Arctic communities sit on ice-rich permafrost destabilized not only by warming but by buildings, roads, utilities, fill, and city maintenance and management. Within developed areas, reworked surfaces, anthropogenic heat, altered drainage, and snow redistribution produce ground thermal regimes that remain poorly studied compared with surrounding tundra.

This session invites contributions on permafrost responses to land use, infrastructure, and surface modification across scales relevant to planning, architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, city management, and community decision-making. We welcome in situ monitoring, subsurface and cryostratigraphic characterization, geophysical surveys, remote sensing, and numerical ground-thermal modeling, as well as integrative studies. We particularly encourage case studies from Arctic settlements, typology-based analyses linking physical processes to built form, and work grounded in partnerships with municipal, utility, tribal, and Indigenous organizations. Studies translating observations into planning- and design-relevant products are especially welcome.

• EP - Earth and Planetary Surface Processes
• GC - Global Environmental Change
• H - Hydrology
• NH - Natural Hazards