Asbjørn Aase 1932–2024

Professor Asbjørn Aase died on 22 February 2024, aged 91 years. He was appointed as the first professor of geography at the University of Trondheim (later the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU) in autumn 1974. He became professor emeritus in 2002 although he continued to be academically active for another ten years after this.

Asbjørn Aase (Photo: Michael Jones, August 2022)

Asbjørn Aase was born on 13 July 1932 in Oslo and grew up there. His interest in geography began already in his school days in the 1940s. He became aware of social-geographical inequalities in Norway as his parents came from different parts of the country. His father was from Andøya in Nordland and his mother was from Hurdal in Akershus. Asbjørn observed at an early age the differences in people’s level of living between small farms in North Norway and large estates with tenant farmers in the south-east of Norway.

Travels in Europe, North Africa and Turkey during his high school days in 1948–1950 strengthened his interest in geography. After completing his military service in the Norwegian Brigade in Germany in 1951–1952, he began university studies in Oslo but then decided on economics with geography at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen. He took a degree in business administration at NHH in 1957 with geography as his optional subsidiary subject.

Asbjørn’s first employment was in Bodø from 1957 to 1959, when he worked as a consultant in Studieselskapet for Nord-Norsk Næringsliv (Study Association for North Norwegian Businesses), a consultancy set up after World War II to survey North Norway’s resources and to work for economic development in the region. There, he undertook the first comprehensive regional investigation of the tourism industry to be conducted in Norway (Aase 1959).

As a researcher, Asbjørn was driven by curiosity and showed an interest in new ideas. He became a pioneer in several subdisciplines of geography in Norway. From 1959 to 1966, he was employed at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Norwegian Institute of Technology, in Trondheim, first as research assistant, then as fellowship holder and finally as lecturer. He was involved in the department’s first course in planning, which led to the first Norwegian textbook in the field of planning. He contributed as an economic geographer to commissioned interdisciplinary research projects on planning in mountainous areas (Sømme et al. 1965; Aase 1969) and on land policy (Aase 1967). He was among the first geographers to orientate towards the planning problems that had developed in the wake of the revised Building and Planning Act of 1965. During that period, Asbjørn received grants for two study visits to geographical institutions abroad. The first was to Strasbourg in 1960 and the second to Stockholm in 1965. These visits provided considerable geographical inspiration and useful academic contacts. His stay in France resulted in a journal article on centralization and decentralization in France (Aase 1966).

In 1966, Asbjørn married Monica Berglöf, whom he had met in Sweden, and became father to a son and a daughter, as well as for Monica’s daughter from an earlier marriage. Monica became a university librarian, first in Bergen and later in Trondheim.

From 1966 to 1974, Asbjørn was back in Bergen, first as lecturer and later as senior lecturer at the Department of Geography, which had been established in 1964 as a joint department at the Norwegian School of Economics and the University of Bergen. Before that, in 1960 he had participated in the International Geographical Congress held in Stockholm and the post-conference symposium in urban geography held in Lund, where the new modelling paradigm in geography was presented by capacities such as Walter Christaller and Torsten Hägerstrand. As a result, Asbjørn developed an interest in the new quantitative geography employing statistics to investigate geographical conditions. His research involved developing a model to simulate urban growth (Aase 1977) and he contributed to a thematic atlas for Bergen (Aase & Dale 1978; Helvig 1992).

At the same time, he became interested in the philosophy and methodology of the discipline of geography. This interest led to a pioneering article, ‘Geografi og samfunn’ (‘Geography and society’) (Aase 1970), in which he discussed varying epistemological positions and approaches within geography, and the qualifications of geographers for taking part in applied geography and planning. His lectures on these topics were particularly well received by students.

Further, Asbjørn assumed responsibility for the geographical contribution to the first Norwegian level of living investigation. This was a large, interdisciplinary research project with government financing. Level of living and social well-being were topics that had been little in focus previously in geography but were becoming increasingly important internationally. Bjørn Terje Asheim and Britt Dale became involved in the geographical part of the project as respectively research assistant and master’s student under Asbjørn’s supervision. This work resulted in two government White Papers (Asheim 1978; Aase & Dale 1978).

Returning to Trondheim in 1974, Asbjørn founded the new Department of Geography at what was then the Norwegian Teachers’ College, which had become part of the University of Trondheim in 1968. The Teachers’ College was renamed the Norwegian College of General Sciences in 1984. Teaching in geography began in autumn 1975. The authors of this obituary were involved together with Asbjørn in developing the teaching programme from the beginning; Michael Jones was appointed to a lectureship, while Britt Dale came from Bergen as research assistant in the Norwegian level of living project. In addition, Oddvar Jakobsen came from Bergen to take up a research fellowship in the geography of developing countries (today referred to as the Global South). Under Asbjørn’s guidance, a master’s degree in geography was established in autumn 1977.

Asbjørn was pioneer in Norway of welfare geography (known in Norwegian as levekårsgeografi, literally ‘geography of living conditions’). Following the project together with Britt Dale on the welfare geography of the largest Norwegian cities, Asbjørn went on to lead the first regional Norwegian projects in this field, on respectively the welfare geography of fishing districts (Aase 1982a) and the northernmost county of Finnmark (Aase 1982b; Aase 1987; Aase 1993). These projects aimed to contribute to the development of welfare-oriented planning (Aase 1984; 1985a), although Asbjørn later wrote in an article that regional planning showed too little awareness of research on social welfare (Aase 1991a). His interest for Finnmark led also to a more general regional-geographical contribution (Aase 1985b).

From welfare geography, Asbjørn’s interests moved in the direction of medical geography, later termed health geography, where he was again a Norwegian pioneer. In the mid-1980s, he was involved in the establishment of an interdisciplinary research group in this field at the University of Trondheim. A database borrowed from Statistics Norway enabled the mapping of regional variations in mortality and in the occurrence of heart disease and cancer in Norway (Aase 1989; 1991b; Aase & Almås 1989; Ross et al. 1990; Aase & Bentham 1994; 1996; Bentham & Aase 1996). Asbjørn also edited a special journal issue on medical geography (Aase 1990). He further made a major contribution to a Norwegian health atlas, a volume of the National Atlas for Norway (Aase 1996). Asbjørn cooperated in health geography with partners in Poland, USA, Britain, Australia, Israel, Sweden, and Estonia, and visited colleagues and gave lectures in all these countries.

Asbjørn’s 60th birthday on 13 July 1992 was marked by the publication of a Festschrift, Levekår og planlegging (‘Social welfare and planning’) (Jones & Cramer 1992). The book reproduced a selection of Asbjørn’s central articles published throughout his career. His articles were each accompanied by a commentary article written by colleagues who had worked with Asbjørn at different stages of his career. The book includes a bibliography of Asbjørn’s publications up to that point (M. Aase 1992).

Asbjørn was through the years concerned with promoting research with and in countries in the Global South. In 1996, the Department of Geography gained a grant from the National Programme for Education and Research to initiate research and teaching cooperation with two universities in Ghana. Asbjørn led this project until 1998, when colleague Stig Jørgensen took over. Together with his earlier PhD student, Samuel Agyei-Mensah from Ghana, Asbjørn edited in 2005 a special journal issue presenting geographical perspectives on HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa (Aase & Agyei-Mensah 2005). Other health-related articles on Africa, published together with his doctoral candidates, were on fertility change in Ghana (Agyei-Mensah & Aase 1998) and on AIDS and orphan-care in Ethiopia (Abebe & Aase 2007).

During his career, Asbjørn undertook several administrative tasks for the Research Council of Norway and the university. He was deputy rector of the University of Trondheim 1987–1989.

After his retirement in 2002, Asbjørn worked on a book that combined a history of the Department of Geography with his personal academic autobiography (Aase & Jones 2012). In 2020, he published a book of short anecdotal accounts from his travels around the world (Aase 2020). He encountered many different countries, both on work-related journeys and private trips, and visited in all more than 90 countries.

In his private life, Asbjørn enjoyed music and was a keen skier and cyclist. His cabin in the mountains was an important arena for family life. He showed concern for others and hospitability, not least in taking good care of guest researchers and doctoral candidates from abroad. He had a warm sense of humour and enjoyed telling anecdotes.

Asbjørn was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters in Oslo and of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters in Trondheim. He was elected as an honorary member of the Norwegian Geographical Society in 2008.