From war devastation to the “Dubai of the Donbas”: Mariupol portrayed by Gabriele Micalizzi

In 2022 Mariupol was at the centre of international headlines. One of the main theatres of fighting following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it was among the first cities to be attacked in the Donbas — the industrial region of eastern Ukraine contested since 2014. The three-month siege, from 24 February to 20 May, claimed—according to Ukrainian authorities—around 21,000 civilian lives and left the city devastated: filled with mass graves, cut off from water, electricity and phone networks, its buildings ripped apart by the craters of aerial bombardment.

Since then, Mariupol has been under Russian occupation and has been incorporated into the administrative region of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), one of the four separatist entities in the Donbas recognised by the Russian Federation. But today Mariupol is also something else: it is the city Moscow wants to turn into a seaside resort on the Sea of Azov, and the place where one of the largest—and most controversial—urban reconstruction operations in post-war Europe is being tested. This is what Gabriele Micalizzi tells Domus: an Italian photojournalist and founding member of the Cesura collective, who photographed exclusively for us the city that aims to become the “Dubai of the Donbas”.

“From where we stand, we still picture a city completely destroyed. That’s not true: today Mariupol is an open-air construction site,” says Micalizzi. “I saw bodies still lying on the ground, and people already cleaning the windows,” he recalls. “In 2022, during the siege, mid the ruined buildings, two little girls walked over to throw their candy wrappers into a bin.”

Providing a single, clear picture of how much was destroyed— and consequently how much is now being rebuilt—during the siege that tore Mariupol apart is complex. What is certain, however, is that reconstruction began immediately after the end of the urban battle in May 2022, and that it has been advancing at an astonishing pace.

Gabriele Micalizzi

Schools, hospitals and housing were the first infrastructures to be rebuilt. The population, which had drastically declined during the siege, is now growing again: many residents have returned, while newcomers are also arriving. New policies include controlled prices and subsidised mortgages. “Anyone working for the army or the Russian government can get preferential rates between 0% and 2% to buy a home,” Micalizzi explains. Over the past three years, according to local authorities, the population has even doubled.

Numerous investigations, however, have focused on the expropriation of Ukrainian homes, the inability of some original residents to return to the city, and its Russification. Among them, a report by The New York Times and an independent investigation by Bellingcat — the investigative journalism platform founded in 2014 by Eliot Higgins — in November 2025 describe reconstruction as a process intertwined with the normalisation of occupation.

In 2024, a General Plan for the city’s reconstruction was approved, extending all the way to 2035. Showing Micalizzi more than two hundred pages of projects, renderings and planning documents is Mariupol’s new Russian mayor, Anton Viktorovich Koltsov, who describes himself as a “city manager” rather than a politician. He explains that the goal is to make Mariupol a “model city of the Donbas,” capable of proving that “normality has returned,” even in the newly occupied territories annexed to Russia. “We want Mariupol to be recognised as a seaside city,” Koltsov says. “Two kilometres of seafront on one side and two and a half on the other. Hotels, restaurants, beaches, children’s resorts. The sea is shallow, warm, and family-friendly.”

Funding comes from multiple sources: private investments, statal and DNR funds. “There’s a huge flow of money: they want to turn it into something like Dubai,” Micalizzi says.

During the battle of Mariupol, Soviet high-rise blocks were turned one by one into war terrain: occupied by Ukrainian forces as heavy artillery positions and targeted by Russian troops as enemy strongholds. True architectures of conflict, where “people were down in the basements while a battle was being fought above their heads.” For this reason, among Mariupol’s buildings, residential blocks were hit the hardest—and today they are also the first to be demolished and replaced. “In cases like this, it’s faster to demolish than to restore,” says Micalizzi when asked how much of the city’s Ukrainian past remains imprinted in its architecture. “When you have a twenty-storey building with holes right through the middle, where entire vertical rows have collapsed, it’s impossible to rebuild — and it’s not worth it.”

Today, new apartment blocks are being erected where Soviet collective housing once stood, but with different proportions: lower, wider, less vertical. Not a total break with the past, but a controlled reformulation of it. The architects involved come from Moscow and St Petersburg, and the implicit model is the capital itself. “They’re shaping the city,” Micalizzi says, “the way the Romans did with conquered cities.”

A typical Soviet-era theatre built in the style of socialist realism in the city centre: it was here, in March 2022, that a huge number of Ukrainian and Russian civilians took shelter, trying to escape the crossfire engulfing the city.

Anton Viktorovich Koltsov, mayor of Mariupol

The building had been marked as a civilian refuge: in front of both façades, the refugees wrote the word “children” in Russian on the ground, in an attempt to make the presence of minors inside unmistakable. Yet it was here, on 16 March 2022, that bombs dropped by Moscow’s aircraft hit the site. For the international community it was among the most brutal war crimes committed during the invasion; Russia continues to deny responsibility.

Almost four years later, on 28 December 2025, the Mariupol Drama Theatre celebrated its reopening with a New Year’s performance, after being fully restored by the Russians. The façade remained largely unchanged, while the layout and interiors were partially modified. Here, reconstruction funds came directly from the Russian Federation: every public building in the occupied city is, after all, considered state property.

Not all of Mariupol is an active construction site, and the gaps in Moscow’s urban plan are above all ideological ones. The biggest is certainly the Azovstal steelworks — 11,000 square metres of warehouses, buildings and underground networks stretching from the outskirts to the city centre. The massive Soviet-era industrial complex was the epicentre of the final phase of the siege: the symbol of resistance and Mariupol’s last stronghold, where the few remaining Ukrainian units in the city had entrenched themselves — including the Azov Battalion, the Ukrainian paramilitary unit formed at the beginning of the Donbas war to fight pro-Russian separatist militias.

Gabriele Micalizzi

Inside the Azovstal steelworks, time seems to have stopped in 2022: the area is still largely destroyed, inaccessible, mined. “It’s a military zone and, for the time being, you can’t go in.” Plans are to turn it into a “mega-park with adjoining museums,” to commemorate the battle—and perhaps, at the same time, control its memory.

“The work will continue until everyone has their apartment,” Mayor Koltsov is keen to stress, insisting on the idea of a normality already restored and of a safe city. But the battle over Mariupol’s future is not being fought by one side alone. In 2023, even before the approval of the Russian General Plan, the Ukrainian government launched the project “Mariupol Reborn”: a reconstruction and urban regeneration plan imagined for “afterwards,” in case the city were liberated. The Russian vision and the Ukrainian one are two specular—yet radically different—images of the same city. But beyond propaganda, they reveal above all a truth about the future of war: reconstruction today no longer serves only to consolidate a conquest — it builds it in real time. No longer urban regeneration projects designed once the fighting is over, but masterplans implemented while war is still being fought, on the rubble itself.

The same imaginary of urban escapism returns in the “Gaza Riviera” proposed by Donald Trump as a regeneration plan for Palestinian territories devastated by the IDF: in a world where war seems to have become a permanent presence, almost a next-door neighbour — even for a Europe that thought it had left it behind — reconstruction happens immediately and often takes the form of an escape from reality. Seafront promenades and family resorts, mined industrial zones turned into urban parks, and theatres with holes in their façades welcoming in the new year: the dream is of a gleaming well-being that ignores what is happening just a few kilometres away.

“On the seafront I photographed a bar: in that exact spot, in 2022, a mortar shell fell near me. Now it’s a place where you can grab a coffee,” Micalizzi concludes.