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Peter Hemmersam is a professor in urban design at the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape. He is trained as an architect and is a former partner in the architectural practice Transform. His main research interest lies in the field of urban design. He is currently undertaking research on Arctic cities, periurban landscapes of the Oslo region and placemaking. He directs the Oslo Centre for Urban and Landscape Studies.
Cities and buildings are materializations of imaginaries of place. The Arctic is urbanizing, and Svalbard can help us understand how this realization takes place, and some of the diverging forms urbanization takes when translated into built form by architects and planners... Read »
The concept of neighbourhood has been used throughout modern urbanism to articulate notions of the ideal community. What can we learn from these different versions of neighbourhood planning? .. Read »
Twentieth-century development policies in the Arctic played out differently across the region but often involved colonization, environmentally damaging resource extraction and urbanization of Indigenous peoples. These are uncomfortable dimensions of the history of development in the North... Read »
The entire urban planning history of Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland falls within living memory, and the history of urban design needs to be documented. We have studied the evolution of urban space design through selected residential projects from different periods of the country’s planning history... Read »
Architecture in Scandinavia’s Arctic north exists in a tension between place-specific approaches and globalizing and potentially homogenizing meta-narratives. Here, I will show how ‘Nordic architecture’ is constructed in the Arctic. We can start with the region’s geophysical qualities of snow and darkness... Read »
Refugees, temporarily displaced people, and migrants who arrive in Norwegian cities would benefit from equitable access to urban public spaces. Research suggests that the design and management of public urban spaces and local neighbourhood centres can improve migrants’ wellbeing and encourage local cross-cultural interactions... Read »
This article explores how placemaking took place in architectural and design studios working with migrant and displaced communities at universities in three countries. Placemaking is a dimension of architectural and urban design practice that is emulated in architectural design studios – and often takes the form of a top-down and expert-driven exercise... Read »
Norwegian cities are small, green and dispersed, and mainstream European models of urban regionalization and compact urbanism are not always relevant or useful when analyzing the urban landscapes of the North. .. Read »
Arcticness (or Northernness) has been expressed in the planning and design of Arctic cities over the past century. This paper explores how the imaginary conveyed in this notion has influenced the urbanism and architecture of northern communities in different ways... Read »
Making the Arctic City explores the unwritten history of city-building in the Arctic over the last 100 years... Read »
ON FUTURE NORTH → 7 1. INTO THE FUTURE – Andrew Morrison → 11 2. RUINS IN REVERSE – Janike Kampevold Larsen → 20 3. TRANSECT WALK – Peter Hemmersam → 32 4. WALKING THE HIGH WIRE – William L. Fox → 51 5. METHODS FOR PROBING FUTURES: VARDØ – Henry Mainsah → 55 6. SAVOUR THE PAST, TASTE THE FUTURE – Brona Ann Keenan and Miles Franklin Hamaker → 57 7... Read »
INTRODUCTION – Janike Kampevold Larsen & Peter Hemmersam → 7 1. INVENTING AND REINVENTING PLACE IDENTITY IN LONGYEARBYEN: TOWARDS A POST-MINING CITY? – Aileen A. Espíritu → 9 THE ART OF SVALBARD, MAY 23–JUNE 1, 2015 – Bill Fox → 14 2. A FLUID LANDSCAPE – Kathleen John-Alder → 19 NARRATA → 22 3... Read »
PREFACE – Janike Kampevold Larsen & Peter Hemmersam → 13 1. ENCOUNTERING KOLA – Peter Hemmersam & Janike Kampevold Larsen → 15 2. MURMANSK: A COASTAL CITY? – Aileen A. Espíritu, Ph.D. → 25 4. ENNOBLING URBAN SPACE IN THE BORDER REGION, INTERVIEW WITH MORGAN IP – Peter Hemmersam & Vlad Lyachov → 31 5... Read »
Anthropocene discourses shapes perceptions of landscape futures. This chapter reports on a visual survey and characterisation of ongoing landscape transformation in two Subarctic regions , using as a reference mechanical excavators, or ‘diggers’ – the most obvious technology for ground alteration and landscape (re)creation... Read »
The interdisciplinary Future North project experimentally investigates the territories and landscapes of the High North or Subarctic regions of Northern Europe. It studies the relationship between people and their environments and attempts to map the ›future‹ landscapes that are developed through both social and individual agency... Read »
The changing Arctic is of broad political concern and is being studied across many fields. This book investigates ongoing changes in the Arctic from a landscape perspective. It examines settlements and territories of the Barents Sea Coast, Northern Norway, the Russian Kola Peninsula, Svalbard and Greenland from an interdisciplinary, design-based and future-oriented perspective... Read »
Public lecture at HafenCity University in Hamburg 10 January, 2018. Despite being remote, the Arctic is in fact home to millions of people, and the region is facing some of the most rapid urban change on the globe due to climate change, resource exploitation and geopolitical posturing. The talk will present historical trajectories and contemporary dimensions of urbanism in the circumpolar region... Read »
This paper presents and discusses the use of serendipity in the design and use of experimental urban mapping tools and practices. We address the issue of error in design processes by exploring the role of serendipity in an experimental cultural mapping activity enabled by an iphone app of our own design... Read »
This book documents the joint effort of an international group of researchers and students of architecture and landscape architecture to understand the everyday Kirkenes, its life, and the thinking of the inhabitants about the town and its future. These crucial local elements inform the students so that their design proposals can better suggest ways that the future of the town could unfold... Read »
This paper identifies and discusses a set of challenges relating to the design of digital services in policies and strategies for more liveable and sustainable cities. These challenges emerge in the meeting between the knowledge and practice fields of digital design, which deal with service and interaction design, and urbanism, which is concerned with the study, planning and design of cities... Read »
Discourses on the Anthropocene influence perceptions of landscape futures. This paper reports on a visual survey and characterisation of ongoing landscape transformation in two regions in the Arctic (including the Subarctic), using as a reference mechanical excavators, or ‘diggers’ – the most obvious technology for ground alteration and landscape (re)creation... Read »
This essay explores changing images of the Norwegian-Russian Barents Coast landscape, which is currently undergoing political and economic changes due to large prospected quantities of extractable oil and gas, rare earth and other minerals... Read »
Regulations in urban governance stipulate that large amounts of urban data be made available to the public with the intention of informing and enhancing decision making by businesses and citizens... Read »
This article investigates how experimental forms of urban mapping can reveal the particularity of places in non-standard urban situations with the intention of moving beyond the reductivism of still-dominant modernist modes of mapping and associated forms of planning... Read »
This paper presents and discusses the use of serendipity in the design and use of experimental urban mapping tools and practices. We address the issue of error in design processes by exploring the role of serendipity in an experimental cultural mapping activity enabled by an iphone app of our own design... Read »
Guest lecture, Université de Montréal, Quebec, Canada. 14.10.2016 .. Read »
Guest lecture, Université Laval, Quebec, Canada. 13.10.2016 .. Read »
Guest lecture, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. 12.10.2016 .. Read »
Guest lecture, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. 11.10.2016 .. Read »
The Arctic is urbanizing. Not just in terms of demography and economy, but also in terms of cultural evolution, changing values and lifestyle choices. The tension between colonial modernization as expressed in architecture and urban planning and indigenous ways of life is evident in many Arctic cities... Read »
This paper presents and discusses the use of serendipity in the design and use of experimental urban mapping tools and practices. We address the issue of error in design processes by exploring the role of serendipity in an experimental cultural mapping activity enabled by an iphone app of our own design... Read »
Seminar: Conservation Through Transformation – Cultural Heritage and Place-based Development Varanger Museum, Vardø, 20 April, 2016 .. Read »
In 1968, the British/Swedish architect Ralph Erskine published an article ‘Architecture and town planning in the north’ in this journal, in which he called for a particular Arctic approach to the design of buildings and cities that is distinct from mainstream architecture due to conditions such as harsh climate, resident indigenous or sparse population and remoteness... Read »
The planning of Arctic cities largely still happens within a modernist master-planning framework. This tendency has paradoxically persevered, as anti-urban identity discourses relating to indigenous populations have left little room for re-evaluating city design... Read »
Mapping is intimately related to the practice of urbanism, one that is beginning to be transformed by social and locative media. This chapter presents research in a project into the design and use of locative media in the networked city... Read »
Arctic settlements and cities are adapting to climatic, economic, social and geo-political changes. Strategies for planning and transformation of cities do not only depend on these dynamic and emerging conditions, but also on how existing material cultures provides frames for thinking about possible urban futures... Read »
Future North: Svalbard 30.10.2015, AHO, Oslo .. Read »
Keynote at Arctic Frontiers – Science Session .. Read »
This text deals with what the concept ‘best practice’ means – where it comes from, and how it is used in urban planning and design. It is a widely used concept, which might be applied as a strict protocol, but is often also used in a much more liberal way in the design practices—describing a wider range of approaches. .. Read »
Regulations in urban governance stipulate that large amounts of urban data are made available to publics with the intention of informing and enhancing decision making for businesses and citizens... Read »
Danmark har lang tradition for streng byplanmæssig styring af detailhandelen, og Svend Aukens stop for nye eksterne shoppingcentre i 1997 og den efterfølgende politik har været en stor succes i forhold til at begrænse butiksflugten til bilbyen... Read »
On the east coast of Greenland is city of Tasiilaq where the icebergs tower over its wooden houses in the summer. These landscapes, the urban on land and the wild at sea, form a dual relationship, shaped by the long history of traditions and the recent stories of modern life... Read »
Mapping is intimately related to the practice of urbanism, one that is beginning to be transformed by social and locative media. This chapter presents research in a project into the design and use of a GPS-based ‘app’ called Streetscape based on the mapping methodology of Urban Gallery (by chora)... Read »
Akershus County, Areal og samferdselsgruppa i Follo 14.03.2014 .. Read »
Arctic Modernities Conference, Tromsø .. Read »
Utsatte Nordlige Landskap AHO, Oslo .. Read »
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: Conference: Archives of the Arctic. Ice, Entropy and Memory .. Read »
This report is a result of a collaboration between The Foundation for Design and Architecture in Norway and the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and the purpose was to uncover consequences of, and potentials in, shopping centre construction in small and medium sized Norwegian towns... Read »
Førsteamanuensis ved Arkitekthøyskolen i Oslo, Peter Hemmersam, gjør opp status for forholdet mellom kjøpesentre og tradisjonelle sentrum, peker ut hovedproblemer slik situasjonen er og har vært – og antyder en vei videre. .. Read »
Negotiating Space, Arranging the Land UiO Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History and Place: Nasjonalbiblioteket, Oslo Key words: Agency of matter, Serendipity, Mapping contemporary landscapes, Journey format. .. Read »
A consensus as to how cities can meet the challenges posed by sustainability is emerging. The primary response of cities in terms of urban policy and planning can be summed up in the term ‘Compact City’. This is a strategy that is easy to envision for planners, politicians and the general public... Read »
This paper presents completed research in phase one of a project into the interdisciplinary co-design and collaborative uses of social media in urban settings. Research now includes place-specific computing, locative media applications (‘apps’), and open source tools (OpenStreetMaps, Ushahidi)... Read »
Urban sustainability is often reduced to a specific set of issues packaged in the notion of ‘green city’ or ‘eco-city’. The idea of eco-city is problematic in terms of pure sustainability, but forms an important motive in urban policy. The architectural policy of Oslo emphasizes sustainability, and ‘greenness’ is a marketable quality which is exploitable in the promotion of cities... Read »
Innlandsbykonferansen 2010 (Hedmark and Oppland Counties) 05.05.2010. .. Read »
The notion of ‘green city’ or ‘eco-city’ occurs in urban planning policies in many cities. The issue of sustainability in urbanism is often reduced to a discussion of a limited range of quantifiable factors, but there are in fact not only one but many different and often competing ‘sustainability agendas’... Read »
Ministry of Environmental Affairs 08.09.2009 .. Read »
(English summary below) RESUMÉ Afhandlingen er en undersøgelse af integrerede shoppingcentre. Den er et studie af, hvorledes tre nyere danske centre i tætte bysituationer, udform-ningsmæssigt og programmatisk, indgår i eksisterende kontekster og skaber nye offentlige rum og fodgængerforbindelser... Read »
Afhandlingen er en undersøgelse af integrerede shoppingcentre. Den er et studie af, hvorledes tre nyere danske centre i tætte bysituationer, udformningsmæssigt og programmatisk, indgår i eksisterende kontekster og skaber nye offentlige rum og fodgængerforbindelser... Read »
City of Oslo, Agency for Planning and Building Services 11.11.2005 .. Read »
The article discusses the fact that much of the current urban theory describes the city as both physically and socially fragmented as a negative result of globalization and other forces, while some architects and writers adopt a somewhat more positive tone, seeing a potential for urban integration with shopping as an integrating program. .. Read »
Retail Institute Scandinavia: City Branding Conference 07.11.2002 .. Read »
International Business Conferences: ‘Butikken som oplevelse’ 13.12.2001. .. Read »
Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole, Copenhagen 10.10.2000 .. Read »