Project Statement

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world. Utqiagvik, AK is increasingly affected by thawing ice-rich permafrost that destabilizes the environment, infrastructure, and cultural practices. This project highlights the critical role of water—snow, ice, and meltwater—in shaping public space, maintenance, and the future development in Utqiagvik. Born from community engagement, data analysis, and field work, two-site specific designs propose maintenance strategies and ecological restoration to stabilize permafrost at the site-scale while considering broader implications at the city-scale. These initial explorations build connections across disciplines and cultures to fill knowledge gaps to benefit Arctic communities.

Project Narrative

Goals: The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world. Communities built on ice-rich permafrost like Utqiagvik, AK are increasingly affected by unstable ground. Our research goals are to generate locally implementable design that minimizes permafrost degradation while elevating everyday cultural practices, and to co-produce narratives with community and research partners that directly benefit the community. By focusing on the phases of water—snow, ice, melt—that uniquely shape this region our research investigates what it means to design with hydrological and thermal dynamics outside of temperate landscapes.

Context: This project is part of ongoing NSF-funded research led by a multidisciplinary team of faculty. It is one of a few federally funded design research studios and encompasses close partnerships across seven academic disciplines, five local Inupiat organizations, and two federal research laboratories. 

Methods: 1) Archival research on Utqiagvik’s relationship to scientific practices, 2) analysis of micrometeorological and ground sensor data, 3) relationship-building and listening sessions with Inupiat partners, 4) in-situ winter fieldwork, and 5) discussions of hydro-thermal conditions with Arctic experts from non-design disciplines. These methods allowed us to understand the entangled relationships of extreme climatic conditions, urban development and community agency at the nested scales of the body, site and city, and to synthesize our research in two key site-specific designs. 

Propositions:

Site 1: Building on existing practices, we position urban maintenance as a socio-ecological agent to stabilize permafrost while improving quality of life for residents of a 29-unit low-income housing site—one of the city’s snow dump sites. Working closely with the local housing authority and dept. of Public Works, we propose melding current snow- and melt- management strategies with understandings of the site’s permafrost vulnerabilities and fieldwork data to reduce snow insulating capacity, establish seasonal meltwater channels, and improve pedestrian access. At the urban scale, this positions maintenance as a proactive practice of ephemeral place-making with both seasonal and long-term implications. 

Site 2: We propose tundra restoration for improved socio-ecological health and urban development at the hospital, a local social hub and a regional medical resource. On-site fieldwork and listening sessions with the Arctic Slope Native Association identified recurring flooding as a major concern. We offer an expansion of health into the landscape through restoration of ice-wedge polygon landforms that reduce standing surface water and support a meditative boardwalk. This positions landform restoration as a creator of both drainage and public space, and organizes urban development as an extension of tundra landscape. 

Significance: This project emphasizes water's role in public space, maintenance, and the future development of Utqiaġvik. It demonstrates how remote sensing transformed our engagement with the landscape, connected us to the community in new ways, and prompted sites and methods for future sensor deployment. It broadened the concept of "data" to include lived and embodied experiences. These explorations contribute to Arctic design scholarship, bridging disciplines and cultures to benefit Arctic communities. These initial findings will be shared with local stakeholders in-person this summer.