Brøset | New carbon neutral town in Trondheim

Location: Trondheim, Norway
Client: Trondheim Kommune
Team: Stig L. Andersson, Flemming Rafn Thomsen, Mette Skjold, Lene Dammand Lund, Jule Wittorf, Helena Kaae
Design phase: 2010-11
Area: 35 ha.
Type: Parallelopdrag
Realization: 2011-

Partners: Adept Architects, Atkins Ingeniører, LIFE, Susturb

A carbon neutral life should not mean lowering your living con-ditions or opting out of life. Instead, a modern, sustainable life should consist of positive options which frame a unique everyday life. This is the core of SLA's proposal for a new climate neutral city of Brøset in Trond-heim.

The proposal includes excellent architectural spaces, urban innovation, performative land-scapes, low-priced organic food, unique social communities and attractive ways for residents to live in a sustainable way.

With SLA’s design, the Norwegian government's ambitious goal of reducing each citizen’s CO2 emission by 70-90 percent by 2030 becomes a realistic goal, even today.

Today an ordinary citizen of Norway emits 12.000 kg CO2 a year. In Team SLA's design, moving to Brøset will reduce the emission of each inhabitant to 4,400 kg per year. To reduce the CO2-emission even further, however, requires changes all the way into one's social life.

But where other proposals to reduce CO2 emission ban carbon heavy activities, SLA instead presents the people of Brøset with a wide range of sustainable services so attractive, that an amendment to a climate neutral lifestyle will be experienced as a positive choice rather than a necessary rejection. The result will be an annual CO2 emission per citizen of Brøset of only 2.900 kg.

SLA does not believe that people will actually change their lifestyle if their only motivation is an abstract goal of reducing CO2 emissions. The motivation for change can only ever be quality. In Brøset, this motivation will be ‘the unique everyday life’.

The unique, sustainable every-day life in Brøset will include shared organic fruit and vegeta-bles from local farms, a credit system which provides discounts on recycling, collective sports and leisure activities, and shared work-from-home hubs.

These activities will not only result in far better use of Brøset’s resources; it will also result in an easier, cheaper and better life for Brøset’s residents. Living in Brøset will provide the citizens with attractive ways of reducing their carbon footprints. But not as coercion from the outside, but as an incentive evolving from within.

On Brøset architectural quality will go hand in hand with a social experiment that will not only make Norway a pioneer in the effort to adapt to climate change. But also make Brøset an inspiration and a model for other brave cities - in Norway as well as internationally.