Assessing the adaptive resilience of twentieth-century post-industrial fishing landscapes in Siglufjörður, Iceland

ABSTRACT

Over the last 130 years, the landscapes of northern Iceland’s fishing villages have experienced repeated reconfigurations based on changing technology, cultural developments, and ecological shifts. However, the interconnected nature of these changes and their role in enabling industrial success have not been systematically assessed. This project aimed to evaluate the ecological and cultural histories of the herring industry of northern Iceland vis-à-vis the built environments in Siglufjörður in order to understand how changes in the built environment facilitated resiliency or increased vulnerability in the adaptive cycle through the spatial and temporal analyses of maps and aerial photographs of the landscape. This paper utilises an adaptive cycle framework to better understand how communities responded to disruptions in the fishing industry. Understanding the relationship between the built environment and the adaptive cycles of industrial communities can help illuminate the factors that cause settlements to succeed or fail.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptive resilience
• Iceland
• fishing industry
• industrial landscapes
• aerial photography

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Leifur Eiríksson Foundation. The author is grateful to Anita Elefsen, Robert Gudfinnsson, Chris Van de Ven, and Sara Thompson for their assistance. The article was greatly improved through the efforts of three anonymous peer reviewers.

Disclosure statement

There are no known conflicts of interest related to this research.

Geolocation information

66.147427, −18.913136

Notes

1. The graphical representations of the landscape are based on the following images: 1933 and 1944–1:100,000 scale atlas map from Iceland’s Geodætisk Institut; 1958—aerial survey photo taken at a height of 1800 m; 1964—aerial survey photo taken at a height of 1700 m; 1977—aerial survey photo taken at a height of 2000 m; 1986—aerial survey photo taken at a height of 2200 m; 1994—aerial survey photo taken at a height of 1000 m. The aerial survey photographs and atlas maps used in this project are made available by Landmælingar Íslands. Data for 2014 was derived from satellite imagery provided by ArcGIS Pro.

2. The western and northern boundaries of the town were taken from the 1933 atlas map and held constant; the southern boundary of the town was extended to the first water-front structure south of Siglufjörður on the 1933 map in order to incorporate the large amount of land reclamation that occurred south of the peninsula.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported in full by the Leifur Eiríksson Foundation.

Notes on contributors

V. Camille Westmont

V. Camille Westmont is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Historical Archaeology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, USA. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Maryland in 2019. Her research examines former industrial towns in the United States and Europe.