Door to Door in Mountainous Landscapes

The opportunity

Øyer is the home of popular tourist destinations such as Hafjell and Hunderfossen Adventure Park. The municipality expects to have reached a 50% increase in visitors by 2030, which also happens to be the target year of important climate goals.

The local administration recognized the need for change. While tourism makes out their community’s most important livelihood, business as usual would prevent that from sustaining long term.

Hafjell’s high season lasts for six out of a total of 52 weeks a year and represents a short-lived yet immense pressure on its surroundings. This is followed by a lot of otherwise unused infrastructure for the remaining parts of the year: Holiday homes, hotels, restaurants, cafes and means of transportation are left relatively empty.

Flexible mobility could be the answer to protecting the local community and its finite natural resources.

A tender was written, seeking out a process that gathered the private and public sector of Øyer in close collaboration. The goal was a sketched-out mobility system, diverse enough to benefit local inhabitants, local businesses, nature and temporary visitors.

ÆRA, together with Ihuga Architects, was assigned the mission.

The way

This project dealt with a paradox that is far from exclusive to Øyer: the local community needs a thriving economy, and nature needs rest. The traditional understanding of growth puts pressure on both sides of the dilemma.

Our role was therefore first and foremost to bring this paradox into a constructive dialogue where people in all corners of society could understand what new growth should look like, and the competitive opportunities this entails.

Only then could we consider sparking innovative solutions.

We provided a process following our Floke-model, meaning a multi-actor project where co-creation and systems innovation are the means to societal change.

Dialogue between all actors, across disciplines and sectors, turned into ideas, ideas turned into concepts, and concepts turned into sketches of concrete solutions that mainly focused on:

1) Reducing private car usage

2) Increasing the access to vacant beds

Summarized: a circular mobility concept for the Hafjell-Hunderfossen area.

Many of the mobility solutions are designed as experiences in order to make them as attractive as possible. They include trains, buses, a new gondola, hiking paths and smaller walkable roads that will move people to, from, up, down and across the mountain. With both Lillehammer station and Hunderfossen as a starting point. As seamless and affordable as possible.

The solutions will not only tackle the Norwegian travel industry’s astonishing 70% of emissions that stem from private cars, but also provide a revitalized service industry needed in order to coordinate, maintain and further improve the mobility services across all user journeys.

We also created a financing plan allowing for “Entré Øyer” to be run on income from the various mobility solutions combined with developer agreements and grants from the municipality.

For example, the income from a now piloted shuttle bus between Lillehammer station and Hafjell. The bus makes it possible for visitors arriving by train to move from the opposite side of the mountain valley, right up to the top of Hafjell to the popular Gaiastova, and back again, completely car-free.

The result

The circular mobility concept we named “Entré Øyer” is now a collective term for 16 mobility sub-projects in Øyer, and the name of Øyer’s local development company responsible of implementing these.

They are all solutions that will provide both inhabitants and visitors with transportation and housing of people, luggage and goods – vital functions of a rather popular tourist destination – without heavily relying on new development.

More so, “Entré Øyer” it is designed to utilize the current infrastructure, and close its value chains, not just in Hafjell, but in any mountain destination. Ultimately, a project aiming for behavioral change in order for us to continue enjoying nature in a fun, flexible and freeing way.