Arctic Resilience: Adaptive Networks of Self-Sufficiency

• Main Author: Cui, Jingjing
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@RISD 2023
• Subjects: climate migrant; self-sufficiency; Alaska; resilience; closed-loop system; Environmental Design; Landscape Architecture; Urban; Community and Regional Planning; Arctic; Climate change
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1035; https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/context/masterstheses/article/2061/viewcontent/Jingjing.Cui.LDAR.2023.pdf

As the impacts of climate change reverberate across the globe, there is an increasing focus on communities already grappling with high environmental stress, limited resources, isolation, and economic challenges. Among these communities, the Arctic region stands out not for its population size, but for the threat posed to their traditional ways of life by the melting polar icecap, rising seas, changing ecology, and shifting migration patterns of vital wildlife. Many communities are living on shorelines being lost to the sea, having been moved there decades earlier by government and oil corporation dictates. Now facing impending relocation again, these communities have a unique opportunity to reimagine settlement patterns, community design, and regain autonomy from government dependence. At present, many of these communities are experiencing a significant amount of resource wastage. Factors such as inefficient use of energy, water, and materials, combined with inadequate waste management systems, contribute to unsustainable living practices. This not only puts a strain on the already limited resources available in these Arctic coastal communities but also exacerbates their vulnerability to climate change impacts. The existing strategies are quite basic and meet the fundamental requirements, but they lack resilience in the face of drastic environmental changes and do not maximize resource utilization. In this context, this thesis focuses on rearranging resources to design a closed-loop system for living in extreme cold environments and marginalized populations and how those living in a landscape of scarcity can make better use of the resources around them to achieve greater self-sufficiency through adopting a circular economy model that integrates shelter and land with food production, energy, water, and waste.