Regional Mountain Conference

Ski resorts are among the most climate-exposed forms of temporary settlement. Designed around the ephemeral presence of snow, they occupy fragile mountain environments while relying on extensive infrastructure to support seasonal habitation and mass tourism. As climate change accelerates, ski resorts have become sites of a persistent land-use conflict, where tourism-driven development increasingly confronts ecological limits and conservation priorities of the islands of snow and wilderness.

Mountain terrain became a technical and cultural challenge, with architecture expressing human ambition in extreme environments. While community-based ski areas remained tied to permanent settlements at lower altitudes, large resorts detached themselves and imposed permanent landscape modification and fragmentation through high-altitude mountain urbanism. Climate change is now destabilising this model: declining snowfall and rising temperatures are eliminating many community ski areas, forcing the spatial concentration of winter recreation and intensifying ecological and urban pressures within the large ski resorts.

This paper asks what future awaits large ski resorts if these climatic trends persist. Will they transform into seasonal bike parks, become abandoned settlements, or evolve into new forms of human-nature coexistence more attuned to fragile mountain environments? It further questions whether technological or spatial innovation could enable mountain recreation to exist beyond the disappearance of natural snow without further disturbing sensitive ecosystems, or whether the very premise of ski resort development must be reconsidered.

Drawing on historical analysis and comparative case studies, the paper presents different architectural, urbanistic, and landscape-planning approaches to seasonal mountain settlements, discussing why some models proved resilient while others failed. This contribution argues that rethinking areas beyond permanent settlement requires understanding the historical and natural layers sedimented within them. Mountains have long served as sites of experiment—testing architecture, infrastructure, and human capability. Faced with the consequences, the paper reframes the question of the “last snow” not as a technological problem, but as a theoretical challenge: how architecture and planning might engage with temporary settlement, environmental limits, and coexistence without territorial exploitation.