A Room for Peace, Help us rethink the shelter at SSE
What if a shelter could be a place we value every day—and a place we can rely on in a crisis?
The SSE Center for Security and Resilience and AFRY invite you to a lunch workshop to explore how shelters can enrich everyday life while providing protection in war.
The challenge: protection is only the beginning
Shelters are essential infrastructure. But the way we design and use them deserves fresh thinking.
A shelter is often designed for wartime protection first, with a peacetime use added afterwards. The result can be a substantial investment in a space that serves mainly as a bicycle room—or, at SSE, book storage. Converting these spaces into operational shelters also requires preparation, equipment and people who know what to do.
Protection is vital, but it is only part of what people need when spending extended periods underground. How can a shelter also support rest, study, work and community? How do we create an environment where ventilation, temperature, sound and light support both physical and mental wellbeing?
We need to think about shelters as places for human life, as well as human protection.
The ambition: two purposes, designed together
Our starting point is a simple ambition: design for the everyday, prepare for the exceptional.
Rather than treating peacetime use as an afterthought, we want to explore a dual-purpose approach: spaces designed from the outset to serve meaningful everyday needs and to function as shelters when required.
SSE’s Art Initiative offers inspiration for bringing together practical function, artistic expression and intellectual life. AFRY brings engineering and technical expertise to explore how these ambitions can meet demanding protection requirements. SSE contributes perspectives on the business case: how such spaces can create lasting value and how investment in them can be justified.
Together, we want to explore what becomes possible when these perspectives meet.
Where do we begin? Right here at SSE.
We will use SSE’s two approximately 80-square-metre shelter spaces on Saltmätargatan as a hypothetical case for a hands-on discussion.
Our central question is:
What do you want or need more of at SSE—and how could we build that into a space that also serves as a shelter?
A place to study, recharge, create or connect? Something entirely different? We want your ideas about the activities, experiences and qualities that would make these spaces valuable in everyday life.
You do not need technical expertise to take part. Your experience of life at SSE is the starting point. Together, we will explore how a space we need in war could become a place we want in peace.
Want to know more?
Contact Staffan Holmberg, Executive Director, SSE Center for Security and Resilience:
staffan.holmberg@hhs.se