AAR5220 Urban Contingency Practice and Planning

Semester Booklet, Spring 2023

Urban Ecological Planning (International Master’s Programme)

Department of Architecture and Planning

Faculty of Architecture and Design

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Trondheim, Norway

Course Coordinator:

Course Lecturers:

Guest Lecturers:

Booklet Layout:

Mrudhula Koshy

Assistant professor and Doctoral researcher, NTNU

Mrudhula Koshy (Uncertainty and Contingency)

Assistant professor and Doctoral researcher, NTNU

Gilbert Siame (Adaptation)

Associate professor, NTNU

Wang Yu (Disaster and Risk Management)

Senior researcher, NTNU

Angelo Jonas Imperiale (Urban resilience)

Lecturer and Post-doctoral researcher, University of Groningen

Corina Angeloiu (Urban Resilience)

Strategic Learning Lead, Global Resilience Partnership, Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA)

Rodrigo Mena Fuhlmann (Humanitarian-development-peace nexus)

Assistant Professor, International Institute of Social Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Vija Viese

Research Associate, NTNU

Cover image: Corentin Julliard @ pixabay

Foreword

2023 has been a year of unpredictability. World over, countries and communities are experiencing compounded uncertainties due to consequences of climate change, the onslaught of inflation, recession and layoffs, protracted displacement, and armed conflict, impacting our lives in unexpected ways. Climate activists, environmental experts, and international humanitarian organizations among others have intensified the clarion call for urgent shift in status quo. Despite global realization from governance institutions, decision makers and civil society organizations on the immediate need to deal with unprecedented environmental crises, how to operationalize effective contingency planning remains unclear.

The ‘Urban Contingency Practice and Planning’ course (7.5 credits), in the 5th year of its current iteration, aims to bridge this gap. The course highlights how interrelations in theory, practice and policy could be redefined to deal with contingencies. The course is held every spring semester in association with the Urban Ecological Planning (UEP) international master’s program at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. Complex concepts such as uncertainty, contingency, resilience, and adaptation are addressed at the intersection of spatial planning, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and humanitarian response. The course equips students to recognize and synthesize uncertainties at various levels and intensities, and to develop contextual and multi-scalar plans and design responses that are flexible and adaptable.

The premise of this group assignment was to prepare a contingency plan for a hypothetical crisis of unexpected floods (due to sea level rise or heavy rainfall) in Trondheim. Like many cities around the world, Trondheim faces a range of risks and threats. In such cases, rather than viewing uncertainty as a catastrophe, envisioning different scenarios and pathways can enable institutions, organizations, and communities to kick-start transformative change.

To stimulate transdisciplinary research, the general objectives of this group work were to:

1. Explore the range of perceived and documented risks, threats, and uncertainties in Trondheim.

2. Analyze the various stakeholders, institutions, and organizations in Trondheim, which are dealing with (perceived) disruptions and the ways they could prepare, respond, adapt, and transform.

3. Understand that the range of scenarios and different constraints can lead to different outcomes in plans and strategies. Drawing on existing morphology, spatial structure, and features of geographical location of the selected area in Trondheim is paramount for a contextualized plan.

4. Document best practices and cases from other disaster-prone and vulnerable areas that are appropriate for the given scenario.

5. Propose a contingency plan based on the hypothetical scenario and, through it, outline a response strategy, implementation plan, operational support plan, preparedness plan and budget. This includes sets of flexible tools, strategies and frameworks that can deal with unexpected and unprecedented uncertainties and enhance planning for contingencies based on this exploration.

Each team was given one hypothetical scenario with a different set of resource, institutional, spatial and climate change constraints. Within the given constraints, students prepared a contingency plan which comprises a set of frameworks, tools and strategies that are flexible and adaptable.

We hope you enjoy reading this compiled booklet of the students’ hard work as much as we enjoyed teaching the course!

Kind regards,

Mrudhula Koshy, Vija Viese, Wang Yu, and Gilbert

Siame