SINKING & SHRINKING: Adapting to Subsidence on an Example of Shrinking Kohtla-Järve City

This master’s thesis sheds light on the need and possibilities for revaluing post-mining industrial landscapes, using the exhausted Kukruse oil shale mine in Estonia as a case study. By the year 2100, residential buildings with 1,400 apartments built on top of empty oil shale mine in the city of Kohtla-Järve, will sink under the ground. By the year 2100, an absolute demographic decline can be predicted for Kohtla-Järve. The explosive development of industry and mineral wealth in the city are replaced by an excavated landscape, extreme shrinkage and sinking dwellings. A man-made disaster.

Estonian industrial landscapes, similarly to worldwide sites, are largely shaped by areas related to oil shale mining. Estonian oil shale deposit is ca 16,4747 ha. Traditionally, underground mines are abandoned after resource exploitation resulting in potential 16 thousand hectares of extraction. This thesis proposes a revaluation of the underground industrial heritage, firstly establishing the pattern of "room and pillar" mining method and the architecture behind it. Then mapping the architectonical repetitive elements – shurfs, stretches, oil shale columns, and chambers – which are restored and reused taking a hint from their initial functionality. This study also examines the post-mining city of Kohtla-Järve, addressing the subsidence (sinking) of residential buildings in a co-act with radical demographic shrinkage. The aim is to adapt to these changes, embracing ongoing demographic and post-industrial processes. Inspired by post-humanism, the thesis suggests reusing underground spaces for passive storage, which is based on the nature of the oil shale deposit – the underground value is always there, either in active use or stored as a reserve. The stability of underground spaces and the narrative of the shelter allows to secure permanent value back to the land. The type of archive can have unlimited possibilities – heritage and art storage, server rooms, grain storage and other assets. The interactions should be made before terrain sinking is complete. The ongoing reality of oil shale production waste and sinking terrain is used as a virtue – oil shale ashes are turned into concrete to rebuild the abandoned spaces; sinking terrain is becoming into domed landscape, emphasised and curated as the new landscape of post-extractivistic land.