Future North The Changing Arctic Landscapes

About this book

What is the future for northern landscapes? How will they look? What will it be like to live there? Who will live there and how will they sustain themselves? More importantly still: How do our expectations, projections and actions now contribute to shaping the future north – its communities, its landscapes, its industries?

These questions are addressed in this interdisciplinary book, which investigates the ongoing changes in the North, Subarctic, and Arctic from a landscape perspective. It examines landscapes and territories ranging from the Kola Peninsula in Northwest Russia, the Norwegian High North (the Barents Sea Coast and Svalbard), The Canadian North, and Iceland. The Arctic finds itself as an emerging geopolitical centre of focus as climate change radically increases the region's exposure to resource extraction and new global trade routes. This means that notions and perceptions of the Arctic landscape is the object of attention – its waters, its coastlines, its fisheries, its sea floors, its terrestrial territories, and not the least its communities. These are all physically transforming due to climate change, globalization, as well as economic and demographic shifts.

While landscapes used to be something that existed at the margins of society, as a leisure and recreational resource or as natural resource repository, they are now at the centre of political discourse and concern. Through processes of industrialization, pollution, building activities, and climate change, the earth's crust is being exposed to an increasing degree, and the Arctic seems more exposed than any other. Here, climate change has dramatic effects and it is also the battleground for strategic and resource interests.

Future North looks at the contrasting ways in which Arctic landscapes are socially and materially produced simultaneously by external projections of future development and by local perceptual responses – including forms of local politics, activism, art and architecture.

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