From compliance to purpose: Rethinking Sweden’s civil defense shelters
Sweden has some 64,000 civil defense shelters, with capacity for roughly seven million people. Yet many are rarely used in peacetime, public awareness of where they are located remains limited, and large parts of the system were built for a society whose population patterns have since changed considerably.
At the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) on August 24, that challenge was approached from an unusual direction: What if civil defense shelters became places people had a reason to enter before a crisis?
The meeting brought together Minister for Culture Parisa Liljestrand, Minister for Justice Gunnar Strömmer, and Minister for Civil Defense Carl-Oskar Bohlin with representatives from the cultural sector, civil defense, municipalities, the property sector, and industry. The aim was to explore whether art, culture, and genuine dual use could give shelters a more meaningful role in everyday life while strengthening their protective function.
Making shelters useful in peacetime
The discussion began above ground. Participants were taken through the Stockholm School of Economics’ art classrooms, library, and common spaces, where art and architecture have been deliberately used to influence how people interact with their surroundings. The group then moved underground into the School’s civil defense shelter. The contrast was deliberate: one set of spaces has been designed to invite people in, while the other exists primarily for a moment most hope will never come.
The practical challenges quickly came into focus.
Mikael Jeppsson, preparedness director at the County Administrative Board of Stockholm, outlined the changing responsibilities for inspecting and assessing Sweden’s shelters. Marko Nokka, chief executive of Verona Shelters, described how relatively modest investments can, in many cases, bring existing shelters back to an adequate standard.
More than a technical challenge
But the challenge is not only technical. Sweden’s shelter network reflects where people lived and worked when much of it was built. Since then, cities have expanded, some communities have shrunk, and daily movement patterns have changed. Capacity on paper is of limited value if protective spaces are not located where people actually are when they are needed.
AFRY brought experience from both Sweden and Ukraine to the discussion and made the case for genuine dual use. The central question is not simply how to maintain shelters, but how to give them a peacetime function without compromising their protective purpose.
The ministers added a behavioral dimension. Carl-Oskar Bohlin discussed the condition of Sweden’s shelter stock and the measures now being taken to strengthen it, while also raising the value of creating places where people can become familiar with shelter environments before a crisis. Parisa Liljestrand drew on experiences from Ukraine, where getting people to seek protection could itself prove difficult. In one instance, music in an underground passage changed how people experienced and used the space.
From there, the discussion widened.
Could reading, music, and performance make shelters familiar rather than foreign? Could public art and protected spaces be considered together in urban planning? Could shelters host cultural activity in peacetime? And could the logic ultimately be reversed, with future museums, concert halls, and other cultural buildings designed from the outset to provide protection in a crisis?
These questions matter because infrastructure that is used is also observed, tested, and understood. Regular use can reveal faults, create incentives for maintenance, and make people more familiar with spaces they may one day depend on.
The issue is therefore not primarily about making shelters more pleasant. It is about whether dormant protective infrastructure can become a more active part of society’s everyday resilience.
From discussion to practical testing
For the Center for Security and Resilience (CfSR) at the Stockholm School of Economics, the next step is practical: identifying which ideas are worth testing, where they could be tested, and how their value should be assessed.
The objective is not to turn every shelter into a cultural venue. It is to explore whether a piece of largely dormant infrastructure can generate value in peacetime while becoming more credible, familiar, and effective when it matters most.
