Artificial intelligence supercharges Ukraine‘s reconstruction effort in a project called Circularity on the Edge, which analyses drone footage of bombed-out buildings to identify reusable materials.

Created by Ukrainian architect and researcher Kateryna Lopatiuk and developer Herman Mitish, Circularity on the Edge demonstrates how artificial intelligence (AI) can make it faster and easier to identify salvageable materials within damaged buildings.

In a demo that can be viewed online, Lopatiuk and Mitish show a visualisation of the city of Bucha, which has been a site of heavy fighting since the Russian invasion in 2022.

Circularity on the Edge uses AI to analyse aerial drone footage for reusable materials

The map lets users click on almost any building to see an aerial photo of the structure alongside its assessed damage level and a breakdown of its visible material makeup, including exactly where those materials are located.

Lopatiuk created Circularity on the Edge after returning to Europe from an exchange programme at US university MIT, during which she learned about computer vision systems and remote sensing technology at Carlo Ratti’s Senseable City Lab.

“After relocating from the US to Europe, I felt a strong urge to deepen my understanding of this approach and explore its application in the Ukrainian context, particularly given the growing significance of aerial drone imagery in Ukraine, both for military intelligence and civil surveillance,” she explained.

“Through my work with Ukrainian communities, I realised that many areas remain inaccessible due to landmines or occupation, making it difficult to assess the extent of damage or develop appropriate response strategies,” Lopatiuk added.

“In such cases, remote sensing becomes a valuable tool to estimate the scale and material typologies present on damaged and destroyed sites.”

While some construction waste from destroyed buildings is currently being reused in Ukraine, the majority is either sent to landfills or stored at temporary sites with different materials mixed together, according to Lopatiak.

This is allowing toxic materials to contaminate the other waste, rendering it all unusable. The Circularity on the Edge AI is trained to identify hazardous materials such as asbestos, so that special handling can be arranged where appropriate.

Wood, concrete, metal and brick can all be reused in various ways

Lopatiuk and Mitish trained the AI model on 2,518 images of destroyed buildings, which they had worked with experts to carefully annotate with identifiable materials such as brick, concrete, metal roofing and wood.

To illustrate the preliminary results, Lopatiuk selected four sites in Bucha that have suffered different levels of damage for detailed analysis: a shopping centre, an electrical substation, a private house and an apartment building.

Based on the AI remote identification, she has determined that 46 per cent of the materials in these buildings require disposal, 11 per cent incineration and 43 per cent have reuse or recycling potential.

In an ideal world, once the AI has classified the waste materials at a site, the findings would then be followed up by a ground assessment and the materials properly sorted.

The project was presented as an installation at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale

Lopatiak thinks there is also scope for AI to help with this next stage of the reconstruction process by matching recovered materials to nearby building projects in real-time.

An NGO that Lopatiak works with, called ReThink, has already developed a digital platform called Povtorno that performs a similar function and is currently in beta.

“In the context of Ukraine during the war, circularity is both an environmental ambition and, for many hromadas [neighbourhoods], an operational necessity,” said Lopatiak. “The destruction of buildings across the country has generated millions of tonnes of construction waste.”

“At the same time, the supply chains for new materials can be disrupted or expensive due to the war,” she added. “As a result, the reuse of existing materials might be a good option for timely and cost-effective reconstruction.”

Lopatiuk also developed an installation based on Circularity on the Edge for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, which was curated by Ratti.

The installation includes materials that Lopatiuk and her team have processed from Bucha and arranged to mirror AI-detected configurations from drone footage. Light and laser projections highlight the materials as if they are being mapped in real time.

“Beyond functionality, materials from damaged and destroyed sites carry symbolic weight, as they hold traces of prior use, memories, the histories of people, and what happened to them,” said Lopatiuk.

“That is why we see the extension of the life of these materials as a gesture of dignity toward those whose lives were interrupted by the Russian aggressive war.”

Ukraine has been at war since the Russian invasion in February 2022 escalated a conflict that had been ongoing since 2014. Since then, construction projects have included 10 underground schools, while architecture and design studios have continued to operate, often pivoting to war-related projects.

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