At present the Circumpolar North provides a unique laboratory for studying future landscapes of production, infrastructure, excavation, and environmental change. More »
Thinking strategically about the future of cities in the Arctic entails a positioning towards regional and global strategic opportunities but also involve recognizing the opportunities emerging in the urban space. Read more »
Forged by its strategic location and by geopolitics, Murmansk has been the primary port city in the Russian Arctic since it was established in 1916. With access to ice-free routes to the Barents Sea and open waters to the West, Murmansk has been ... Read more »
Coming back to Longyearbyen to mount our exhibition of last semester’s studio work on Svalbard provided a welcome opportunity to explore the beach in wintertime. ... Read more »
Research feedback: Science data and community interaction has informed our research on the future north. Through a presentation and exhibition of student work in Longyearbyen, findings and proposals are reported back to scientists and local ... Read more »
Technologies of seeing, remote sensing, satellite hoovering. Who’d have thought the far north town of Svalbard would have become such a techno-scape. Mines closed, hand drills and the elaborate overhead shuttle system would be replaced by ... Read more »
Longyearbyen, the ‘capital’ of Svalbard (or Spitsbergen as it is called by some), is a lively community that is now facing closure of its cornerstone-industry: coal mining. World market prices have plummeted, operating costs are high, and ... Read more »
I’m powered, No, not just my mini reactor. I mean I am powerful! Hey, I’m even reactive! I’m alive, I’ve been living longer than my peers. None of that young blood transfused into me to reduce the aging process. I am alive, not just an ... Read more »
In his blogpost “Why we started MyCity” Murmansk based entrepreneur Stepa Mitaki explains how the online social urban ideas service is inspired by an architect’s use of ... Read more »
I was in Svalbard specifically to look at public art deployed around Longyearbyen—the statues of polar bears and miners, and the light works on the Global Seed Vault for example—as part of my examination of how a brandscape was being ... Read more »
It’s not exactly a hop, skip, and a jump from saltwater crocodiles to polar bears, but I left tropical Australia on a Tuesday and by the end of the week I am walking up the main road of Svalbard’s only town, Longyearbyen, toward the glacier ... Read more »
Together, two iconic buildings in Longyearbyen represent the changing logic of Norway’s geopolitical interests in the Arctic. ... Read more »
We are a class. A species. We are one. But most people do not know very much about us. They rarely focus on smaller members of my mammalian family of whales. People ride boats to watch the tail fins and gigantic plumes of air and spray. No lamps ... Read more »
Some days all my nuclear empowerment makes me restless. Anxious even. Shark-like, I survey these Arctic waters. Murmansk, Vardø, Svalbard, across to the east coast of Greenland. And I love to lie shallow bays, chortling to myself with my ... Read more »
I am back in Svalbard. The majestic mountains rise above the sea, my sense of perspective challenged each time I return, the glaciers climbing taller as I approach land and the ice cream thick curls of snow exquisitely untouched by anything we ... Read more »
Using social locative media, people’s engagement with their local urban environment are investigated in neighbouring communities in an Arctic transnational area (Vardø and Kirkenes, Norway, and Nikel, Russia). ... Read more »
We are not all made the way we’d like to be. I’m a hybrid now through and through. The long and strong telomeres of my species, oh so superior to other whales. No one ever talks about us in that way. We are just the small cousins, the ... Read more »
It will soon be spring up here and I see there is yet another scientific report saying the ice is thinning, that since the 1970s this has been a measured pattern and that in the not so distant future the northern passages will be free of ice for ... Read more »
One night I dreamt about Vardø as if it were Teriberka—the Russian Barents Coast town where dreams of a new gas era never came true. ... Read more »
Is North a direction or a place? Is it a state of mind or an image? Might it be all of these? ... Read more »
The Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art on October 9–11, 2014 included a number of presentations of collaborative teams working on documenting landscape change. ... Read more »
They eat my skin: ‘Mattak’ they call it. Cut in small cubes you can make out the mottled white pattern on my skin attached to the blubber. It is thicker than that of other whale species – and some say better tasting. ... Read more »
In Tasiilaq on Greenland’s East Coast infrastructure and the urban support systems are present and highly visible in the town. This provides a contrast to modern cities in other parts of the world—in which infrastructure is often both ... Read more »
The Future North Team conducted a participatory mapping workshop with partners in Vardø in July 2014.
Architecture is instrumentally applied in place development strategies. But how does this play out in Vardø in Northern Norway? ... Read more »
It’s a rather mild June afternoon in Vardø. This once Arctic city is at the northeast of Norway. I am resting right underneath the boardwalks in Vestervågen, among poles that were for a large part put down after WWII. You’ll recall that the ... Read more »
The wall of Fermont protects the town from the climate and is an icon of civic pride. ... Read more »
In January 2014 the Future North team and guest researcher Bill Fox (from the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art) visited Vardø on the Barents Coast. ... Read more »
The city is also a landscape for the birds. ... Read more »
Last week, at the Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø, the sidebar conference Constructions of North was held. This all-day event ... Read more »
This international seminar is the result of a long standing collaboration on genre and innovation between AHO and the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. This event is lead by Prof Gunnar Liestøl and assembles ... Read more »
Design research is a growing domain of interdisciplinary inquiry. It is often inflected with knowledge, processes and artifacts arrived at via mix of practice and analysis. One of the emerging themes in this research is the role of ... Read more »
In the Future North project one of our core challenges is how to convey the immiment and more distant character of climate change. Today, Janike, Peter and I are attending the annual SAMKUL Programme conference hosted by the Research Council of ... Read more »
I’ve kept quiet for a long time now. Centuries of lips sealed and horn retracted. Learned that one from the invention of the telescope. They have found me neverthless, explorers, mariners and hunters of the north.
But its’s time to ... Read more »
At the recent SAMKUL conference, funded by the Research Council of Norway, Prof Kjersti Fløttum addressed unpacking discourses of climate change by analysing two Norwegian ... Read more »
A mini-seminar on challenges and current issues for sub-arctic landscapes and territories organized by the Future North project. October 30, 2013, 14.00-17.00, AHO, Big Auditorium ... Read more »
Geographic lines are representations of difference and distribution of phenomena in space. Lines are also tools for reading and conceptualizing landscapes: they may be concrete—perceptual—but also abstract figures of a more analytically ... Read more »
Work. Shopping. Daily life in Murmansk. The design-research team is back in town following their bus ride around the Kola Peninsula. ... Read more »
My atennna is working overtime this morning. I sense that the project team is in town! I am down in the water beside my old atomically powered ice-breaking relative The Lenin. That stalwart steel machine of movement now in the harbour of Murmansk ... Read more »
Two wars have touched this Northern expanse over the last hundred years, most dramatically in the Second World War when the Soviet Red Army defeated the Germans on the fields of Zapadnaya Litsa and then liberated Norway in October 1944. ... Read more »
A new Russian Orthodox church is being built in the industrial town of Nikel on the Kola peninsula. Its construction involves the use of traditional building techniques, recalling an architecture that predates the founding of the town. ... Read more »
Walking a local neighbourhood with a group of young people in Murmansk, we encountered new urban scenes and childhood memories. This provides us with an opportunity to think about the future of urban space. ... Read more »
I am standing at the edge of the town. The hills are not the hills. I gaze at them, waiting for a word. Words and landscape. I see them as flat topped … buttes. Horizontals cutting across the horizon. A symmetry in their patterns. ... Read more »
The AHO Future North team has met up locally in Kirkenes with our partners at the Barents Institute. This is our first joint visit to the Circumpolar North. Our project team has gathered together a diverse set of interests and competencies: ... Read more »
After some hours of being on the road and stopping now and then to observe the landscape we turn a corner and suddenly instead of the expanse of rolling hills and rocky outcrops covered in autumn birch is a wide and open valley. The road bisects ... Read more »
As we venture north and east in order to observe urban and territorial change on the Kola Peninsula, we travel through regions whose contemporary built environment dates back only to the third decade of the last century. Visiting the mining ... Read more »
Today our guest Alessandra Ponte gave an enlivened talk on her work on the extreme conditions of the Atacama desert in northen Chile as part of the Future North project seminar series. She chose to shift between Google Earth and Powerpoint. ... Read more »