The Mountain Hall and the Smart Club: The Architecture of Emergency Reception in Norwegian Cities

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.