气候变化领域集成服务门户

While people don’t want to live in sod homes used by their ancestors, they do want their needs and cultures to be considered, said Jack Hebert, founder of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center. That is why Alaska Native people should guide the design of homes they will use, he said. “I don’t think we can, as Western people, really understand what the needs are of rural Alaska and first peoples of this state,” he said. One example of Native needs being neglected, he said, is the common shortage of storage space, both warm and cold, a disadvantage for a subsistence food-gathering lifestyle.

Jackie Qatalina Schaeffer is also pushing for cultural fit in housing design.

Schaeffer, the community development manager at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, well knows the problems of living in cramped quarters, including stale indoor air and moisture buildup that damages structures. Her first childhood home had five kids and two adults sharing about 800 square feet of living space; after her parents adopted four more children, the family moved into a different house that was only a little bigger.

Bigger houses won’t properly address rural Alaska needs, Schaeffer said, if those structures are ill-suited to Alaska conditions, seasonal changes or indigenous traditions of gathering wild foods.

“My whole thing is I would hope that, eventually, they design not only for the Arctic but through an Indigenous lens for the lifestyle and through the public health lens because then people don’t have to fly 700 miles to get to a hospital,” she said.

Several Cold Climate Housing Research projects have addressed the blended needs for energy efficiency, adequate ventilation, resilience to harsh conditions and the needs of indigenous cultures.

In the Yup’ik village Quinahagak, where the Lower 48 designs wound up being overcrowded and quick to rot and disintegrate in Alaska conditions, the Cold Climate Housing Research Center, in consultation with local residents, designed an octagon-shaped house prototype to fit the windy conditions. The design won approval from the tribal government before the house was built.

In Mertarvik, the relocation site for the Yup’ik village of Newtok that is in the process of moving inland and away from dangerous erosion, 14 Cold Climate Housing Resaearch Center-designed homes have been built. Each has a sizeable Arctic entry, or elaturaq, plus decks and designated space for cold storage. The houses have been built with in-home water and sewer systems that can operate independently of any municipal utility and skiddable foundation allowing for movement over the ice or tundra.

Another housing innovation is being tested in a pilot project with the Inupiat village of Unalakleet on the Bering Sea coast. Modular kitchen-bathroom-utility cores are being designed and built at the CCHRC headquarters Fairbanks, with plans for shipment next spring to the village, where full houses can be built around the pods at affordable costs while providing local construction jobs.

Unalakleet, with just under 700 residents, is short more than 80 housing units, according to federal calculations, said Kari Duame, housing director for the Native Village of Unalakleet. Many of the existing homes are riddled with mold of other problems, she said.

The kitchen-bathroom-utility pods designed and built by the Cold Climate Housing Research Center thus could serve multiple housing needs: the needs for more homes, better homes,  more affordable homes and homes in new locations.

Unalakleet, like other Alaska villages, needs to move away from a crumbling shoreline where erosion is accelerated by sea ice retreat and permafrost thaw. A development plan adopted by Unalakleet’s municipal and tribal leaders features a managed-retreat strategy, with new housing upslope from the coast.

Wales, a village of about 150 people located on a tip of land at the narrowest point of the Bering Strait, is similarly shifting to safer terrain. Eleven new houses have been built upslope, where the airport is located and where a new power plant is planned, Deighton said. “Slowly, the village is creeping toward the airport and away from the ocean,” she said.

Permafrost thaw presents special challenges for housing in the North.

Indigenous peoples from reindeer herders in Siberia to the Inuit of Canada and Greenland to the Inupiat of Alaska, have traditionally incorporated solid permafrost into their living spaces and their selection of seasonal travel routes. Among the best-known uses are sigluaqs, the food-storage cellars dug by Inupiat people into ground that is frozen year-round.

But that freeze is much less reliable than it was in the past, and the thaw is creating widespread problems for buildings and other infrastructure around the Arctic. That includes homes now vulnerable to cracks, slumps and potential collapses.

Until recently, Cooke said, conventional architectural wisdom held that any permafrost thaw around structures was the result of bad design.

“But that’s not true anymore. Now, even if you do everything right, even if you insulate your foundation as much as you can, the permafrost might melt anyway,” he said.

The Cold Climate Housing Research Center’s location, chosen deliberately for the precarious state of the warm and thawing permafrost beneath its ground, is a fitting site for testing possible responses to thaw.

Among the technologies being tried is the experimental raft foundation beneath Cooke’s own house in the sustainable village. It can move and shift as the thaw below necessitates, providing some house mobility that may become a way of life for many communities atop permafrost, Cooke said.

“Because this permafrost is so close to degrading, anything you put on this land you have to adjust,” he said. “I think the future of permafrost design is to have mobile foundations.”

Support for this reporting came from the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism, a program of the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.