Programme
- 11:00 AM: Trial lecture: "The refuge as an architectural element. Its history and agency"
- 13:00 PM: Defence
Thesis Abstract
This doctoral thesis examines the architecture and urbanism of places used for displacement management and contingency planning. Current policy and practice concerning emergency reception promote limited engagement with long-term plans for communities receiving new arrivals, and domestic contingency planning is delinked from urban planning, though the two domains intersect in critical ways.
The thesis asks: What are the spatial intersections between international and local governance in contingency planning and displacement management? How can these intersections contribute to frameworks for evolving understandings of displacement? And how can these frameworks be used in policies for spatially integrated emergency and daily uses?
To address these questions, I investigate the localized spatial manifestations of global displacement management policy, the site selection process, and the mediation of the contested spaces these decisions may produce. Cases include Norway’s reception architecture shaped by the Cold War and urban securitization, and Romania’s earthquake contingency planning, which intersects with hosting refugees from Ukraine. The thesis challenges the mono-functional and time-limited displacement management practice known as humanitarian exceptionalism.
Biography
Håvard Breivik-Khan (1981) is an architect, researcher, and expert in international emergency planning and response. He has worked for the United Nations in Haiti, Nepal, North Macedonia, and Hungary, at UN Headquarters in New York, and with government ministries in Moldova and Romania through the Norwegian Refugee Council’s emergency roster, NORCAP.
Breivik-Khan has extensive research and teaching experience from AHO and Columbia University on topics bridging architecture, urbanism, and displacement. He holds a master’s degree in architecture from AHO’s Institute of Urbanism and Landscape, with academic residencies in Paris, France, and Shanghai and Chongqing, China.
Supervisors
- Lisbet Harboe (AHO)
- Peter Hemmersam (AHO)
Co-supervisors
- Cathrine Brun (Oxford Brookes University / Centre for Lebanese Studies)
- Jessica Hemmings (AHO)
Adjudication Committee
- 1. Opponent: Associate Professor Marc Schoonderbeek (Delft University of Technology)
- 2. Opponent: Associate Professor Anne Hege Simonsen (OsloMet)
- Coordinator: Professor Mari Hvattum (AHO)