Dynamic Port-City Scapes

Dynamic Port-City Scapes: From Liminal "Non-Places" to Imaginative and Synergistic Adaptive Ecosystems

Höller, Lukas (TU Delft Architecture and the Built Environment)

Hooimeijer, F.L. (mentor)
Hein, C.M. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

2020-08-28

This research investigates the case of Kirkenes, Norway. The region with its 10.000 inhabitants is located around 400 km above the Arctic Circle within the municipality of Sør-Varanger, Finmark, and is known as the capital of the Barents Region and the gateway to the east. Located around 15km away from the Norwegian-Russian border, Kirkenes has strategic importance, being one of the main areas expected to change due to increased navigability as well as new reachability of resources benefited by a changing climate and melting Arctic sea-ice extent. The region is foreseen to become Europe’s gate and new logistic node towards the soon-to-be ice-free Northern Sea-Route, creating a 40% faster trading-route between Asia and Europe. Founded in 1905 as a harbor-town for the trans-shipment of iron ore extracted from the Sydvaranger Mine, around 8 km inland in Bjørnevatn, new port development is planned, serving as a potential strategic part for China´s “Polar Silk Road” Initiative. Despite the efforts for reinventing Kirkenes and changing its face from industrial development towards a future-proof, sustainable, and resilient Capital of the Barents Region, mining, as well as manufacturing and industrial development, never stopped being an essential factor. The municipality envisions a new and massive extra-urban port development along the neighbouring Tømmerneset Peninsula, transforming the small port into one of Scandinavia´s biggest container ports, equivalent to the current capacity of the Port of Gothenburg. The thesis focuses on the need for rethinking, adapting, and complementing current approaches on port-cities, thus spatial planning, and design as a holistic and interdisciplinary profession can gain operative power to become a mediator between the different institutional and non-institutional actors and their values to emerge a new port-city paradigm within Kirkenes. The complexity and diversity of the project-area depict the necessity to shift the perception of the port-city relationship away from a static, line-like interface of management between (in the meaning of separating) port and city towards dynamic and pluralistic “scapes” betwixt of in-between (in the meaning of belonging to both) port and city. The goal of the project is to imagine an alternative design of the new port-development driven by a place-specific, actors- and values-based approach, which aims for the in-between scapes, where port and city become intertwined and embedded within each other. The multiple of port and city and therefore the emergence of an additional dimension in-between the territorial economic force of the port and the local urbanity and culture helped to define the new Port-City Scapes as one synergistic adaptive ecosystem, in which needs of the port, city and ecology are united.

Port-City
Synergistic Adaptive Ecosystem
Paradoxsynergy
Kirkenes
Arctic Norway
design fiction

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:5bd2f042-74d1-4dc1-903d-dbe2d49f9f79

69.728578, 30.043259

Student theses

master thesis

© 2020 Lukas Höller