the UXOs, you can't do effective damage assessments. So one of the key things is to then start to deploy AI and robotics techniques. 

So instead of using mice and dogs, for example, to detect the UXOs, which is what we did 20, 25 years ago, now use AI and robotics to deploy that, to assess the infrastructure and identify the critical components that need to be rebuilt. So for example, recently we deployed robotics in a 17 kilometre pipeline, which was a main trunk pipeline for the water supply. And in that, we were able to identify the 900 metres, which was the critical part of the pipeline that needed to be replaced without any human casualties. So the first step of any reconstruction work needs to be damage assessments and the deployment of AI and the deployment of robotics is critical to be able to do that effectively. 

Priti Parikh  

And also AI can be used as a tool for human safety. 

Stergios Mitoulis  

Yes. That's very important. It's very much what we also do in our research group. We, for example, we've very recently published a paper where we're using satellite imagery. We're trying to understand patterns of damage in Ukrainian cities. And based on that, we can zoom into the asset level, for example, into a bridge level or building level and really understand what is the level of damage. We can characterise this, we can then start planning recovery, restoration of the assets. And having that at the large scale, for example, a number of buildings, hospitals, schools, a number of infrastructure assets, we can then, based on very limited budgets and resources, come up with the optimised plan, a resilience plan, if you like, of how you can recover quickly with a minimum budget. 

And we are systematically doing that in use case in Ukraine, for example, in the Mykolaiv city, where we try to understand what are the single points of failure and whether the very tight budgets that we currently have, we can allocate them so that we can maximise service and operations at city scale. 

Priti Parikh  

And thinking about decision makers who are responding to this, but equally they influence construction and reconstruction. So how do you think shifts in international foreign policy, political priorities influence global construction and reconstruction efforts? 

Stergios Mitoulis  

That's true. Reconstruction prioritises often and they follow political agendas. It's very much a profits driven if you think about the private sector and the politics, how they're thinking about reconstruction. And it's not necessarily enhancing or supporting or underpinning resilience and sustainability at systems level. So we need to start thinking and developing what we call a conflict resilience frameworks and approach and strategies to show that objective and network-based prioritisation would avoid any political driven sequencing. So try to be objective rather than subjective into our or preferential, if you like, reconstruction. So we have built strong use cases which can be used for reconstruction of cities where we demonstrate based on objective outcomes, increasing traffic, increasing businesses, increasing in jobs in cities based on specific optimised reconstruction versus what we very recently hear by politicians where it seems that decisions are being made without taking into account the people's needs and the cultural needs or the historic needs. So they're pretty much out of context. So without this kind of new science, if you like, frameworks, we really risk rebuilding what is visible rather than what is vital for these countries. 

Sam Godfrey  

Yeah, maybe just to build on this as you said, I think the challenge we have is that the reconstruction needs are enormous in all of these countries. So identifying that single point of failure is critical. I will give some sorts or example of it from some work that we've done in a country that had 70,000 cases of cholera and a death rate of 2000, so sort of case fatality rate of about 3%. And when we analysed those cholera cases, we found exactly the single point of failure of the infrastructure was the main cause of the cholera. We identified that the attacks on the electricity substations, which were providing the power for the water treatment plants, were being systematically targeted and damaged during the conflict.And of course, this led to the disabling essentially of the population.  

 So in this case, we then identified that as that single point of failure, the most critical point of infrastructure that needed to be addressed. And we began to look at ways of having not just backup to the substations, but back up to the backup to the substations. In this case, we saw 572. In fact, there was one example of 572 cases were recorded in five days in that particular substation. And when the energy was brought back online, the numbers went down to only 52 cases. So it was the correlation between the public health outbreak and that single point of failure of the asset was really very, very evident.  

Stergios Mitoulis  

That's a very interesting point that Sam just raised now. And let's just remind ourselves that resilience frameworks are not only made for conflict zones. in the UK, we had a very recent disruption, extensive disruption of Heathrow Airport, just because one of the substations very close to the airport was damaged by fire and/or the case in the United States where a single failure of the key bridge in Baltimore caused the disruption of the entire port. So it's not only about treating and coming up with optimised frameworks for conflict zones, it's about honing our resilience frameworks and resilience thinking into our systems. And of course, prioritising in this case, conflict zones, because this is where the need is. And I believe that Priti you as well, enhancing these frameworks with people-centred approaches is also very important. We have seen that with your research. 

Priti Parikh  

Absolutely, because if we think about the scale of reconstruction and the new infrastructure that needs to be built, invariably with that will come innovation, but with innovation, it only works if people adapt to that. So there's a whole piece of research that we're doing around behaviour change. How can we motivate people to respond positively to some of the technological innovation, but vice versa, listening to people, learning from people on what their infrastructure choices are. So it's a loop where you have conversations with people that the recipients of infrastructure-built asset management and make sure that the infrastructure that's delivered rapidly meets their needs because ultimately people are smart. They will respond positively to things if they are fit for purpose. And there's an interesting question here really around the kind of use of science, technology for reconstruction. And whilst we focus on reconstruction, is it around making sure we build better? 

Can we use technologies more effectively for reconstruction? Can we build infrastructure which is more sustainable? And can we bring those lessons back to UK, US, and other settings? 

Sam Godfrey  

One of the areas is material sciences. So looking at what materials we deploy in these contexts to reconstruct countries. Our experience has been that the traditional approaches, particularly when it comes to civil engineering, may not be as appropriate within these conflict settings. For example, when we look at water systems, the majority of water that's pumped around the world is pumped using gravity, and that requires, of course, elevated service reservoirs, which are very visible from the air. The majority of the conflict being fought now is in the air, not on land. And large attacks that we're seeing around the world are coming from drone attacks. These surveillance drones, semi-automated drones, are attacking infrastructure that's very visible from the air. And so it's really important that when we talk of construction for reconstruction, we begin to look at the design and the norms of the way we design water or energy infrastructure and certainly bridges and roads, but at the same time, the material science side of it. So to invest more time in bomb resistant concrete, looking at shatter resistant concrete, thinking through different ways that the materials that we deploy within these contexts can be more sustainable for the users. 

Stergios Mitoulis  

Yes. I think as universities and developed countries, we do have the responsibility to help the people that have been affected by wars to reconstruct their own countries. An example of that is that we have a three year capacity building programme with Ukrainians where we teach them how to use materials, how to plan their cities, how to plan their, how to design their infrastructure, their roads, their buildings, their hospitals, and they're very innovative. They come up with all sorts of ideas. For example, reuse of existing buildings, existing structural components, existing materials from war rubble. 

There's been obviously many buildings that were blown up and we can reuse this material. They also come up with local capacity buildings. So we have the Ministry of Reconstruction in Ukraine helping us to better understand what are the local needs and how can we come up with an optimised way of providing these capacities and this knowledge to the local people, because we also need to understand that there is hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people out there that can actually help with their reconstruction. 

As I mentioned before, I think we can do that proactively. So cities that have not been completely damaged or whether we have minor damage, we can still go there and try and protect the people, even ongoing conflicts, but doing that, we also have to bear in mind that we need to be careful not to militarise existing civic infrastructure, because for example, there is innovative and very creative ways of reconstructing buildings and building shelters within these buildings, but we always need to keep in mind that we need to make sure that these buildings look like civic buildings. They don't look like military camps. 

Priti Parikh  

And that perception really matters, doesn't it? Because people also want to feel that they have some form of normal life. 

Stergios Mitoulis  

Absolutely, yes. Respecting culture and the history of people and as I mentioned before, making them feel that they have ownership will only increase the feeling of belonging.  

Priti Parikh 

So Stergios you've been discussing Ukraine at great length and quite passionately making the case for reconstruction there as soon as possible. But what is the point of doing it now, especially since Ukraine is still in war? 

Stergios Mitoulis  

That's a very interesting point. And that's actually the crux of reconstruction, the central problem, and thought of reconstruction. There is obviously short-term needs, medium-term needs, and long-term needs. So we need to balance those against what's available in terms of resources and funding and what needs to be done to keep the people in the country because we need to remember that a war causes a huge departure of people from the country. There is talent and there is people that could potentially reconstruct the country that actually flee the country. So there is a way to reconcile this balance between, okay, what do we construct? What do we leave as it is because we know it might be targeted in the near future. And that really depends on the level of risk. So for example, in a very recent framework that we published, we try to de-risk reconstruction in certain areas in Ukraine, try to understand what are the areas that have lower possibility, lower probability of being attacked and try to focus the reconstruction in these areas. My point is that there is ways, there is frameworks that can balance between risks, reconstruction, and people's needs. 

 

Sam Godfrey  

Yeah. Short, medium and long term solutions definitely is the right way. I mean, certainly when it comes to the short-term kind of solutions, one of the challenges, of course, is the education of the population. So if you don't reconstruct the basic education facilities, the schools, then you'll lose a generation. And if you lose another generation, then as well as the outward migration we've been talking about in terms of the skill drain, we'll also not be creating the next generation of the country. But also on the other side, at least from my experience, when a nation state is in conflict, it's not the whole geography of the country that's at war. There are pockets of the country that are heavily at war, and there are parts of the country which are peaceful. And some of the countries we're referring to have a number of areas where you can work on reconstruction during the conflict. So I think that's another key consideration that we shouldn't look at a nation state as one size fits all.  

 Priti Parikh 

So we know that reconstruction is so important, but how can we persuade governments, donors, the private sector to invest in this, especially in countries where the conflict is ongoing? 

Sam Godfrey  

As you mentioned at the beginning, Priti, the UN estimate for reconstruction, is more than a trillion dollars across the world. And about half of that is estimated to be in Ukraine. But of course, as you said, as we've been discussing on this podcast, we need to prioritise which bits of infrastructure need to be built first. Now, as we know with infrastructure, each type of infrastructure has a different financing model. 

So when we consider the financing, we need to first look at what is the pipeline of investments that are needed for that country. And then secondly, look at what is the financing across the three Ts, the tariff, the taxes and the transfers, which is the particular method we want to use to finance that infrastructure to try and make a gain. But it's a very complicated question and it's a very complicated situation and it's one which we face on a daily basis. 

Stergios Mitoulis  

The only thing that I would be able to add here as an academic is that there is ways to estimate with probabilistic models, with our models, the level of risk, and of course resilience. So if you take the risk to reconstruct how quickly you can reconstruct with local resources, labour, et cetera, et cetera, which means that you have a better estimate of what you expect in terms of return of your investments. So we can do this exercise. We've been doing this exercise post-hazard, for example, after a flood, we can advise stakeholders and operators and infrastructure owners of how to reconstruct and why accelerated reconstruction would benefit them. We can do similar exercises for conflict zones, but as I mentioned, conflict zones are way, way more complicated than just reconstructing infrastructure in countries at times of peace. 

 

Sam Godfrey 

Academics can provide significant inputs into each step of the sort of programme cycle. One particular area that I feel we would benefit more from as kind of field practitioners is in the area of procurement. And as we said at the beginning of this podcast, the reconstruction is the reconstruction of the physical and the human infrastructure. And so with the lack of the human infrastructure to administer conventional procurement systems, it would be good for academics to invest time in looking at alternative procurement systems that could be applicable. As we know, the ACLED, the armed conflict location and events data is showing now that 10% of the world is living in countries in conflict compared to only 5%, 15 years ago, and therefore the need for us to have alternative procurement systems for that 10% of the world is a reality. 

Stergios Mitoulis  

Yes. I think it's very interesting what Sam mentioned about procurement because when I spoke to deputy ministers In the Ministry of Reconstruction in Ukraine, this is where it's always been flagged to me, procurement, procurement, procurement. It's all about understanding the needs but also coming up with a reasonable pipeline of projects. So when external donors are ready to pump funding into the country to reconstruct, they know what exactly they want to reconstruct. And they can justify that based on local needs. They can justify that on short, medium and long term plans.  

It's a responsibility of the Bartlett School to come up and help ministries around the world and conflict affected countries to help them reconstruct, to help them understand, highlight their needs, and also involve people in democratic processes so that they can better sense what the locals need.  

Priti Parikh  

And at Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, we have been revamping our MSc programme in Infrastructure Investment Finance to bring in how do you finance infrastructure in complex settings precisely for this reason, because traditional financial models, partnerships simply will not work. Banking institutions have been destroyed in some of the conflict settings. So then how do you bring partners together? How do you deliver funding from agencies safely, securely? How do you make sure the funding allocated is used for intended infrastructure. We know that the scale of reconstruction is in the trillions. Do we have hope? Is there a reason for optimism and what can we do, Sam? 

Sam Godfrey  

I think the fact that 10% of the population of the world is living in these areas affected by conflict, as we've mentioned on this pod, puts us in a position where it's no longer a luxury, it's a necessity. We need to come up with innovative solutions to address the needs of the people living in these conflict affected countries. And I think the optimism is that an institution like Bartlett and UCL has a huge opportunity here to both influence the future engineers, the way that future engineers look at this, deploy technologies like we've mentioned, whether it's AI technologies, robotics technologies for solutions, but fundamentally come up with ways that we are reconstructing the facilities for them to be sustainable within this current conflict situation. And I believe that that's an optimistic way of looking at it, that we're bridging the gap between the skills and the human capital we need and the physical infrastructure that needs to be developed. 

Stergios Mitoulis  

From my view, I believe conflict brings catastrophe, brings devastation to conflict zones and to countries. But at the same time, there is a silver lining that reconstruction would allow a systemic redesign and not just repair of the country. An example of that is that we see Ukraine leading in the digital era. They have all sorts of new automation systems, digital systems, advanced digitalisation of their services operations, mapping of their infrastructure and eco structure. So we see the locals innovating. And I'm saying this because I believe that artificial intelligence and remote sensing and digital modelling are now allowing faster and fairer evidence-based recovery decisions and reconstruction from this point if you can create jobs, re-skill young people, stimulate green infrastructure and accelerate clean energy transition. And so unlike narrow political discourse driven by short-term interests, I think that this science-led approach would place the people, the Ukrainians, the Gazans on the pathway for reconstruction based on equity and sustainability. 

Priti Parikh  

And there is an opportunity to think about construction of infrastructure in a different way. For example, earlier in the podcast we were talking about how infrastructure becomes a target, an easy target because it's so visible. So perhaps in the future, there are ways in constructing infrastructure which makes it less visible, having backup of backup of infrastructure. So if an asset is targeted, it does not shut down airports, it does not shut down, water supply systems in cities. So I think there are ways in which we can be smarter around the construction and maintenance of infrastructure, and those lessons can be brought into non-conflict parts of the world as well. So I'm very optimistic about the power of science, especially at UCL where we have been doing science for 200 years. 

My thanks to Stergios and Sam for your expertise and time. I've really enjoyed hearing about your thoughts on this subject, and I hope our listeners have too. 

Sam Godfrey  

Thank you very much for having me, Priti.  

Stergios Mitoulis  

Thank you very much. 

Priti Parikh  

If you want to find out more about the work being done here at Bartlett, links to articles and previous episodes of the Bartlett Review Podcast, and a lot more information about the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment is available at our website, ucl.ac.uk/bartlett, or you can find us at LinkedIn at the Bartlett UCL. From me, Priti Parikh, thank you for listening and goodbye. 

Recorded February 2026.