Longyearbyen tourism restaged

In collaboration with Eakapob Huangthanapan
The professionalism award for "Arctic City" - sponsered by Arkitektbedriftene Norway

The objective of the project is to reconsider the tourism infrastructure of Longyearbyen by utilizing the cultural heritage as a tool.             

There is not currently any strong infrastructure for cruise tourists in Longyearbyen. Thousands of tourists of diverse nationalities stream out from the cruise ships for very short and temporary visit, during which, they may miss out on opportunities to understand the town, its history, and the essences of the land they’re stepping on. The lack of circulation of large number of tourists may suspend the whole town in a state of congestion, leaving it economically disadvantaged.

We are proposing a new tourist route and infrastructure concept that would support large number of tourists for brief periods of time. It would prepare and inform them about the town and Svalbard as a whole, and also circulate and spread them through the uses of the existing cultural heritage. We propose using the existing cultural heritage of the mining infrastructure as the new tourist infrastructure.

A central hub would be the ropeway station that extrudes in the directions of the ropeways that lead into different parts of the city towards the old mine heads. In the past the ropeway station served as the central station to collect coals from all the four routes and send it directly to the power station and to the pier for further logistics.

In the proposed project, the movement would be reversed. The tourists arrive at the pier, are led through the existing Store-Norske office building which is repurposed into a tourist information center, a outdoor equipment rental and tourists preparation center, a national park information center, an educational space for environmental issues, and an extended campus of UNIS and the museum exhibiting the recently found plesiosaurs fossil. After passing through this building, the tourists are guided to the old power station through the outdoor exhibition of the historical mining elements. The existing interior of the old power station and the facilities are reserved as a exhibition on the mining history.  The tourists then will be led by the stairways that built upon the dents of the past mining infrastructure towards the ropeway station. This route towards the ropeway station also acts as the lookout points where the remains of the different mines are visible within the landscape. The ropeway station at the end of the stairways acts as the distribution point where they can choose to spread and explore Longyearbyen in different directions following the ropeway towers.


The renovations and reprogramming of the buildings within the site are intended to function both for tourists and locals, since there will only be cruise tourists a few days of the year. Therefore, the industrial area is also being renovated with social and recreational spaces for the local residents, such as a new garbage houses park.