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Mediating Time and Place addresses the urgency of finding solutions to climate change induced displacement and highlights the need to to re-actualize the relationship between architecture and urbanism with displacement management and contingency planning both in research and in policy and practice. The timeframes of ‘here and now’, or ‘before and after’ are currently challenged in academia but not in the practice of built environment in emergency response and planning. In parallel, contemporary domestic contingency planning is largely delinked from urban planning. The two domains, however, intersect in critical ways.
Mediating Time and Place investigates the complex interactions between global displacement management policy and the localized spatial manifestations of these provisions. I outline the complicated processes of site selection for emergency response, and the mediation of the contested spaces these decisions may produce. The perspectives identified in my research seek to challenge mono-functional and time-limited displacement management practice. The empirical data in my research reflects my alternating professional roles: the site planning expert, the academic researcher, and the educator. The methods I use are qualitative and rely primarily on bibliographic research, document analysis, case studies, and embedded field research. Further to this teaching and running the In Transit Studio has implicitly and directly produced source material for research and publications This material is primarily comprised of speculative design-projects based on data obtained during field work and desk studies and translated into threedimensional form by architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism students. Many findings emerge through design, which in some cases could not have been revealed or understood without three-dimensional explorations and visualizations.
The research feature examples of emergency architecture from France, Greece, Haiti, Jordan, and Lebanon. It also includes Norwegian Cold War architecture retrofitted as arrival infrastructure for asylum-seekers in the 1990s and the 2010s. Current investigations explores the reception of refugees displaced by the war in Ukraine and includes a case study of neighboring Romania – a country that is simultaneously providing humanitarian assistance the ones fleeing Ukraine while preparing for domestic mass displacement in the event of a major earthquake. This research is based on my mission as a Site Planning expert deployed to the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs during the summer of 2022, followed by an In Transit Studio course called ‘Dignified Reception: Bucharest’ at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) in the academic fall semester of 2022.
Articles that are part of the PhD thesis:
The Mountain Hall and the Smart Club: The Architecture of Emergency Reception in Norwegian Cities published in Wellbeing, Space and Society, April 2024
Abstract
Contemporary contingency planning is largely delinked from urban planning. However, the two domains intersect in critical ways. Contingency planning frames conditions for displaced persons in emergency situations but also affects the design of everyday urban spaces. Thus, the spatial output of emergency preparedness can encourage wellbeing and placemaking in both emergency and non-emergency situations. This article explores the built environments of contingency planning in Norwegian cities, paying particular attention to emergency reception.
Furthermore, this article outlines the relationship between the policies of reception in displacement management and the spatial policies of placemaking. A study of Norwegian contingency planning history shows that the former evacuation shelter typology is being replaced by the more loosely defined concept of places of protection, similar to the retrofitted spaces commonly used as asylum centres. Newspaper clippings and document reviews are used to study two emergency reception structures: a Cold War multipurpose mountain hall close to the Norway–Russia border and a transformed 1970s warehouse near Oslo that currently houses the Norwegian national arrival facility for asylum-seekers. Comparing these two cases outlines the interaction between displacement management, contingency planning, and urban planning and contributes to conceptualising what we call contingency urbanism. We suggest that contingency urbanism can be useful in re-spatialising emergency architecture, re-linking contingency and urban planning, and pointing to placemaking opportunities in the duality of everyday life and a state of emergency.
The Concept of Place in Displacement Management published in Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, May 2022
Abstract
The concept of place increasingly appears in literature produced by and for actors of global displacement management relating to interventions concerning the built environment. Place, in this context, is presented as a concept appropriate for interventions in especially urban, non-camp settings. The introduction of so-called place-based approaches indicates that displacement management literature builds on existing conceptualizations of place found in the practice and theory of architecture and urbanism, as well as in other social science literature. A study of operational displacement management literature reveals that the varying conceptions of place apply place thinking to displacement management in particular ways. This analysis finds that diverse uses of place-related terminology and contested ideas of placemaking, contributes to a de-professionalization of design matters in displacement management. Nonetheless, it suggests that place can be a useful concept when combining technical site analyses with urbanism mapping methods in displacement management practice. The perspectives identified in this article seek to strengthen the existing yet tenuous links between competences within displacement management and architecture and urbanism. It is also meant to call attention to the social agency of displaced populations concerning built environment interventions.
To inquire about this article send an email to havard.breivik-khan@aho.no