Future North

The Future North project has been traveling Scandinavia's near North for the past 4 years looking at the relationship between landscape change and social change. The areas under observation are the Kola Peninsula, the Norwegian Barents Cost, and the Svalbard archipelago. These territories provide a unique laboratory for studying rapid changes in social, urban and regional landscapes due to the potent geopolitical situation and climate change. Extraction interests, new sea routes, as well as new opportunities for tourism all contribute to increasing the pressure on Arctic landscapes and settlements. The project identifies and studies competing notions of landscape in the circumpolar North, as well as landscape practices and social agencies that contribute to shaping the new landscape of the North. The project is mapping and documenting material landscapes from the perspective of being immersed in them and from the perspective of social practices that inform them and are informed by them. It has engaged with local partners and communities in order to map their relation to their environment and with the explicit aim to let its work refer back to and encourage local empowerment. The Kola Peninsula performs like a postindustrial landscape having been exploited for minerals for nearly a hundred years. While the territories are heavily polluted, many of its inhabitants are more concerned with establishing small networks for cultural work and exchange. The project has communicated with and performed documentary work of the social landscape in Murmansk with a cultural youth house Mr. Pink. It is, however, only in the city of Vardø that the project has engaged in a long-term collaboration with local idealist. Vardø Restored, a platform that works to revive the city's buildings and services to make people stay and even move there, has embraced a collaboration to document material and immaterial heritage. The project has provided an extensive mapping of cultural value to help lay the foundation for a new city plan. Property owners have received help to find new uses for outdated property. Empowerment and inspiration are among the output that is not easily documented, but which reveals itself both in conversation with and general optimism from people we engage with. Currently the project works on finalizing a public exhibition and a seminar in Vardø in May 2017. This will also feature the ongoing work to help the owners of Grand Hotel Vardø to work out a business plan that allows them to use part of the old hotel in a way that may further finance a complete refurbishment of the hotel. On Svalbard, the project has worked in a more observational manner. On different trips, we have traveled the vicinity of Longyearbyen, as well as on Bjørnøya, to document land use strategies, city development strategies, and not the preservation strategies pertaining to the rare and expansive case of cultural heritage in the Arctic. On a manifest level we are however proposing new city development strategies bases on meetings with local stakeholder. Longyearbyen is the place in the Norwegian Arctic where climate change is having most impact, causing mudslides, avalanches, as well as damaged infrastructure. At the same time the town has a big influx of both tourists and researchers. Our academic papers reflect on Svalbard as being subject to climate and investment speculation. It seems to exist as a territory of speculation, as a true frontier for investments forces and government policy. Since the 1960s the discipline of architecture has created new knowledge of territorial situations by inventive mapping techniques employing aerial perspectives and satellite imagery. The project employs some of these techniques. More importantly however the project has employed the transect walk as a tool when engaging with new locations. In several of the Kola mining cities, in Vardø, and in Longyearbyen, the research group has walked and mapped the cities using this method. It proves an invaluable opportunity to observe while walking, pausing and talking, where we analyze and form concepts about the landscape from a situated perspective. Traveling is still the main tool. Other important tools are cars, buses, and walking boots. One of the important project outputs is that we find that we demonstrate the very important coupling of real time research and teaching. Exploring Arctic and Northern territories from a novel multidisciplinary perspective, we are conscious of the actual approach to new places, how to read and analyze them, and how to employ and modify existing architectural methods for reading landscapes and settlements. The project has produced academic papers. Three pamphlets from Kola, Vardø and Svalbard are in production as is the project book Future North, The changing Landscapes of the Arctic, forthcoming at Routledge. The projects' visual output will be on display in Vardø in early May 2017. Seminar in collaboration with VR.

This project will map and document landscapes of change. Our hypothesis is that the circumpolar North provides a unique laboratory for studying rapid changes in geo-topology, urban topologies, and social typologies due to a potent geopolitical situation a rising from the new extraction opportunities that climate change and internationalization offers. As a basis for understanding the complex discourses emerging on northern territories, the project will identify and study competing accounts of landscape in the circumpolar North, as well as landscape practices and social agencies that contribute to shape the landscape of the North. Sensitivity to coexisting and potentially contrasting landscape perceptions is necessary for formulating good policies for a sus tainable development. The project seeks to complement the insufficient representation of landscape in various discourses on the North, including the Norwegian Government?s white paper on the High North. Since the 1960s the discipline of landscape archite cture has created new knowledge of territorial situations by inventive mapping techniques employing aerial perspectives and satellite imagery. This project is mapping material landscapes from the perspective of being immersed in them and the social practi ces that inform them and are informed by them. We will engage local partners and communities in order to map their relation to their environment and with the explicit aim to let our work refer back to and encourage local empowerment in the face of heavy e conomical and industrial forces in the arctic. We also aim to turning results and new tools back into the general discourse on landscape documentation. Operative notions of landscape as productive fields and beautiful scenery will be under scrutiny in rel ation to a notion of landscape as informing and taking form from social practices. Researchers based in the North are involved, and a solid network with Canadian and US researchers has been established.