IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

This paper is grounded in our ongoing work since 2021 developing a third-year landscape architecture studio for the new master’s programme at AHO and UiT. Based on long-term engagement with Værøy and Røst in Lofoten, the course explores how landscape architecture can mediate between ecological systems, human settlement, economic processes and cultural heritage in Arctic and sub-Arctic territories. Through site-based teaching, fieldwork and collaboration with local actors, the studio investigates how planning and design can respond to the interdependence between climate, ecology and society in communities shaped by depopulation, changing resource economies and vulnerable ecosystems.
The paper argues that the critique of “urban renaissance” must expand beyond metropolitan centres. The key issue is not scale, but the changing relationship between settlement and the ecological systems on which it depends. Coastal communities such as Værøy are embedded in global networks, yet retain spatial structures shaped by long-term coexistence between people and landscape. We propose that many older coastal constructions worked because they were not designed for human functionality alone, but as part of landscapes where use and ecological performance reinforced each other. Rather than importing typologies, we use the site itself as reference, studying functioning natural systems and working landscapes to understand relations between form, function and diversity. Through spatial-functional analysis and section-based readings, the Værøy studio rethinks development by asking what planning becomes when nature comes first. Existing infrastructures and practices are reprogrammed as assets for future settlement, reducing pressure on untouched land while strengthening resilience. The paper concludes that regeneration must be understood as a long-term ecological, cultural and political project. Værøy and Røst are not peripheral cases, but strategic sites for rethinking post-industrial futur