Yesterday, a meeting of the Odesa branch of ICOMOS was held at the Ukraine Rebuilding Alliance. Together with the Department of Culture, Tourism and Cultural Heritage Protection of the Odesa City Council and our partners from the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, we discussed strategic steps to protect our historic centre.
The inclusion of Odesa on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023 was a diplomatic victory, but it also exposed a critical legal vacuum. The harsh reality is that more than 51% of the land plots under our heritage sites do not have clearly defined cadastral boundaries or designated land-use codes.
What does this mean in practice? It turns potentially some of the community’s most valuable assets into legally “toxic” areas. This opens the door to chaotic development in close proximity to fragile historic foundations and prevents revenues from reaching the city budget, effectively blocking transparent investment processes.
We are implementing an Integrated Management System, at the heart of which is a “digital twin” of the historic centre. Specialists have already created millimetre-accurate 3D models of 13 key city landmarks, from the Odesa Opera House to the Passage. All of them are precisely linked to Ukraine’s national coordinate reference system, USK-2000, giving the models full legal and spatial reference.
For the system to work effectively, we are initiating a transition to international management standards through a two-tier governance model for the site. The strategic direction will be overseen by a Supervisory Board, while a professional Executive Office will be responsible for day-to-day monitoring, the 3D cadastre, and spatial management.
Why is this critically important now? Because cultural heritage preservation is also about sustainable economic development, transparent rules, restoring tax revenues to the city budget, and building trust among international partners.
Odesa belongs to the world, but the responsibility for building effective institutions to protect it lies with us. We continue the work.
