Rebekka Waters

Liminal Landscapes

Spatial Frameworks for Post-Extractive Community Resilience

Liminal Landscapes explores how extractive industries have shaped and fractured settlement patterns, infrastructure, and community life across northern Canada. Mining has historically produced mono-industrial towns organized around a single resource, leaving behind environmental degradation, economic precarity, and social displacement when extraction declines. Situated in Red Lake, Ontario, one of Canada’s longest-running gold mining regions, this thesis asks how architecture can operate within active mining territories while preparing communities for life beyond extraction.

The project reframes remediation as a social and spatial process rather than a purely environmental one. Instead of treating post-mining landscapes as sites of environmental repair, Liminal Landscapes proposes architecture as a tool for long-term civic transition. It introduces a distributed system of three climate-adaptive architectural prototypes, the Community Hearth, Food Lab, and Makers Space, connected through year-round mobility routes. Together, they support food autonomy, local production, skill-sharing, and care economies that strengthen community resilience independent of mining cycles.

Each building is designed around seasonal programs and passive environmental strategies, allowing spaces to expand, contract, and change function throughout the year. Facades are defined by patterned cedar snow shelves that capture winter snow for insulation and provide shading in summer, recasting climate as a living building material. Interior organization is structured through gradients of warmth, reducing energy demand while supporting varied social uses.

Constructed from locally sourced timber using accessible post-and-beam systems, the prototypes are intended to be built, maintained, and adapted through collective stewardship. Over time, this network of interventions forms a civic commons embedded in the landscape, positioning architecture not as a monument to extraction but as an evolving framework for post-extractive futures grounded in cultural continuity, local agency, and long-term ecological and social care.

Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien