Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA)
Department
Landscape Architecture
First Advisor
Suzanne Mathew
Second Advisor
Claire Fellman
Abstract
Landscape Repositories: Mapping Social Narratives in Asbestos, QC Val-des-Sources, QC proposes the ‘landscape repository’ as a tool for landscape literacy and cultural legitimacy that integrates histories, geographies, and social narratives to inform grounded and place-based post-mining futures.
Val-des-Sources, Québec (formerly Asbestos, QC) is a place whose extraction legacies and material histories are deeply interwoven into its contemporary economy and cultural landscape. The centre of town is the Jeffrey Mine, once the world’s largest open-pit asbestos mine that is deep enough to hide the Eiffel Tower entirely. Ceased in 2012, the 130-year-old Jeffrey Mine and sixty-one other Québec asbestos sites once supplied about 80% of the world’s asbestos. Only recently has the provincial government focused on the region’s economic, environmental, and public-health concerns. Yet, what remains underrepresented in these actions are the local communities living within these post-mining landscapes.
By treating post-mining landscapes as repositories, how might archival research, landscape writing, and counter-mapping help shape their futures? This work displays these various place-based narratives through writing and mapping using archival material, oral histories, site research, and landscape theory to reveal the complexity of post-mining landscapes and how social legacies can inform future interventions. By approaching the physical and cultural remains of this extraction history as repositories, the possibility for a nuanced post-mining intervention reveals itself.
Recommended Citation
Lama, Rasha, "Landscape Repositories: Mapping Post-Mining Narratives in Asbestos, QC Val-des-Sources, QC" (2026). Masters Theses. 1679.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1679
Creative Commons License
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