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This book, funded by SUN, emerges as a disciplinary extension of the exhibition project Transforming Legacy: The Evolution of Extractive Cultures in the European Arctic, presented at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2025.
The exhibited work explores the complex layering of extractive and traditional cultures in European Arctic and sub-Arctic environments. At the core of the project lies a tension between technologically advanced systems developed for resource extraction and long-term, traditional forms of knowledge and intelligence.
In the book, we show how the current model of Arctic urban development is reshaping territorial and social structures through centralized, smart urban logics. By contrast, we investigate how traditional Arctic intelligence offers alternative, rural, and dispersed approaches to sustainability that may hold renewed relevance for contemporary forms of inhabitation.
This evolution of Arctic and extractive culture reveals how advanced digital systems and AI are transforming human relationships with land, generating both conflict and unexpected intersections. In the book, we propose to examine these transformations through the theoretical lens of assemblage: a dynamic juxtaposition of elements and systems that are often distant or seemingly incompatible—automation and ancestral knowledge, industrial infrastructures and fragile ecosystems, remote sensing and embodied traditions.
