Longyearbyen’s Fluid Futures
Fall 2024
Prof. Bert de Jonghe
Longyearbyen, Svalbard
This visual essay emerged from a semester of researching past, present and future understandings and conversations around design in the Arctic. Following conversations with indigenous leaders, community organizers and leaders in architecture and urbanism from across the many countries that lay claim to land in the Arctic circle, a projective gradient of solutions to an increasingly worrying problem of flooding in Longyearbyen, Svalbard.
Longyearbyen is a former coal town on the island of Svalbard, sitting between gruve (or
mine) 1A and 2. The first mine opened in 1906 by Boston based Longyear Coal Company. Later the mining town and Svalbard itself came under the sovereignty of Norway, though 48 countries have claim to research and mine here through the 1920 Svalbard Treaty. Today only Mine 7 to the far east is still in operation and only serves to produce energy for Longyearbyen.
Zooming in, this town map of Longyearbyen is drawn from a 2023 avalanche danger zone map produced by the governor of Svalbard. Due to climate change, specifically decreased snowfall and increased rainfall paired with melting permafrost slush avalanches have become a very serious problem causing many buildings and neighborhoods to be moved to avoid avalanche destruction. This essay will use Elvesletta (translated floodplain) a student housing block that previously was in the avalanche zone as an object of interest.
The gradient of solutions being presented here takes a slight sliding scale on feasibility or even practicality but draws from real precedent in both built work and theory around architecture and the arctic. We will start with the plan to reroute the river which is the current proposed solution in Longyearbyen and move all the way to relocating the whole town reflecting the observations of towns people in Meyer’s article that Longyearbyen would never have grown there without the pull of coal.