James Henry Telfer

This thesis proposal seeks to address the decaying fishing industry and its consequential impacts upon people, place, and prosperity in the Arctic town of Vardø, Norway. The sharp rise and even sharper decline of maritime economic activity in this remote island settlement has played a definitive role in its urban physiognomy and community well-being. In the town’s capitalist heyday, industrial fisheries with the latest energy-guzzling, deep-freezing technology would spring up eagerly along the quayside, hastening the inevitable erasure of Vardø’s historic ‘fiskeallmenninger’ (fishing commons) that long served the subsistence economy of the island’s inhabitants. Nowadays, as a result of global market crises, Vardø exists in the shadows of its former industrial fervour. Of the numerous elusive fish processing facilities established in the town, all but a mere few of them stand abandoned today as box-like ghosts of a bygone era of extractivist opportunity. While the majority of Vardø’s industrialists have since fled, the citizens of Vardø live with a physical memory of lost prosperity that punctuates the water’s edge.

This project aims to counteract the regional instability attached to extractive capitalism and increasingly exacerbated geoeconomic fluctuations by embracing a sustainable fishing ecology that will be sufficient for ensuring health, well-being, and enhanced livelihoods in Vardø for generations to come. It will do so by giving prominence to a network of new facilities that will each house processes related to low-energy seafood preservation on a local and humane scale. Its brownfield harbour site will be reclaimed as fishing commons to rejuvenate the small-scale fishing community, hosting programmatically legible structures that intend to serve as productive conduits for distinct preservation methods and a circular food economy.