Strategic Management of Urban Sustainability and Resilience: Navigating the BANI Environment in Ukrainian Context

This article proposes a strategic framework for Kyiv’s post-conflict sustainability and resilience under brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible (BANI) conditions. We integrate adaptive governance, circular-economy reconstruction, and city-scale digital capabilities, including AI-enabled analytics, IoT sensing, and urban digital twins. Building on recent assessments of Ukraine’s reconstruction needs, we outline a socio-technical model that links sustainability and resilience objectives under shock risk and budget constraints and show how an illustrative five-year optimisation can rebalance investments toward distributed renewables and early-warning infrastructure. The example portfolio achieves an end-horizon composite performance of Foptimized(5) = 0.65 (on a 0–1 normalised index where 1 indicates achieving the policy-defined targets; 0.65 indicates ~65% progress toward those targets at year 5, improving on the baseline allocation under shocks), indicating improved robustness relative to a baseline allocation. We emphasise that effective implementation depends on secure-by-design digital architecture, participatory prioritisation of indicators and weights, and iterative monitoring that supports rapid adaptation as conditions evolve. The framework provides a pragmatic roadmap for Kyiv and similarly vulnerable cities seeking a low-carbon recovery while reducing systemic brittleness and mitigating anxiety-driven decision-making delays.