Romerike, the vast clay plain north of Oslo, is under major pressure. This is where collapsing ground meets Real Estate. Digging and excavation are the primary causes of quick clay landslides and has caused dozens of deaths in recent decades. Yet, Romerike is undergoing a constructin boom, dictated by money-driven developers and housing speculators.
This is also the story of the ravines: forgotten fragments of what was once a dense network of rivers and streams, carving steep corridors teeming with mushrooms, mycelium, and insects. About 80% of the ravines were leveled for agricultural purposes between the 1960s and 1980s. Today, many of those that remain are treated as invisible spaces—used as dumping sites for polluted surplus materials from construction projects around the capital - reflecting our failure to recognize their ecological and cultural value.
Climate change and increasingly frequent episodes of torrential rain are now causing ravines to re-emerge in areas where they were previously leveled or filled in. These unstable and often polluted landscapes pose growing risks, as people now live close to—or directly on—former ravine systems, exposing local communities to extreme danger.
This is also the story of the ravines: forgotten fragments of what was once a dense network of rivers and streams, carving steep corridors teeming with mushrooms, mycelium, and insects. About 80% of the ravines were leveled for agricultural purposes between the 1960s and 1980s. Today, many of those that remain are treated as invisible spaces—used as dumping sites for polluted surplus materials from construction projects around the capital - reflecting our failure to recognize their ecological and cultural value.
Climate change and increasingly frequent episodes of torrential rain are now causing ravines to re-emerge in areas where they were previously leveled or filled in. These unstable and often polluted landscapes pose growing risks, as people now live close to—or directly on—former ravine systems, exposing local communities to extreme danger.
Anne Marte
RAVINEVANDRINGER,
Click here to read about it in Arkitektur
Throughout the fall of 2024 and summer 2026 we are hosting a series of critical walks in the ravine landscapes of Lillestrøm municipality in Norway. Through these walks, we aim to spotlight the meaning of ravines in the face of urban development, biodiversity loss, and challenges related to flooding, pollution, and quick clay landslides. Each walk addresses different themes and is directed at landowners, residents, developers, and to the municipality.
The project’s goal is to highlight the web of different worlds that form the network of actors who unconsciously gather around the endangered nature type in Romerike. These walks create opportunities for discussion and reflection on the future of ravines in a time marked by climate change and increased development pressure. By collaborating with experts, the local community, and decision-makers, we hope to foster a deeper understanding of the significance of ravines.
A BIG THANK YOU TO THE VARIOUS CONTRIBUTORS!
Elin Løken (huseby gårds venner), Lasse Bergmann (trumpet), Cecilie Kure (bar bakke landskap), Asbjørn Langeland (historielaget), Sverre Solberg (naturvernforbundet), Siv Moen (rsnf), Brit Aase (rsnf), Gaute Mohn Jenssen(rsnf), Tonje Håkensen (oosn), Kåre Homble (rsnf)
Walking down into the ravine.
Norway is the largest masses producer and exporter of the whole Europe. It’s booming construction industry around the capital, Oslo, has impulsed a masses management sector to rise. As the capital builds at an unprecedented pace, from housing to infrastructure to logistics parks, it generates millions of tonnes of excavated rock, soil, and debris every year. Approximately 10 to 12 million tonnes of construction minerals must be managed annually in the region alone. Since the municipality of Oslo has no treatment or storage facility within its limits, these masses must travel, sometimes for hours, to be deposited or processed in neighbouring municipalities.
This is a massive and higly lucrative business. Yet there is little to non oversight by the public authorities. Once materials cross a municipal boundaries, tracking is effectively lost. Today there is not a comprehensive public record of where the masses come from, where they go, or what they contain. The state monitors large projects, municipalities manage the smaller ones. This opacity has created situation for misuse: ravines filled with unknown materials, neighbourhoods built on contaminated ground, and communities whose concerns have not been heard.
Site currently under construction, the information is currently being verified.
This project aims to responds to this public information gap building a publicly accessible database of mass reception facilities, landfills, and the companies that operate them.
“No dumping – Oslo Public Roads Administration“. Old furniture and rubbish placed on a loop in Raschs vei.
Bekkelaget, Oslo, Norway.
Photograph by Arbeiderbladet, March 1963.
Municipal road construction that has never been fullfilled as the works provoked a landslide of quick clay were 3 workers are still buried under.
Asak Massemottak, Frogner, Romerike.
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Asak Massemottak, Frogner, Romerike.
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Photograph by Leif Krohn Ørnelund (1969).
Oslo Museum / DigitaltMuseum.
Moss, Norway
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Asak Massemottak, Frogner, Romerike.
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Asak Massemottak, Frogner, Romerike.
Photograph by Anne Marte Aure, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Asak Massemottak, Frogner, Romerike.
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Oslo, Norway.
Photograph by Ørsted, H. (c. 1983–1984)
Oslo Museum / DigitaltMuseum.Oslo, Norway.
Photograph by Kim Hart (June 1992). Oslo Museum / DigitaltMuseum.
What’s more concerning about this subject is that a significant volume of masses is deposited outside any formal monitoring framework. Under current Norwegian regulation, private landowners may receive up to 5,000 m³ of non-contaminated masses without requiring a permit or declaration, provided the material is stored in piles not exceeding 1.5 metres in height. This provision has enabled a widespread and profitable practice across the region, where landowners accept construction surplus with no oversight on its origin, composition, or final disposition. In effect, masses are dispersed across the metropolitan area of Oslo and beyond, invisible to any institutional record.
To address this gap, we are developing a detection method based on the subtraction of successive Digital Terrain Models (DTM) produced by Kartverket (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). This technique, known as DEM of Difference (DoD), computes the volumetric change between two terrain surfaces over a given time interval, identifying areas where material has been added to or removed from the terrain. The chronological analysis of these models allows us to locate, quantify, and visualise mass movements that are otherwise undocumented, as shown in the map below.
Digital Model of Difference
Topographic changes between 2018 and 2021, around Skedsmokorset and Frogner.
Map by : Laboratory for Urban Boundaries.
Data source : Karvertket, NGI
In blue are the areas where material has been extracted and in green/red where it has been deposited. The topographic analisis has a resolution of around 3 m, so any movement over this threshold is normally seen. You can see clearly in the map the Asak Massemottak on the right, as well as Skedsmopukkverk on the left. As well as the different logistic and industrial parks.
False color representation of the surface topographic change, in orange what has been added and in blue what has been taken.
Satellite imagery overlayed to the topographic change
When public institutions lack the capacity to monitor and document processes that threaten social and ecological justice, civil society must step in, with information, analysis, and collaboration.
This is a work in progress, and we are currently looking for partnerships for this project. If you are interested in collaborating please reach out.
This territorial project questions the gap between the political ambitions of ‘transforming the Senegal River valley into the California of Senegal’ and the reality of a rural periphery that has become a major source of emigration.
During my first stay in Dakar, I met Raphaël, a native of Tiguéré Ciré, a village of a thousand inhabitants located on the banks of the Senegal River. At his invitation, I visited the village in 2022 and 2023. Through fieldwork, interviews and unexpected encounters, I strive to document the evolution of a fertile valley that is disappearing in favour of a hyper-specialised farming system, which is extremely vulnerable to climate change.
More than thirty years after the dams were built, farming production remains low. Despite their agricultural vocation, river towns have become forgotten suburbs where the remaining populations subsist on livelihood agriculture financed by money transfers from the diaspora. In this Sahelian territory, exposed to the many consequences of climate change, migration has become a survival strategy encouraged by families.
These flows, both physical and virtual, are reshaping the social, spatial and economic organisation of the Senegal River valley. While many emigrants are unable to return to their territory of origin, the transformations resulting from their displacement are visible. Villages are becoming denser as money circulates. The diaspora has become the most reliable source of funding and the main actor of a deterritorialised urbanism.
These encounters, observations, interviews and photographs call for an agrarian transition towards a more sustainable mode of subsistence that takes into account the river's ecosystem services and ancestral agricultural practices that do not require irrigation systems. Such a perspective involves rethinking certain production systems and imagining new interactions between emigrants and those who remain in their homeland.
The connections I made in Dakar and then on the banks of the Senegal River led me to meet this immigrant diaspora in the Ile-de-France region, where I am continuing my photographic investigation.
Thibault
In August 2022, we travelled 600 km along the Meta River to understand how its recent changes has affected its people and the environments that depend on it.
Just weeks after the election of Gustavo Petro as Colombia's first left-wing president. The political shift had completely changed the directionality of the plains. Since 2013, the closure of the border with Venezuela had enclosed the Llanos, blocking any commercial outlet to the sea and freezing the extractive economies that had heavily speculated on their land. When we arrived, the border had not yet reopened, but the possibility was imminent. People were travelling back and forth from Venezuela to prepare for the different outcomes.
We travelled in a moment of deep tension and uncertainty. Nobody could be sure whether the opening would bring relief or accelerate the violent colonization that had already profoundly transformed the region.
The Meta River descends over 1,000 km from the Andean páramos to its mouth at the Orinoco, draining a basin of approximately 100,000 km². It splits the Llanos savannas in two and marks the border between Colombia and Venezuela. The plains have always been the favoured site for extractive speculation, from the Jesuit missions of the seventeenth century that became today's plains towns, through the oil industry, to the recent agroindustrial expansion.
Extractive water-consuming activities by tributary watersheds,
The concentration of extractive activities around the piedmont causes multidimensional impacts on the lower basin.
Yet climatic and ecological conditions have not allowed this wanted development to succeed. Since the 1960s, the river has entered a drastic transformation. Its waters now carry increasing amounts of sediment. Despite contributing only 10% of the Orinoco's water, the Meta delivers nearly half its total sediment load. The timing of floods has changed: winter arrives earlier and lasts less, disrupting the cycles of cultivation, fishing, and transport that organise people along its banks.
The causes have not yet been established. Our hypothesis is that the major transformations produced in the upper basins, heavy deforestation of the piedmont, mining in the tributaries, industrial agriculture, and the diversion of the river's headwaters to supply Bogotá, whose Chingaza system extracts 80% of the capital's drinking water from páramos that feed the Meta, are now visible downstream, where their effects are most obvious as those communities face the greatest degree of isolation and vulnerability.
Visiting an island cultivated by landless farmers
Near La Poyata, Casanare, COL
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Our fast and fresh transport in Puerto Gaitan
Humapo indian reservation, Meta, COL
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Up the river, near to the Andes, the water is low and murky
Villavicencio, Meta, COL
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Menonite house, in the newly established colony in los Llanos
Liviney, Meta, COL
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Boats that furnish the towns in the plains are only charged by hand.
Puerto Gaita, Meta, COL
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Cars crap is imported from Venezuela and transported by boat several weeks.
Near the Venezuelan Border, Rio Meta, COL
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Truck stop in the inner plains, for mainly for oil transport as there is no pipeline.
Near El Oasis, Meta, COL
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Talk with indigenous antropologue Luis Bonelo.
Puerto Carreno, Vichada, COL
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
River farmers as they go in the morning to seed, as the water goes down.
Near La Poyata, Casanare, COL
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
Venezuelan houseworker of a menonite familly that will arrive from Mexico. She with her husband are preparing the land for their coming.
Liviney, Meta, COL
Photograph by Paolo Ricci, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
To investigate this, we proposed to travel the river as a territorial transect, a sequential reading of the plains across six sections: source, headwaters, piedmont, flooded savannas, mid-basin, and river mouth. Each plays a distinct role in the hydrological system and bears the marks of a different colonization process. We travelled by boat, car, bus, bike, and horse. In each section, we visited farmers, fishermen, indigenous communities, transporters, and municipal authorities to build a new regional history from the periphery.
New river-based Llanos calendar,
How economies, culture and movement adapts to current ecological and political changes.
Paolo
This is a personal exploration of what it means to belong in an ever-changing world. On the Northwestern coast of Norway, where I was born, lives a tiny creature with many names.
Some call it a weed. Others depend on it.
It thrives in human-disturbed soil and has expanded its territory as society has shifted from an agricultural to an industrial one. This narrative weaves through its first appearance and examines the various attempts by local people to fight it —all in vain, of course.
This photo was taken through the lens of a pair of binoculars I found in the old school building I borrowed from my old aunt May 2022.
The intelligent root system has developed in order for the plant to spread rapidly over vast areas—efforts to suppress it rarely succeed.
Picked and brought carefully in newspaper back to Oslo in car and then to Paris.
Farmers in Sykkylven in late spring around 1910.
Anne Marte