Making the Arctic City: The History and Future of Urbanism in the Circumpolar North 9781350235854, 9781350235892, 9781350235878

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction
PART ONE Framing the Arctic city
1 Introducing the Arctic
2 Building cities in the Arctic
3 Studying Arctic cities
PART TWO Arctic urban development
4 Developing Russia’s Arctic cities
5 Developing Canada’s Arctic cities
6 Developing Greenland’s cities
PART THREE Constructing the Arctic city
7 Defining Arctic urbanism
8 The architects of the Arctic city
9 Learning from the Arctic city
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Making the Arctic City

ii

Making the Arctic City The History and Future of Urbanism in the Circumpolar North

PETER HEMMERSAM

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Paperback edition published 2023 Copyright © Peter Hemmersam, 2023 Peter Hemmersam has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Namkwan Cho Cover image: Danish Arctic Institute / Unknown Photographer All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hemmersam, Peter, 1969- author. Title: Making the Arctic city : the history and future of urbanism in the circumpolar North / Peter Hemmersam. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053667 (print) | LCCN 2020053668 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350235854 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350235861 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350235878 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781350235885 (epub) | ISBN 9781350235892 Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns–Arctic regions. | City planning–Arctic regions. Classification: LCC HT169.4 .H46 2021 (print) | LCC HT169.4 (ebook) | DDC 307.76–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053667 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053668 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-3585-4 PB: 978-1-3502-3586-1 ePDF: 978-1-3502-3587-8 eBook: 978-1-3502-3588-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Figures  vii Preface  xv

Introduction 

1

PART ONE  Framing the Arctic city 7 1 Introducing the Arctic  9 2 Building cities in the Arctic  18 3 Studying Arctic cities  31

PART TWO  Arctic urban development 41 4 Developing Russia’s Arctic cities  43 5 Developing Canada’s Arctic cities  83 6 Developing Greenland’s cities  116

PART THREE  Constructing the Arctic city 155 7 Defining Arctic urbanism  157 8 The architects of the Arctic city  166 9 Learning from the Arctic city  182

vi

Notes 191 Bibliography  226 Index  247

CONTENTS

FIGURES

I.1

Map of the urban Arctic with a selection of the most significant cities and towns. The map shows the Arctic Circle and the 10˚C July isotherm  5

2.1

‘Study of a town in the antarctic zone. A residential district with four dwelling-circles. Inner diameter of a dwelling-ring: 100 metres; outer diameter: 150 metres. 36 apartments on each floor, viz. 792 apartments in the whole dwelling-ring (22 floors). About 4000 inhabitants in the dwelling-ring or 16,000 in the whole residential district. The height of the dwelling-ring is about 90 metres. The business centre is situated in an inner circle. From each floor a sheltered approach leads from the dwelling-ring to that business centre with its workshops, schools, cinemas, theatres, library, hospital, and sportfields.’ Ernst Arnold Egli, Die Neue Stadt in Landschaft Und Klima [Climate and Town Districts, Consequences and Demands], trans. Ch. Neuenschwander (Erlenbach-Zürich: Verlag für Architektur, 1951): 54  25

2.2

Ernst Egli: Proposal for a city in the arctic zone. © Das Werk: Architektur und Kunst 32 (1945)  26

4.1

The Polar Alpine Botanical Garden located in the Khibiny Mountains 145 kilometres south

viii

FIGURES

of Murmansk, was founded in 1931. © Peter Hemmersam  44 4.2

Map of Arctic Russia with the administrative divisions ‘The Far North’ and ‘Territories Equated to the Far North’  47

4.3

Classical and monumental urban plan for Monchegorsk near Murmansk by Sergei Brovtsev et al. from 1936  54

4.4

‘Building with cross-concrete beamed walls and external walls from reinforced concrete double-layered panels.’ Model K-7 was designed by V. P. Lagutenko and built across the Soviet Union in the early 1960s  56

4.5

The 1940 development plan for Norilsk by Vitold Nepokoichitsky  62

4.6

Residential project for the southwest district of Norilsk by Shipkov and Shipkova (1965). © L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui  63

4.7

‘Norilsk microdistrict (No. 1) with an area of about 24 hectares. It extends along Lenin Avenue. The sports centre and plazas are located in the centre of the microdistrict. The layout of a new microdistrict (No. 10) differs from the first in that the designers were not compelled to take into account the previously existing layout. The principles used for providing a shelter from wind and snowstorm were particularly successfully applied in this microdistrict.’ S. V. Slavin, The Soviet North: Present Development and Prospects, trans. Don Danemanis (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 88  64

FIGURES

ix

4.8

General view of a settlement with artificial microclimate with residential buildings of elliptical shape (1964). S. P. Odnovalov and M. V. Tsimbal (LenZNIIEP)  65

4.9

The residential project for 4,500 residents at Udachny. A series of apartment blocks are connected by an indoor gallery to a central community hub. Map data: Google, Image © 2020 CNES/Airbus  66

4.10 Nikel is a monumental industrial city in the subarctic landscape. © Peter Hemmersam  70 4.11 The dense vegetation of the urban spaces of Murmansk. © Peter Hemmersam  74 4.12 The 200-metre Okhotny Ryad indoor staircase and shopping gallery connects the hilltop Kamennoye plato district to the main thoroughfare, the Prospekt Kol’skiy. CC-BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bysa/4.0/deed.en. Image © Dim 137/https://domofoto.ru/ photo/21360  76 4.13 The monumental city centre of Murmansk and the 1980s housing development overlooking the city. © Peter Hemmersam  77 4.14 A standard five-storey walk-up concrete panel housing block and one of the omnipresent garage districts of Murmansk. © Peter Hemmersam  78 4.15 Housing district in Zapoljarny on the Kola Peninsula. © Peter Hemmersam  81 5.1

Map of Arctic Canada with the territorial divisions of the North suggested by Louis-Edmond Hamelin  84

x

FIGURES

5.2

Dawson City: ‘Palace Grand Theater – Built in 1899; now houses the Gaslight Follies. It is one of the approximately seventeen buildings included in the National Historical Site.’ CC-BY-SA 3.0 https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en. Image © JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ MD https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DAWSON_HISTORICAL_ COMPLEX_NATIONAL_HISTORIC_SITE.jpg  87

5.3

Inuvik 1961. Royal Canadian Navy/Department of National Defence  90

5.4

‘While the maintenance condition is generally good in NWT, the older rather primitive single-family home areas of Frobisher Bay make a rather miserable impression.’ Gunnar Lind Pedersen, Gunnar P. Rosendahl, and Hans Ølgaard, Rejse til The Northwest Territories, juni 1979 og juni 1980 [Travel to the Northwest Territories, June 1979 and June 1980] (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1980), 33  91

5.5

‘The town site plan illustrating the various buildings within the scheme. Note the reasonable areas allowed for park development.’ B. A. Gardner and William Edmund Fancott, Frobisher Bay: The Design of Accommodation for a Community of 4500 People (Ottawa: Department of Public Works, 1958)  96

5.6

The Nakasuk Elementary School by Papineau, GérinLajoie, Le Blanc (1973). CC-BY-SA-2.0-DE https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/deed.en. Image © Ansgar Walk https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Nakasuk_School_Iqaluit_2000.jpg  98

FIGURES

xi

5.7

‘Section of the center with winter garden, beneath skylights which thanks to reflectors receive sunlight.’, ‘Resolute Bay New Town, Cornwallis Island, Canada’, © Bauen + Wohnen, Volume 31 (1977).  99

5.8

The outline and road network of Erskine’s plan are clearly visible today. When the development was cancelled in 1978, existing houses were moved from their previous location close to the airfield to the prepared town site. Only a small section of the wall was built. Map data: Google, Image © 2020 Maxar Technologies  101

5.9

The original urban plan for the central district of Fermont is well-preserved. Map data: Google, Image © 2020 Maxar Technologies  102

5.10 Le Mur Écran protects the lower row-houses from the northern winds. © Peter Hemmersam  103 5.11 The interior street of the climate wall. © Peter Hemmersam  104 5.12 An entrance to the wall. © Peter Hemmersam  106 5.13 The wall is the icon of Fermont. © Peter Hemmersam  108 6.1

Map of Greenland with the larger and other significant settlements  117

6.2

‘The proposed city is divided into three parts: one, the outermost, for the government and metropolitan element, the middle one, for trade and the future business district and a third, the innermost, for industry – for factories and yards …. The real center of

xii

FIGURES

urban life will be around the slipway and the bay …. Here, the bridge between the capital and the commercial city, the most prominent public buildings, the interesting coastlines surrounded by the high mountains, the islands, the market bustle, the naval station, the fresh, salty Atlantic water with the changing impressions and lifestyles will give rise to a real capital life, which will contribute greatly to the city’s reputation and prosperity.’ Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: III. Stedet [The Capital of Greenland: III: The Place]’, Architekten 16 no. 23 (1914), 239  120 6.3

‘A suggestion for a Greenlandic garden city-system.’ Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: VI. TuristVærdien [The Capital of Greenland: VI: The Turist Value]’, Architekten 16 no. 30 (1914), 310  121

6.4

The Planning Expedition’s proposal for a urban plan for Godthaab (Nuuk) for 9,000 inhabitants. Hugo Lund Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland, Narssaq, Sukkertoppen, Egedesminde, Godthaab [Proposed Urban Plans in Western Greenland, Narssaq, Sukkertoppen, Egedesminde, Godthaab] (Copenhagen: Grønlandsdepartementet, 1951)  126

6.5

The report of the Planning Expedition was illustrated with plans and illustrations of cityscapes, including a visualization of a modernist urban design for Maniitsoq (Sukkertoppen). The accompanying text suggests, tongue-in-cheek, that ‘the entire population of Maniitsoq could be housed in one single high-

FIGURES

xiii

rise’, while admitting that technical and economic efficiency was not the entire purpose of the planning exercise. Hugo Lund Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland, Narssaq, Sukkertoppen, Egedesminde, Godthaab [Proposed Urban Plans in Western Greenland, Narssaq, Sukkertoppen, Egedesminde, Godthaab] (Copenhagen: Grønlandsdepartementet, 1951), 32  128 6.6

Gunnar P. Rosendahl. Chief engineer, from 1956 director of the Greenland Technical Organization. Connie Eriksen (photograph)  131

6.7

Around 500 EN2/Type 16 one-family houses were built (Design: Einar Nielsen, 1953)  133

6.8

The Radiofjeldet development in Nuuk from 1970 combined grand views with a coherent urban space. (1972–7). © Peter Hemmersam  135

6.9

Blok 10. Painting by Stéfan Baldursson. © Peter Hemmersam  147

6.10 The Imaneq pedestrian street, Nuuk. © Peter Hemmersam  148 6.11 The Nuussuaq and Quinngorput districts of Nuuk. © Peter Hemmersam  151 8.1

Ralph Erskine: ‘Arctic City’ (1958). Photo: Matti Östling, the ArkDes Collection/ARKM.1986–170349  168

8.2

Indoor communal space in ‘Shopping’ by Ralph Erskine (Luleå, 1955). Photo: Sune Sundahl/Arkitekturoch designcentrum  171

xiv

FIGURES

8.3

The initiator of the Winter Cities Movement, William C. Rogers, mentions the Minneapolis skyways as an example of ‘architectural design that has been adapted to the northern climate’. William C. Rogers and Jeanne K. Hanson, The Winter City Book: A Survival Guide for the Frost Belt (Edina, MN: Dorn Books, 1980): 58. Minneapolis Skyways. In the Skyway near the IDS Center c. 1980. CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/2.0/. Image © City of Minneapolis Skyways  174

8.4

‘City under one roof’ for 1,000 people. The Buckner Building at Whittier, Alaska (approx. 1955). Christing McClain papers, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage. U.S. Army Photograph. Approved for release. U.S. Army Engineer District Alaska. Corps of Engineers. P.O. Box 7002, Anchorage, Alaska  178

8.5

‘On a rocky knoll in Frobisher Bay, a multi-purpose house has been erected, which includes contains hotel, cinema, shops, offices, apartments etc. It is agreed that the experiment: the closed Arctic house, which holds all the functions under one roof, in this case has failed.’ Gunnar Lind Pedersen, Gunnar P. Rosendahl, and Hans Ølgaard, Rejse til The Northwest Territories, juni 1979 og juni 1980 [Travel to the Northwest Territories, June 1979 and June 1980] (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1980), p. 33  179

PREFACE

Visiting Arctic cities has always involved a slight sense of displacement for me – even in the northern regions of my residential country, Norway. I am happy to note that the feeling has become less pronounced as I have become more familiar with the urban settings and urban life of the communities in question after numerous visits over the years. Still, many of the Arctic cities and settlements that I have visited first appeared to my Scandinavian architectural ‘eye’ to be unresponsive to the human condition and the climate. In this book, I try to understand why that was the case. What were the architects and urban planners thinking? What societal context they were working in? What narratives and ideologies did they respond to, and how did these evolve and transform over time? Many academics have studied northern communities much more extensively than I have. Still, through research in Arctic communities over several years, I have come to realize that while there are many books about changing Arctic ecosystems, economies and societies, there were very few books on the urbanism of the Arctic. At the same time, politicians, planners and architects are scrambling to come up with rationales for building and planning in a fast-changing region. The title of the book, Making the Arctic City: The History and Future of Urbanism in the Circumpolar North, encapsulates the central premise: in order to understand the current state and appreciate the potential future of Arctic cities, it is necessary to uncover the influence and involvement of ideas and external forces that dictate their recent development history. In the historical overview of the development of Arctic cities in this book, I explore the relationship between the planning and design of everyday urban space, the environment, and the political and economic contexts of city-building. As a prerequisite to reflections over the possible future of local places, I also confront the history of Arctic citybuilding with the experience of being there. To that end, ‘city images’ that report from fieldwork in Arctic cities in Russia, Canada and Greenland invite the reader to reflect on the experience, meaning and development potential of urban space in the North. It is within these three countries that I have found the most well-documented, continuous and contentious discourses concerning city-building in the North. Similar debates on development, planning and design also exist in the remaining circumpolar territories, but these three nations jointly represent, I believe, a circumpolar perspective on urban design, planning and development in the Arctic.

xvi

PREFACE

A few notes on the vocabulary in the book: ‘Arctic’ is used in a broad sense to cover both the climatic and political region, but also to discern a particular architectural discourse that is specific to the peoples, settlements and environments of the North. ‘Urbanism’ is the study of urban ways of life, of the relationship between people and the built environment, and of the planning and built form of the city. It deals with the physical city, with the practices of planners, architects and social scientists, as well as with the driving forces and historical and political framing of urban evolution. ‘City’ is used even though most urban communities in the Arctic are fairly small, and with few qualifying as ‘cities’ in the traditional meaning of the word. Still, I choose to use ‘city’ to denote the construction of ideas of urban living in the North, and I apply it to large, medium and smaller settlements when addressing this conceptual construction, including planners’ and architects’ conceptualizations and urban designs. This book builds on studies of Arctic territories at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). This work has involved several years of travelling, fieldwork and community engagement with a multidisciplinary team of international researchers, as well as with students of architecture and landscape architecture. I want to thank my fellow researchers in the Future North project team: Janike Kampevold Larsen, Andrew Morrison, Aileen Aseron Espiritu, Morgan Ip, Kjerstin Uhre and all our associates. My gratitude extends to all our local collaborators, our advisory board and Lisbet Harboe, who has been my fellow investigator of Arctic communities together with students at AHO. I would also like to thank Vlad Vyacheslav Lyakhov, Rune Christensen and the invaluable AHO Library for helping to source research material for the book, as well as Jonny Aspen, Tom Nielsen, Boris Brorman Jensen, Thomas Clemmensen and my father, KarlJohann Hemmersam, who all helped me with the book manuscript. Finally, it would not have been possible to write a book without the support and understanding of my wife, Aasne, and our two children, Signe and Oskar. Peter Hemmersam

Introduction

Millions of people call the Arctic their home, while, to outsiders, the region often appears as an uninhabited ‘natural’ space. Public perception of the Arctic draws from images of Indigenous people engaged in traditional activities, while, in fact, industrialization and urbanization have been taking place in the region for more than a century. The Soviet Union, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland subjected Arctic territories to development policies that introduced resource extraction, citybuilding and housing schemes for both existing populations and newcomers. Indigenous peoples were in many places subjected to paternalistic modernization policies, and settlements and cities in the Arctic were, in particular periods, planned and designed to ‘soften’ the North for southern workers and experts. The Arctic was a space of modernity and architects proposed radical designs for future settlements in the extreme climate. In reality, however, the development of most Arctic settlements was much more ad hoc, and designers and planners imported urban and architectural designs from elsewhere. Still, Arctic settlements are not identical to – and do not function like – ‘developed’ cities elsewhere. Many Arctic cities have short, but extraordinary development histories, and they now face new challenges in a fast-changing region. Finding themselves at the forefront of climate change, they increasingly appear to be at the centre of global political, academic, industrial and popular debate about the future of the planet. Arctic economies depend on the exploitation and export of natural resources, and what popular culture once portrayed as an untouched or ‘clean’ environment is threatened by both local industries and pollution from elsewhere. While Arctic communities are small, peripheral and often isolated, globalization nevertheless weaves them into transnational

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MAKING THE ARCTIC CITY

flows of people, energy, information and goods. Despite rapid changes in northern settlements, there have been few significant attempts at reconceptualizing Arctic urban form, space and planning in recent years. Such a re-conceptualization calls for studies of how planners, architects and decision-makers have imagined urban futures and designed Arctic cities over time in response to internal and external pressures, as well as national and international ideas of urban planning and design.

The contested Arctic Politicians, scientists and environmentalists consider the Arctic to be more important to the world than ever, and in recent years, a growing literature has portrayed the Arctic as a dynamic but also differentiated region.1 To the outside world, the region was long associated with heroic polar exploration and imbued with the qualities of sublime emptiness. In addition, explorers and authors described the Indigenous peoples of the North in romantic terms as living in an untarnished pre-industrial society in harmony with nature, a notion that continued to inform public policy in some countries until the 1950s. In the early twentieth century, concepts of an untouched nature merged with ideas of imperialism and economic exploitation of resources. For instance, American explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson insisted that the region was, in fact, full of promise and resources, and portrayed it as a settled place teeming with life.2 States projected their national futures onto the Arctic and started colonizing northern territories in response to a growing obsession with the natural riches of the region. In Russia (then the Soviet Union) and Canada, the idea of the Arctic or the North became integral to their respective national identities.3 During the decades of global decolonization after the Second World War, the fate and future of the Indigenous peoples of the North became a significant concern in the national and international debates about the Arctic. In most of the circumpolar countries, the Arctic regions have developed political structures that reflect the concerns and agency of local and Indigenous peoples. However, decolonization has happened in very different ways and at different rates across the region. Also, re-colonization is now taking place in some territories as a result of geopolitical posturing and the scramble by states and corporations for minerals and petrochemicals. During the Cold War, an entirely new political construction of the idea of the Arctic emerged, encapsulated in the term ‘circumpolar North’ – which suddenly posited the North Pole as a centre rather than a periphery. Transpolar air travel and nuclear ballistic missile trajectories helped form this new perspective. The international identification of a global ‘Arctic’ region gained traction in the 1980s, where the inhabited circumpolar North emerged as a

INTRODUCTION

3

space for international collaboration and for addressing regional and global environmental concerns. Cultural, economic and political perspectives on the history, contemporary challenges and future perspectives shape public perception and northern policies. These perspectives exist side by side, inside as well as outside the region, and make up a matrix of opportunities for interpretation and projections of Arctic territories and societies. A survey of contemporary literature on Arctic futures by Peter Arbo et al. identifies two competing but also interacting ‘storylines’.4 The first storyline deals with climate change and the resulting demographic and economic changes this will bring to the North. The other storyline centres on the political and territorial disputes that this development will introduce, exemplified by the ongoing debate over the control of the North Pole. Carina Keskitalo outlines three dominant narratives: the Arctic as an uninhabitable wilderness, as a frontier and as an Indigenous homeland.5 Lassi Heininen and Chris Southcott further propose: the Arctic as a military theatre, a frontier, a frozen wilderness with no history, a Klondike, a research landscape, a victim of pollution, the frontier of climate change and an Indigenous homeland.6 Philip Steinberg, Jeremy Tasch and Hannes Gerhardt suggest that the Arctic is contested between political ‘imaginaries’:7 the Arctic as an ungoverned non-state space, a resource frontier, a place for replicating existing forms of governance (such as Indigenous statehood) and an environmentalist imaginary that regards the region as a ‘nature reserve’. Rather than making the Arctic an exception, Steinberg et al. argue, these contested imaginaries contribute to making the Arctic a normal place, as all regions are subject to such competing notions of space.

The cities of the contested Arctic An ‘Arctic city’ is a contradiction in terms if we consider the Arctic to be a barely inhabitable and barren land. However, the region is home to a substantial number of city dwellers and northern residents who live modern urbanized lives. Just as there are many competing notions of what the ‘Arctic’ is, there is no consensus on what defines a city across the region. Individual countries have different legal regulations on what constitutes a city, a town, a hamlet, etc., and different languages apply seemingly analogous terms differently. While Arctic cities belong to different countries and vary when it comes to size, urban planning regimes and economy, most of them share certain northern characteristics, such as ice and snow cover, winter darkness, remoteness and the presence of Indigenous peoples. The Arctic narratives and imaginaries presented above have been manifested in the conceptualization of settlements as ‘frontier’

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MAKING THE ARCTIC CITY

towns, Indigenous cultural hubs, industrial dystopias, climate change capitals or as sites of technological development and modernization. Over time, politicians and experts within the region and in southern urban centres have responded to these conceptualizations and translated them to urban policies and plans for northern settlements in a variety of ways. At the same time, architects have explored and disseminated utopian visions for cities in books, journals and popular media such as magazines and newspapers. The harsh climate of the Arctic meant that it became an arena for technologically enabled fantasies of human habitation and a radical modern architecture. Among the speculative urban plans and architectural proposals of the post-war period, we find the Canadian government’s 1958 project for Frobisher Bay, Ralph Erskine’s ‘subarctic habitat’, the proposal for the climatized city of Seward’s Success in Alaska with up to 40,000 inhabitants, as well as the urban projects for the Far North presented by the architects of the Leningrad Zonal Scientific Research and Planning Institute (LenZNIIEP) and other Soviet research and design institutes in the 1960s and 1970s. These visionary projects were the results of projections of international discourses of urbanism onto the region and were essential in establishing ideas about the Arctic city that have persisted over time. Few of these radical projects were realized, but they influenced the later promotion of northern liveable cities by the Winter Cities movement. Ralph Erskine’s evocative visualizations of Arctic habitats, in particular, inspired a late-Modernist architectural tradition of micro-climatic adaptation through architectural and urban designs that are referenced by architects to this day. This book explores the ideas and history behind the formation of the Arctic City in territories that have a history of twentieth-century urban planning and design. This critical account of the complex and mostly unwritten history of urban planning and design is essential to the understanding and re-conceptualization of urbanism that the fast-changing Arctic necessitates.

INTRODUCTION

5

FIGURE I.1   Map of the urban Arctic with a selection of the most significant cities and towns. The map shows the Arctic Circle and the 10˚C July isotherm.

6

PART ONE

Framing the Arctic city

8

CHAPTER ONE

Introducing the Arctic

Ideas about ‘the Arctic’ surfaced during the nineteenth century within various academic disciplines that studied its nature and peoples. While the natural sciences have researched the North since the first Arctic expeditions in the eighteenth century, the social sciences and the humanities (including architecture and urbanism) have a shorter history of engagement with the region. Over time, these northern regions have been considered peripheral, barren, national treasure troves, Indigenous homelands, fragile ecosystems or even the embodiment of national identities. In the twentieth century, these various evolving and successive ideas and narratives have had consequences for southern governments’ northern colonization and development policies, for how cities were planned and built across the Arctic, and for the lives that the peoples of the North came to live. What is a homeland to some, and a territory for scientific study and heroic endeavours to others, has in recent years become a geopolitical region, the ‘Arctic’, which attracts worldwide attention and increasingly becomes a home to people from many other places.

Delimiting the Arctic Russia has long been preoccupied with its north, but the discourse on the ‘Arctic’ as a distinct territory was initially associated with the northern regions of the United States and Canada.1 There are a number of geographic definitions of the Arctic, and delimitations often refer to how different academic disciplines study the region.2 Science has played a prominent role in the exploration and subsequent colonization of the Arctic and the field sciences have had a lasting influence on outsiders’ perception of the region.3 Two frequently referenced natural science-derived definitions of

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MAKING THE ARCTIC CITY

the Arctic are demarcated by the taiga-tundra ‘tree line’ boundary and the ‘ten degrees July isotherm’. These roughly corresponding boundaries cut across Alaska, Canada, Russia and Iceland. This territorial delimitation of the Arctic includes Greenland in its entirety, but largely excludes Scandinavia. While not particularly cold when compared to other Arctic regions, northern Scandinavia nevertheless extends far north of the Arctic Circle and experiences an extended polar night. In contrast, the mostly treeless terrain and glaciers of Iceland correspond to images of a barren polar landscape, even though the country is almost entirely south of this circle of latitude. The picture becomes even more complicated in near-Arctic territories where small changes in topography and altitude alter the appearance of the landscape and determine the existence of forests, permafrost and glaciers. Unlike Antarctica, the Arctic is not a clearly defined landmass and largely consists of the Polar Sea, surrounded by countries that, with notable exceptions, extend south to more temperate regions. The existing national and maritime borders were drawn relatively recently and are still unresolved in several cases. In 1996, the so-called ‘Arctic countries’ – the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia – established the collaborative body, the Arctic Council. This organization reflected the emergence of the Arctic as an international political region.4 The public perception of the Arctic generally includes all of Alaska and Iceland, and Greenland. In the other circumpolar countries, different formal and administrative definitions of Northern territories have, over time, determined where governments introduced special northern policies and regional development programmes. In the Soviet Union, a geographic index of parameters relating to northern conditions formed the basis for subsidy programmes, and factors such as the distance to metropolitan regions, the harshness of the climate and the cost of labour contributed to determining the administrative boundaries of the North.5 In Canada, long-standing policies distinguished between the western provinces and the territories north of the sixtieth parallel: Yukon, Northwest Territories and the more recently established Nunavut. This latitude mirrors the international treaty definition of the Antarctic from 1961, but does not correspond to any significant separation of population, vegetation or climate, and is just as arbitrary as the Arctic Circle is to political divisions of the North.6 Based on a similarity in environments, economies and populations, the Canadian government also includes Labrador and northern Quebec in its official definition of the North. Beyond administrative divisions, Terence Armstrong, Georg Rogers and Graham Rowley suggest to ‘think of the Arctic and sub-Arctic as a group of concepts and attributes, concerned with climates, vegetation, fauna, presence of ice and snow, sparseness of human habitation, remoteness from industrial centres, and many other factors, and not having precise boundaries’.7 The ‘Arctic’ has increasingly been disconnected from a pure climate-based definition, and the concept has branched out to encompass a

INTRODUCING THE ARCTIC

11

wide range of overlapping ecological, social and geopolitical connotations. The interdisciplinary field of Arctic or Northern Studies that emerged in the 1960s to explore the environment, cultures and communities of the Arctic extended the definition of the field of study to also include ‘cultural values and associations’.8 The Arctic exists both inside and outside the region as a range of overlapping ideas, and the region is continuously being ‘constructed’ according to various needs.9 Canadian sociologist Rob Shields argues that obsessions with defining the region relate to maintaining a colonial relationship to northern territories. With reference to Edward Said’s postcolonial theory of ‘orientalism’, he explains how the Arctic has been constructed as a geographical margin where ‘imaginative geographies’ obscure local conditions and imply a will to control through ‘othering’.10 The North is a discursive formation that continuously changes and influences perceptions and policies, and an imaginative space where futures can be envisioned.11 This evolving formation informs policy making, and has over the years been essential to the approaches that architects and planners have taken to building the cities of the North.

Defining Nordicity Canadian geographer Luis Edmond Hamelin insisted on looking at the Arctic, beyond the physical region, as a lived landscape.12 To Hamelin, the North was as much an idea as a physical space, and he argued that general understandings and definitions of the North often had little correspondence to reality.13 The North was not a unified object, whether an ‘over-idealized vision [or] and excessively pessimistic vision’, but rather a composite construct of cultural perceptions and physical phenomena.14 Hamelin claimed that the Canadian North had become less ‘northern’ over time because of the development programmes and infrastructures that infiltrate the North, but also as a consequence of climate change. This scientific, detailed and dynamic concept of Nordicity had for a long time been paradigmatic within Northern Studies.15 Hamelin’s overall ambition was to foster a collective idea of northernness or Nordicity that transcended political territoriality and crossed the boundaries of the academic disciplines that engaged the region. As an example of the power of the idea of northernness, Hamelin referenced the exploitative colonial relationship between southern ‘mainland’ and northern peripheral regions that had dominated Canadian history.16 Complicating this north-south reading of territory, he suggested a lateral indexing of the North that divided the country into ‘strips’ of similar northernness. Hamelin built on Soviet predecessors who mapped the USSR according to the engineering challenges posed by the various northern regions.17 Hamelin’s categorization, like that of his Soviet predecessors, fed into an underlying political imperative of developing the North and attracting southern workers, something that experience had shown to be challenging.18

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‘Nordicity’ is a multi-faceted spatial index of northern geography that consolidates a range of human and physical signifiers of northern conditions into ‘polar values’ (VAPO). The VAPO of any given location is a combination of values for latitude, summer heat, annual cold, types of ice, precipitation, vegetation cover, air services, transport links, population and economic activities. The system rates the individual components on a scale from 0 to 100, and only areas with a combined VAPO above 200 are considered part of the true North, according to Hamelin. The method resulted in a division of the country into ‘Base Canada’, ‘Near North’, ‘Middle North’, ‘Far North’ and ‘Extreme North’. The index enabled a range of policies to become targeted to specific locations or areas.19 Hamelin has been a central figure in northern development discourse, something Douglas West attributes to his unpacking of the discourse on the ‘North’ as a mental construction in ways similar to Edward Said’s deconstruction of the ‘Orient’.20 Other scholars think that Hamelin’s method relies on a considerable degree of idiosyncratic assessment and that he ignored the role of state and policy in shaping place characteristics.21 Rob Shields claims that Hamelin’s definitions ‘provide not so much a yardstick by which to measure northern-ness as an indicator of one profession’s fascination with organizing and recoding popular perceptions in the discourse of empirical rationalism and an indicator of the seriousness with which the entire northern-ness issue is treated’.22 Also, Lola Sheppard and Mason White problematize Hamelin’s approach when it comes to urbanism and urban planning. They point out that changes to specific factors in his ‘nordicity’ index, such as economic activity, transport or even climatic conditions could result in the ‘de-nordification’ of settlements over time, and they ask if, according to Hamelin, ‘urbanity and development [is] antithetical to “Arcticness”?’23

Colonizing the North Political, cultural, social and economic processes of colonization have been at work in the Arctic for centuries. Southern powers have claimed, argued over and exchanged northern territories without the consent of local populations. The timelines and historical forms of colonization vary significantly across the Arctic. For instance, Danish rule of Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands can be traced back to the Middle Ages and followed the colonial pattern of other European states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast, colonization is a much more recent phenomenon in other parts of the circumpolar North. While Danish rule extended to lands that were evidently not part of Denmark, governments in most of the other Arctic countries considered northwards territorial advancement to be ‘internal colonization’. In Sweden, Finland and Norway, mainstream European cultural expansion to the Arctic also happened initially in the Middle Ages,

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and Tsarist Russian expansion to the east and north took place from the sixteenth century. The Russian annexation of eastern Siberia and Alaska in the eighteenth century was initiated by commercial actors in alliance with the state. Often, southern interest in the North and its people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also involved missionary work, which sometimes also took place on behalf of states. Trade in fur and other animal products generated income for many northern communities for centuries. Early systematic industrial exploitation of Arctic natural resources included whale hunting in the seventeenth century, iron mining in the north of Sweden in the eighteenth century, and gold mining in Canada and Alaska around the turn of the twentieth century. This desire for resources led to exploration travels and international treatises on the territorial division of the lands and waters of the North. States built military or police outposts, established new colonies of southern settlers and relocated Indigenous families and communities in order to reinforce claims to territorial sovereignty. Following the Russian Civil War, the Soviet Union engaged in extensive territorial colonization, city-building and industrialization in the north of Russia and Siberia. The Second World War brought infrastructure development to Iceland, northern Norway and the North American Arctic, and colonization continued and even increased in many parts of the region during the Cold War. While industrial exploitation of natural resources was a significant motive for colonization of the northern ‘resource frontier’, the governments of Denmark and Canada also sought to maintain a traditional way of life among Arctic Indigenous peoples in the first part of the twentieth century. This was also economically motivated, and in Greenland, the export of seal skins from traditional hunting was the primary source of colonial income for the Crown.24 After the Second World War, colonial governance in these two countries changed to cultural assimilation of the Inuit. According to American political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott, late colonial regimes were particularly prone to conducting social engineering experiments.25 In some cases, states sought to ‘construct’ an Indigenous industrial workforce. In the Soviet Union, reindeer herders were forced to collectivize following the first national five-year plan for the reorganization and industrialization of agriculture. Mostly, however, industrialization was enabled by a massive influx of southern workers – and in the USSR, a vast forced labour force. In most countries, formal education played a key role in assimilating Indigenous peoples by introducing Western formal skills and majority languages to otherwise traditional communities. Despite these educational efforts, southerners occupied – and in many cases still hold – key political, administrative and economic positions in Arctic communities. While Indigenous populations are the majority in some Arctic regions, they are a small minority in Russia’s Far North. Conversely, in Greenland, the number of Danes is relatively small and gradually declining. While there

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was an intention that Greenlandic society should mirror that of Denmark, the Danish government did not conceive Greenland as a ‘frontier’ that would eventually become settled by Danes.26 Greenland was never an essential component of the Danish national identity.27 In contrast, the ‘frontier’ myth permeated the United States’, Canada’s and the Soviet Union’s discourse on northern development; it was a ‘terra nullius’ or resource territory that was open for settlement. Philip Steinberg et al. suggest that the idea of Arctic exceptionalism frames the region as a remote colony rather than as a frontier that will eventually become an integral part of the nation state.28 They continue, ‘In such a situation, the appropriate political response might focus less on adjusting existing laws to grant distant capitals special powers over their icy domains and more on granting these domains political independence.’29 The twentieth century has seen significant political decolonization in the Arctic. Economic decolonization has involved formalizing Indigenous land rights in Canada and Alaska, and cultural decolonization has included teaching local languages and adopting them in public administration, as has happened in Nunavut and Greenland. In Canada, several Indigenous territories, notably Nunavut, have acquired vastly increased autonomy. Iceland became a sovereign nation in 1918 and Greenland is on a path towards full independence. However, centre-periphery power relationships are, to an extent, replicated within independent Indigenous societies. One example is the political centralization that has taken place in Greenland and the dominance of West Greenlandic language and culture over smaller populations in the east and the north of the country.30 While development and modernization have brought benefits to Arctic populations, colonial relationships with southern metropolitan centres remain a feature of the discourse of northern development. Repeating a dominant narrative, political scientists Oran Young and John Dryzek describe the central mechanisms of what they label ‘internal colonialism’ as more than a simple relationship of conscious exploitation; rather, it is a consequence of the contact between affluent industrial societies which display a largely uncontrollable need for raw materials and small communities located in a region that is sparsely populated but unusually rich in natural resources. The dominant Southern societies (whether capitalist or socialist) cannot control their requirements for natural resources, and remote communities cannot acquire an effective voice in the policymaking processes of these societies.31 Southern experts and skilled workers are still imported to fill administrative and industrial jobs in the Arctic. Profits from the large or multinational corporations that operate in the Arctic still end up in southern capitals, while northern ecosystems suffer.32 Centralized state control continues to play a significant role in large parts of the Arctic, and the colonial political,

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economic, social and cultural imprints on the region and its communities endure. While many Arctic regions are no longer colonies in a formal sense, they remain stuck in a post-colonial power imbalance with southern societies.33 As mentioned above, the Arctic can be defined in any number of ways, but in the following brief history of the colonization and economic development of the region, it makes sense to include the following territories:

Canada’s North Northern communities have existed and traded with the South for centuries. Around 1900, the Klondike Gold Rush resulted in an influx of miners to Yukon, which signalled the start of industrial exploitation of resources across the North. Overall, government intervention in the North remained relatively minimal until the Second World War, when American and Canadian military installations and bases brought Indigenous populations into closer contact with Western culture. In the late 1950s, the government encouraged private corporations to exploit northern natural resources to benefit the national economy. As a result, the modern economic history of the Canadian North has been dominated by the initiation and subsequent termination of a series of oil, gas and mining projects, with consequences for urban and regional development and local communities. The postwar period also saw new policies for the social development of northern populations, such as programmes for housing, education, employment and city-building. In the 1970s, environmental concerns started to dominate the debate about northern development, and political reforms led to expanded autonomy for Indigenous groups in different regions, culminating in the establishment of the Inuit-dominated federal territory of Nunavut in 1999 and the autonomous area of Nunatsiavut within Newfoundland and Labrador in 2005.

Russia’s North In the Soviet Union, ideological convictions led to extensive colonization and city-building in the Far North from the 1930s. Industrialization took place on an unprecedented scale as a component of the centrally planned national economy. According to environmental historian Andy Bruno, ‘the rapid creation of a new industrial civilization north of the polar circle … was part of a deliberate effort of the Stalinist political system to transform a periphery into a center of socialist modernity’.34 However, despite enormous efforts by the state, ‘modernization did not initially lead to a functioning socialist city above the polar circle, but to a profound human and natural tragedy in which disease, hunger, filth, coldness, de-forestation, pollution,

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and disorder raged’.35 The various Indigenous peoples of the Soviet North were subjected to ‘Sovietization’ and ended up as marginal and largely rural minorities in the highly urbanized North.36 Soviet planners routinely ignored the actual costs of territorial development, and sometimes built cities in places that made little economic sense.37 After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many of these industrial settlements have closed down. Overly large cities have struggled to survive, and social indicators have plummeted.38 At the same time, the region has become even more essential to Russia’s geopolitical ambitions and its economy as an oil and gas producer. In addition to the economic and social difficulties in the post-soviet cities, the Russian North also suffers from long-term ecological damage as well as continued pollution from industries and cities.

Alaska Various Indigenous groups have inhabited Alaska for millennia, and from the eighteenth century up until it was purchased by the United States in 1867, the territory was appended to the Russian empire. Alaska has long been a ‘resource frontier’, and its resources have been exploited and exported by corporations based elsewhere.39 The period around the turn of the twentieth century saw several gold rushes and sudden population surges, and the modern economic history of Alaska has been turbulent with various boom-and-bust cycles.40 The Second World War brought large numbers of servicemen to the territory and led to significant development of cities and infrastructure. The discovery of oil in the North Slope region in the late-1960s transformed the state’s economy and increased its economic importance to the United States.41 In 1972, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act resolved land rights issues relating to oil pipeline construction and established collectively owned Indigenous corporations that manage significant lands and resources. Today, large areas of the state are protected wilderness, and Alaska has a considerable income and number of jobs relating to tourism and fishing. The state benefits from the presence of the US military, but overall the economy of Alaska relies on mining and oil.

Greenland Greenland has been settled in continuous waves from North America and Europe over millennia. The ancestors of the contemporary Inuit population migrated to Greenland from Alaska around 1,000 years ago and Scandinavians arrived in 986. Danish-Norwegian missionaries and traders established settlements in the early eighteenth century and Greenland was a Danish colony until 1953, when it became an integrated part of the Danish state. This change in status resulted in large-scale government programmes

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for economic and social development, and a government organization was set up to direct the construction of schools, hospitals and housing for the entire population. The Danish state also built commercial harbours and fish processing plants in new industrial towns. As a result, Greenlandic society urbanized rapidly, and many smaller settlements were closed down. Today, Greenland is a self-governing nation within the Kingdom of Denmark. Along with the other Nordic countries, Greenland is a high-income society.42 The primary income comes from fishing, but the government budget relies heavily on subsidies from Denmark. Traditional hunting is still practised in many places, and the government seeks to diversify the economy by investing in infrastructure and tourism. Despite well-documented mineral deposits, mining remains marginal to the economy.

The Nordic Arctic The Arctic region of Scandinavia was colonized by agricultural settlers from the South from the Middle Ages and up to the twentieth century. This settlement brought new people to the Sámi homeland, Sápmi, which straddles the northern regions of Sweden, Finland and Norway and extends into Russia. While the Sámi do not have exclusive land rights or autonomous political decision-making power in any of the three Nordic countries, the Sámi people (around 100,000) are recognized by their respective governments as a distinct community and are mostly integrated into the national job markets and economies.43 Large-scale industrial mining started in the north of Norway, Sweden and Finland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including in the Norwegian high Arctic Svalbard archipelago. Particularly the iron production in northern Sweden has been essential to the regional economy. The Second World War resulted in territorial losses for Finland in favour of the Soviet Union, also in the resource-rich North. After the war, a central planning agency in Norway oversaw the urban reconstruction and industrialization of the devastated northern parts of the country, a region that is now benefitting from offshore gas drilling. Iceland and the Faroe Islands were settled by Europeans in the Early Medieval Period, and are today modern societies with diversified economies and large fishing industries. The regions of Sweden, Finland and Norway that extend above the Arctic Circle were until relatively recently considered to be peripheral ‘norths’. However, along with Iceland and the Faroe Islands, these regions now increasingly self-identify as belonging to the circumpolar Arctic. This means that Arctic towns and cities in these Nordic countries, for historical reasons, differ only marginally from cities elsewhere in their respective countries.44

CHAPTER TWO

Building cities in the Arctic

The Arctic urban development boom from the 1950s to the 1970s coincided with the peak of late or high Modernism in architecture and urban planning. The construction of modern cities was part of largescale programmes for the industrialization and modernization of what governments and experts considered undeveloped and pre-modern regions. The motivations for city-building included the Arctic states’ desire for economic development, but also the welfare of the residents of the North. Governments transformed northern areas and communities to conform with modern society – often with little regard for local culture, knowledge and concerns. Modernist architects projected architectural thinking onto a region that was ‘underdeveloped’ and in need of a new architecture of its own. States and private corporations built cities for particular purposes where no settlements previously existed, and many of these communities share similar design characteristics. The realization that unique solutions and design models developed in one part of the Arctic could be relevant or applicable to other locations within the region was central to the rise of the concept of the Arctic City.

High Modernist development After the Second World War, Modernist architects and planners quickly, efficiently and economically rebuilt Europe’s cities. Modernism had emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, as a cultural and philosophical response to the industrialism and the rapid urbanization that took place. In the inter-war decades, Modernist architecture expressed a radical and avantgarde vision of a new and better world expressed through a contemporary

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‘international’ style. The Modernist movement rejected the decorative and representational aspects of classical architectural culture and argued that architecture should be unadorned and ‘rationally’ reveal its purpose and mode of construction. Partition of functions should logically and visually order the city in ways that ensured minimal ambiguity and friction between urban flows and uses, which resulted in zoning and thereby the separation of industry, housing and other urban functions. Architects and planners analysed the functional requirements of buildings and cities and strove for efficiency by optimizing the individual components using modern technology and construction techniques. As an example of how architects and planners translated the utopian promises of Modernism to built form, John R. Gold identifies three dimensions of the architects’ promise of a better world in Modernist European housing districts: (1) the promotion of social equality through egalitarian designs, (2) the freeing up of time and space for contact and association by introducing time-saving technology and shared facilities, and (3) a promise of community-building in new neighbourhoods.1 In the post-war period of Keynesian economics, states invested heavily in city-building and industrialization for long-term economic growth in ways that echoed the war-time mobilization of the economy for military purposes. While architectural Modernism already had a decades-long history, Modernist urban planning blossomed and was embraced by governments in Europe, North America and the Soviet Union during this period. Modernist urban planning became essential to the post-war reconstruction of entire cities and construction of new and better societies in the period that David Harvey and others refer to as ‘high modernism’.2 Modernist urban planning involved breaking with the past, and planners anticipated and even encouraged a degree of social disruption to overcome traditionalism. Beyond promoting architecture and urban planning as a technological and technocratic system, high Modernist rationality considered the world to be malleable because its internal logic could be discovered, measured, calculated and manipulated. The pre-war rise of the social sciences made it plausible that individuals and society could be optimized towards desired forms. Governments’ attempts at social engineering to create state subjects in new, urbanized landscapes in the North reflected such optimization.3 States established centralized planning organizations with experts in engineering, sociology, architecture, medicine and other disciplines. These organizations initiated and oversaw largescale industrial and technological development projects that included the construction of cities. These modernization programmes were not restricted to war-damaged Europe but also extended to colonies and peripheral regions where economic performance was weak and social structures did not conform to expectations of central agencies and states – places that were not yet modern.

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Seeing like a State Development of society by scientific methods was at the heart of Modernism. Mid-century models of development that were applied both in the South and in the North shared an assumption that development problems were similar, that modernization processes and development stages were comparable, and that solutions were universal. Government development policies around the world promoted Western market-based ideas of society.4 Even in the Soviet Union, which was not a capitalist society, economic development was also the goal. However, the socialist system considered it essential to develop all economic sectors in parallel, while the capitalist development policies prioritized specific industries for maximum effect. James C. Scott’s 1998 book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, details how centralized states initiated large-scale territorial development projects during the twentieth century.5 Scott identifies a particular type of landscape-industrial megaproject that seems to align uniquely with states’ concerns and priorities. He refers to the territorial development and planning agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority from 1933, as overseeing the ‘granddaddy of all regional development projects’.6 This megaproject was initiated under President Roosevelt’s New Deal programme to further economic growth and regional job creation. The purpose of the project was to harness and control nature through hydroelectric dams, flood control, shipping canals and agricultural development, and the responsible ‘super-agency’ was bestowed with significant administrative and economic autonomy and authority to carry the project through. This type of expert-driven industrial megaproject endeavoured to dominate nature. It also reflected the idea that ‘society became an object that the state might manage and transform with a view toward perfecting it’.7 High Modernist development projects were utopian and necessarily conceptual, and abstract citizens became standardized subjects of planning. Ultimately, Scott argues, ‘state social engineering was inherently authoritarian’, and the failure to recognize local conditions and include local knowledge led to the collapse of many visionary large-scale schemes.8 The development discourse that Scott and others have identified favours Western thinking and definitions of what it means to be modern and what defines good development.9 ‘Development’ continues to reflect the perpetuated power relationships of post-colonialism. Moreover, geographers Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick suggest that development is ‘reflective of the best of human aspirations, and yet, exactly for this reason, subject to the most intense manipulation, liable to be used for purposes that reverse its original intent by people who feign good intentions, the more to gain power’.10

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Development in the Arctic The Western discourse of development from primitive to modern and industrialized societies has dominated policies in the Arctic. Powerful state planning organizations played a vital role in the large-scale resource development and modernization of the region in the twentieth century.11 In the Soviet Union, Glavsevmorput (the Main Administration of the Northern Sea Route) had total control over the modernization and industrialization of the North in the 1930s. After the Second World War, Grønlands Tekniske Organisation (the Technical Organization of Greenland) and to a lesser degree the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development played critical roles in the modernization of Arctic territories in their respective countries. Southern governments established these organizations for geopolitical and economic reasons. However, they also worked towards the creation of what historians Matthew Farish and P. Whitney Lackenbauer call ‘modern individuals in an alien space’.12 The twentieth-century development of Arctic territories by the Soviet Union and other Arctic nations, and the social engineering involved, aligns with Scott’s description of the components and strategies of high Modernism.13 Only the Soviet Union was an authoritarian society with direct government management, which Scott suggests is a precondition for the formulation and execution of these schemes. However, all Arctic territories and peoples were caught in colonial power relationships with central governments, and for most of the twentieth century, northern communities had little influence on policies directed at them. Private corporations also played a key part in development projects, and sociologist Chris Southcott suggests that because industrialization of the Arctic was expensive and workers had to be imported at significant cost, powerful industries were motivated to pursuing stable legal and political conditions by aligning closely with states’ colonial interests.14 In 1976, economic historian Kenneth Rea found that a similar overall logic of industrialization and development had unfolded all across the Arctic. Still, he noted differences: the development of Alaska had, to some extent, been guided by environmental concerns, while the development of Greenland rested on a ‘“peculiar” Danish preoccupation with the well-being of its predominantly native population’.15 In contrast, Rea considered the Canadian North to be wide-open to commercial and industrial exploitation.

Development today Opposition to Modernist planning and development models surfaced in several of the Arctic countries during the 1970s. This was a result of increased critical attention to the assimilation policies towards Indigenous peoples

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that were integral parts of the social engineering of the high Modernist era. The opposition also coincided with anti-authoritarian youth movements in Europe and North America and reflected anti-colonial sentiments around the world. Within urban planning, industrialization and the associated environmental degradation were increasingly met with scepticism. Northern planners also started paying more attention to local cultural specificities and preferences, which aligned with international trends for citizen empowerment and local community building. While the 1970s signalled the start of the end of the dominant development policies in the Arctic, most northern regions are still marginal in terms of infrastructure, and income levels are generally low compared to elsewhere in the relevant countries.16 Nevertheless, the economy of the Arctic has become globally significant, and large parts of the Arctic are well-developed.17 Iceland, Arctic Norway and Greenland are high-income territories, while income in Northern Russia is low in comparison.18 The two major oil-producing Arctic countries, Russia and the United States, have seen significant profits from northern operations and are home to the largest cities in the Arctic. While state-controlled and international companies have profitable operations in the region, local benefits are sometimes marginal.19 Concerns for national economic growth still shape northern policies in most Arctic countries, but the resource exploitation projects often do not help local communities become sustainable.20 The Arctic has seen increased Indigenous empowerment and local political agency in recent decades, for instance in Alaska, Canada and Greenland. The widening global interest in the Arctic has made the region attractive and ‘marketable’ as a business region that is also increasingly open to visitors and immigrants from the rest of the world. Nevertheless, while governments and communities across the Arctic are actively trying to diversify local economies, the economic future of the North will likely remain reliant on resource extraction and primary industries for the foreseeable future.

The urbanization of the Arctic Urban development in the Arctic was central to southern states’ colonial policies, and urbanization played a crucial role in assimilating Indigenous peoples to Western urban life.21 The timelines of urbanization in the Arctic vary significantly between countries and reflect the colonization history of particular regions. For instance, the settlement of semi-nomadic groups was largely completed in Greenland around 1850, while this process was only concluded a century later in Canada.22 Also, the government of the Soviet Union oversaw industrial development and city-building in the Arctic several decades before Western governments launched comparable programmes. Political scientist Marlene Laruelle identifies three phases of urbanization in the Arctic that explain the existence of cities today.23 The first is what

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she calls the ‘colonial’ wave that consisted of European encroachment on Indigenous territories throughout the Arctic. This wave started in the Middle Ages in Russia and Scandinavia, but only commenced in North America in the nineteenth century. This early phase mostly resulted in the construction of trade, administrative and missionary posts. Next, Arctic urban development in the twentieth century took place for a range of reasons, and settlements and cities were constructed as regional administrative centres, military camps, or to attract southern experts and skilled workers for the industries. Laruelle identifies this stage of urbanization as a particular Soviet phenomenon that was the result of hyper-centralized power, a preference for territorial-scale resource exploitation projects, as well as the state ideology for distributed development across the territory of the socialist state. This second stage, which started with the first five-year plan in 1928 and continued to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, included millions of new city-dwellers and resulted in cities that are still the biggest in the circumpolar region. Canada, Norway and Greenland also experienced large-scale urbanization as a result of government modernization and development policies and programmes after the Second World War. Still, these were less concerned with settling large numbers of southern colonizers. The third significant urbanization stage identified by Laruelle is the ‘globalization’ wave and the emergence of post-industrial ‘central’ cities in Arctic regions with diversified economies and localized political administrations. These growing urban and government hubs include Anchorage, Nuuk and Iqaluit. In the Russian North, however, both the larger and smaller cities are shrinking. Notable exceptions are military (closed) settlements in certain regions, as well as cities linked to oil and gas extraction. Military construction of infrastructure (roads, ports and airports) and settlements in the form of strategic bases have been a significant factor in the development of the Arctic. These activities were linked to strategic concerns over national sovereignty. The occupation and inhabitation of northern territories were fundamental drivers in the urbanization of the Soviet Far North, but also in the establishment of bases and settlements in the Canadian Arctic. Concerns with upholding sovereignty in demilitarized Svalbard even motivated the Norwegian state to subsidize mining operations that were at best only marginally profitable. In 2013, there were 4 million people living in the Arctic.24 However, recent estimates by the Nordic Council of Ministers, according to other criteria, put the population of the Arctic at around 7 million.25 The most urbanized part of the Arctic is Russia’s Far North, which is home to the majority of the entire population of the Arctic.26 Overall, the population of the region is increasingly concentrating in the larger cities.27 This urbanization is accelerated by industrialization, militarization, and the further development of public services, tourism and administration.28 Across the circumpolar region, there are five cities with over 100,000 inhabitants. Almost half of the Arctic population live in cities with over 50,000 people, and 74 per cent

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live in settlements with over 5,000 residents.29 Across the Arctic, around 1 million people belong to forty Indigenous groups, but the degree of urbanization of Indigenous populations varies across the region.30 Ninety per cent of the Indigenous population of Greenland live in towns and cities, 50 per cent in Canada, 60 per cent in Alaska, 45 per cent in Russia and 36 per cent in Scandinavia.31

The rise of the Arctic City The technical challenges of Arctic construction have dominated experts’ and decision-makers’ approach to city-building for most of the twentieth century. Building on the experiences of Arctic military operations and infrastructure projects during the Second World War, architects in the postwar period explored new and revolutionary options for the design of Arctic settlements. In 1945, the Swiss-Austrian architect Ernst Egli proposed a model of urban design for the Arctic, and in 1951, he published a further developed proposal, the ‘Unborn Town’, for subarctic Siberia and Alaska.32 This urban prototype focused exclusively on the intersection of technology and climate adaptation. It consisted of a mega-building for 16,000 people, which Egli suggested could be combined with others to form settlements with up to 128,000 inhabitants. He argued that the surface area of these mega-buildings should be reduced to minimize heat loss, which is the rationale behind their round shape. Egli also explored design solutions to maximize sun capture and mitigate the adverse effects of the polar winds. His design exploration based on scientific calculations descended from the modern German Städtebau (city-building) tradition of urban planning, and contributed to an emerging literature on urban climatology and climatic architecture in the 1950s. Similar studies on climatological design also came out of Cold War studies of the challenges of constructing strategic outposts and settlements in the high North.33 As indicated by Egli’s model city, the Arctic functioned as a space for fantastic architectural projections and context-less exploration of selected architectural design parameters. Over the following decades, architects in Europe, North America and the Soviet Union published various similarly radical theoretical architectural and urban design proposals. These projects gave prominence to technical solutions to the problems associated with building and living in the extreme environment of the Arctic. Echoing the popular science-fiction genre at the time, as well as the heroic pathos of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration, the proposed projects had a futuristic quality that stretched the technological imaginary within architecture to include aircraft-style construction methods, new materials and nuclear power. During the early phase of urban development in the Soviet Arctic in the 1930s, there was little evidence of ideas of an Arctic urbanism and

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FIGURE 2.1   ‘Study of a town in the antarctic zone. A residential district with four dwelling-circles. Inner diameter of a dwelling-ring: 100 metres; outer diameter: 150 metres. 36 apartments on each floor, viz. 792 apartments in the whole dwelling-ring (22 floors). About 4000 inhabitants in the dwelling-ring or 16,000 in the whole residential district. The height of the dwelling-ring is about 90 metres. The business centre is situated in an inner circle. From each floor a sheltered approach leads from the dwelling-ring to that business centre with its workshops, schools, cinemas, theatres, library, hospital, and sportfields’. Ernst Arnold Egli, Die Neue Stadt in Landschaft Und Klima [Climate and Town Districts, Consequences and Demands], trans. Ch. Neuenschwander (Erlenbach-Zürich: Verlag für Architektur, 1951): 54.

architecture unique to the region. Instead, the emphasis at the time was on reproducing southern urban models as a manifestation of the dominance of socialist society over the adversarial northern nature. City-building in

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FIGURE 2.2   Ernst Egli: Proposal for a city in the Arctic zone. © Das Werk: Architektur und Kunst 32 (1945).

Arctic Canada and the Soviet Union after the Second World War continued to replicate southern urban scenes to attract southerners to come north, work in its industries and contribute to growing national economies. This period witnessed a rapid increase in Arctic urban development as part of government programmes for modernization and development across the circumpolar region, and Modernist urban design and architecture provided an appealing image of modernity. In the 1960s, Soviet planners and architects studied northern living conditions and suggested that southern design standards and norms regulating the number and type of public services had to be adapted to work in the Far North. Some observers of the execution of the urban development programmes in Greenland and Arctic Canada were also critical of the import of southern urban design models. In the 1960s and 1970s, architects responded to a growing appreciation of the uniqueness of the Arctic by departing from the high Modernist architecture and urbanism and proposing alternative approaches that were more sensitive to the cultural, social and climatic conditions of the North. Prominent among these was British-Swedish architect Ralph Erskine. His enclosed multifunctional town centre in Luleå in northern Sweden from 1955 and the project for a ‘subarctic habitat’ that he presented in 1959 and partly realized in the Svappavaara

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mining community in 1965 attracted international attention as prototypes of Arctic urban design. His design concept for northern settlements, which will be described in detail later in the book, inspired architects across the circumpolar North. Erskine’s writings also inspired the development of the normative urban design theory that was widely disseminated by the North American Winter Cities movement. The advocates of this movement, including Norman Pressman, were instrumental in a growing focus on urban liveability in northern cities in the 1980s and 1990s. The powerful state agencies that oversaw territorial development and modernization programmes in the Soviet Union, Greenland and Canada experimented with building techniques and explored housing typologies in the North, but they also followed developments in other Arctic territories. During the 1970s, this evolved into a systematic international exchange of knowledge about northern construction and urban development. Experts visited ‘sister organizations’ in other countries, and English and Russian language literature on northern construction and design was translated. In 1978, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), which promoted collaboration around regional development, organized a symposium on ‘Human Settlements, Planning and Development in the Arctic’. The event took place in Nuuk in 1978 and had delegations from the United States, Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and the Soviet Union.34 According to Gunnar Rosendahl, who was the director of the Greenland Technical Organization at the time, this event was the start of the systematic sharing of technical knowledge about Arctic city-construction.35 Further exchange took place in 1988 when UNECE organized a follow-up event, the ‘Research Colloquium on Planning Housing and Construction Problems of Human Settlements in Harsh Living Conditions’ in Turku, Finland. More recently, the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Nordregio research institute for regional development and planning organized ‘The First International Conference on Urbanization in the Arctic’ in Nuuk in 2012. Events like these reflect a widespread idea that the uniqueness of the North requires the development of particular models of urbanism and architectural design. Integral to the visionary architectural projects of the mid-twentieth century and the lasting tradition of northern urban design was the idea of Arctic exceptionalism. The idea that architects cannot conceptualize Arctic cities with the help of available urban models also reflects underlying assumptions that the Arctic is somehow distinct and removed from ordinary politics and general theoretical frameworks.36 This romantic tradition fixated on the exotic characteristics of the region’s landscape and promoted the view that the practice of architecture had to be entirely reconfigured to shelter people from the overwhelming forces of nature. In the architects’ theoretical conceptualization of the architecture and design of Arctic cities, climate and the environment loomed large, while ordinary and mundane facets of urban daily life received little attention.

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Certain ideas continue to pervade contemporary discourses on Arctic cities and frame the thinking and production of the architecture, urbanism and planning in the region. There is still a tendency to see Arctic cities as underdeveloped, underperforming or deficient in terms of city planning. They depend on outside resources, air transport and seasonal supplies of food and other essentials. At the same time, Arctic towns and cities are concentrated nodes of urban life in inhospitable landscapes. They are selfsufficient ‘islands’ that are not part of regional urban networks. They are often sites of Indigenous ways of life, which revolve around access to nature and adaption to natural forces. Such conceptualizations of the Arctic City have, with notable exceptions, received little critical attention. There appears to be broad consensus among architects (mostly located outside the region) about what constitutes urbanism in the North.

The competing logics of Arctic architecture

I

n an article in Arctic Record, published in 2016, I mapped the professional and academic discourse on the architecture of the Arctic through a systematic review of academic and professional literature.37 This review revealed a set of competing perspectives and notions of architecture in the Arctic that have evolved and interacted over time. These socially constructed perspectives or ‘logics’ of architecture trace the development history in the region and continue to condition contemporary approaches to building and designing in the Arctic today. The study applies a broad definition of architecture that includes not only the products of professional architectural practice but also other ways in which buildings and the built environment are produced and perceived by architects and engineers, as well as by local and Indigenous people. Thus, ‘architecture’ includes designed ‘works’, engineered structures with few aesthetic considerations, as well as the physical framing of everyday spatial practices. It also includes narratives and descriptions of the relationship between people and the environment by social scientists, psychologists, archaeologists and anthropologists. The perspectives or logics of architecture revealed in the study are:

1. The Arctic as Space, in which the Arctic is the ultimate frontier of civilization. The Arctic is a hostile and uninhabited environment where architecture provides total life support through advanced technology and engineering. Examples of this logic include high Arctic research or military bases, such as the United States’ nuclear-powered Camp Century that was buried into the Greenland ice sheet in 1959. 2. Polar Extremes. Here, inspired architects propose a visually charged and technologically uncompromising architecture that responds to extreme environmental conditions. The severe environment forces designers to

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challenge dominant architectural norms and pursue radical designs. The zoomorphic 2013 British Halley Research Station in the Antarctic by Hugh Broughton Architects, which is raised on legs, is a paradigmatic example of this logic. 3. Psychological Arctic. The third logic stems from environmental psychology and studies of how the conditions of Arctic habitation challenge individual well-being, such as long periods of extended isolation, indoor confinement and the constraints imposed by living in small communities. This logic addresses these concerns through considerations of light, colour use, distribution of communal and private space, etc., and is expressed in user-centric designs of Arctic research stations.38 4. Arctic Engineering. According to this logic, architecture is a technological system that engineers and designers can optimize towards efficiency and economy. Specialists in fields such as ‘cold climate design’ have developed solutions for permafrost construction and built the energy systems and infrastructure that make modern life in Arctic communities possible. 5. Arctic Ethnographic. This logic relates to anthropology and archaeology. Pre-modern dwellings reflect the culture, societal structure and religious beliefs of northern communities, and over time Indigenous knowledge has balanced available means and scare resources with basic climatic functionality. In recent years, this logic has been activated and reappropriated by Indigenous peoples as a source of cultural empowerment. For instance, igloo building has figured in Nunavut school curricula.39 6. Arctic Regionalism. Reflecting international post-modern architectural culture, architects map inter-linked physical and social contextual conditions and design a ‘softened’ Modernist architecture that focuses on place-making, identity and community-building. According to this logic, architectural form links directly to the analysis of climatic and functional requirements as well as the social ordering of space. Ralph Erskine’s urban designs are primary examples of this logic. 7. A New ‘Indigenous’ Architecture. Extending ideas about regionality, this logic considers the Arctic an inhabited region with an emerging architectural design culture of its own. Architecture expresses regional identities that respond to local landscapes and desires and is designed by architects that belong to local communities. Examples of this logic are the bird-watching hides of Norwegian architectural practice Biotope and the landscape-integrated dwellings of Icelandic Studio Granda. 8. Geopolitical North. The emergence of the Arctic as a political and economic region prompts investigations of its digital, political, economic and geographic ‘architecture’. Echoing architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller’s mapping of global systems, statistics and remote sensing data are used to support territorial mapping of the North’s mobile

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demography and globalized economy. This mapping supports projections of neo-industrial futures after the melting of the polar sea-ice. A prominent example of this approach is the study of Arctic territories by Harry Gugger and students at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne.40 9. Cultural North. The final logic also refers to the discourse on the globalization of the Arctic but considers the region a fragile and cultural territory where communities and ecosystems are under threat from capitalism and climate change. Designs relating to this logic combine civic action and local knowledge with digital open-source tools and media. Through art and architectural projects, this logic legitimizes Indigenous rights by reinforcing claims of ecosystem stewardship.

CHAPTER THREE

Studying Arctic cities

Cities in the Arctic are few and far apart. Academics from various fields have studied the communities of the North for decades to document and support development. Still, urbanism remains a peripheral perspective within Arctic Studies.1 Cities and urban design in the region are under-studied and undertheorized, and the ‘Arctic City’ is a mostly uncontested conceptualization. This chapter reviews the architectural and the non-architectural literature on urbanization, urbanism and urban design in the North. It is centred on Canadian literature, which is the most comprehensive, but supplements it with research covering Alaska, Greenland, the Soviet Union and Russia, as well as Scandinavia. The question posed in the regional case studies in part two of this book is: Why do cities in the Arctic and subarctic look the way they do and what are the architectural ideas about cities in the region that has influenced their appearance? The underlying investigation concerns how conceptions of human habitation in the region are formed, and how such conceptualizations reflect the political economy of city construction. Thus, this book supplements dominant narratives and interpretations of the status and future development of the Arctic with architectural and urbanistic perspectives on the role and potential of cities and settlements of the region. This chapter introduces a set of frameworks for the study of urbanism and urban design across the Arctic. These frameworks allow for a discussion on the links between the physical form of the city, the driving forces of urbanization in the region, and the international trends and discourses within the fields of urban planning and architecture.

Studies of the urban Arctic Settlements and communities have been examined and conceptualized within a range of academic disciplines. For many years, researchers approached

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the Arctic as an ‘empty’ and ‘other’ space of heroic exploration, and in the early twentieth century, it became the space of pre-modern peoples. Thus, research on the North proceeded along two tracks. The first was constituted by the natural sciences concerned with the physical environment. The other track was a social or anthropological study of the communities of the North; research that eventually extended to include settlements and urbanization.2 For a long time, studies of life in the Arctic focused on traditional communities, but during the critical city-building phase in the 1950s and 1960s, attention turned to the effects of urbanization on Indigenous groups – so-called ‘acculturation studies’. Reflecting widely held concerns, researchers often considered urbanity antithetical to Indigenous culture, which impeded academic attention to the specifics of urban life in the region.3 In recent decades, however, there has been increasing interest in studying the contemporary urban Arctic.4 As urbanity has become central to life in the North, it has become apparent that to focus exclusively on the non-urban and traditional life of Indigenous peoples would be to deny young generations a relevant framework for enacting change in their communities and lives.5 Leaning on anthropological approaches, some researchers have suggested that urban lifestyles, diversified and developed economies and flows of people, goods and information may be better indicators of urbanity than population numbers in the Arctic.6 Beyond anthropology, researchers from other fields have also studied the political, economic, social and cultural driving forces of urbanization in the Arctic. Radical changes in many northern communities, particularly the negative economic, social and demographic developments in Russian Arctic cities in the last two decades, have resulted in new attention to urban social and economic sustainability.7 For instance, researchers have investigated settlement patterns and the economic role of cities, as well as urban policies of small and peripheral communities.8 Architecture and urbanism have featured intermittently in interdisciplinary research on the social, political, cultural and physical environments that constitute Arctic or Northern Studies. After the Second World War, Canadian scholars wrote portraits of cities and city-building programmes in other parts of the Arctic, particularly Scandinavia, Greenland and the Soviet Union, that functioned as sources of inspiration for northern development.9 Canadian architects and urban planners also studied the new mining communities that governments and corporations planned and constructed in the north of the country.10 In response to the use of southern urban models in the planning of these towns, several authors called for the development of a specific urbanism for the North.11 This criticism was echoed by Danish architects who were sceptical about the Modernist architecture and urban design that the Greenland Technical Organization reproduced across Greenland as part of its modernization programme.12 In the 1960s, the social conditions of Arctic communities and the need for

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technically and culturally ‘appropriate’ housing also started to attract the attention of researchers and architects.13 Following Ernst Egli in 1951, Ralph Erskine and architects from Canada and the Soviet Union published various theoretical Arctic urban projects over the next couple of decades.14 These speculative projects explored solutions to the environmental challenges of the North and proposed technologically advanced solutions for future ideal communities. Many of the projects were for scientific bases or resource camps in the High Arctic and were praised as humanist and visionary examples of new communities in an inhospitable climate.15 In the 1980s, the writings of Norman Pressman and others associated with the Winter Cities movement explored urban planning and policy in cities across the circumpolar subarctic. They produced a normative urban design literature that promoted well-being, attractiveness and urban vitality in northern communities.16 In recent decades, architects have explored the intersection of Arctic citybuilding and climate change and researched the adaptations that northern settlements are facing.17 Accounts of Arctic urban design and architectural practices through the lens of architectural and urban planning history have also emerged.18 For instance, Ekatarina Kalemeneva has documented the architectural and urban development history of the Soviet Far North.19 Matthew Jull has focused on the conceptualization of Arctic architecture in Erskine’s Resolute Bay project, as well as the Soviet urban design model, the microrayon (microdistrict), as prototypes for contemporary urban design for the North.20 In her thesis on Greenland’s towns, architect Susan Carruth argues that ‘landscape, not place, has been the dominant framing of Greenland’.21 She proposes an ‘infrastructural urbanism’, where the material components of the city such as water pipes, harbours, energy systems, dogsledge infrastructures and dumps are not just passive enablers, but active producers of urbanity and the sense of place.22 Her approach echoes the claim by Peter Schweitzer et al. that ‘it is important to highlight the agency of the built environment in polar regions because it could be more easily overlooked here than in other regions’.23 In the Barents Region, which spans the northern parts of Norway, Finland, Sweden and the northeastern corner of Russia, Espen Røyseland and Øystein Rø have documented architectural form and territorial urbanization through a mapping that reveals ongoing cross-border driving forces and the regional characteristics of cities.24 In their substantial book, Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory, Lola Sheppard and Mason White have documented the Indigenous and imported territorial, spatial and architectural practices of the historical and contemporary lived space of Inuit Nunangat (the Inuit homeland) in the Canadian Arctic.25 This study documents the unique ‘urbanism’ in the Canadian Arctic that is constituted through territorial practices by the government, local Inuit and various other actors.

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Framing research on Arctic cities The Arctic has transformed from a pre-modern space to a highly urbanized region over the last century. The existing cities and settlements in the circumpolar region are the result of planning carried out by governments and experts, but also of the interaction of various policies outside the field of urban planning, corporate strategies, and the everyday practices and decisions of individuals. The idea of a particular Arctic urbanism is an architectural imaginary that has been shaped over time by a diverse set of cultural, social, economic and political circumstances. An analysis of this imaginary traces both explicit and implicit articulations of ideas and concepts of urbanism across the region. It also outlines the political and economic contexts for urban planning and development that frame the design and planning and cities in the second half of the twentieth century. Further, the book details the regional learning that has played a part in the articulation of ideas of Arctic urbanism across the circumpolar North. While specifically exploring the emergence of the Arctic City in Greenland, Russia and Canada, this account leads to a discussion of the relevance, permutations and articulations of this concept in the contested and rapidly globalizing Arctic region as a whole. To frame this investigation of the Arctic City, the book starts by posing a series of questions: (1) What does it mean to frame settlements as ‘Arctic’? (2) How does ‘development’ condition thinking about Arctic cities? (3) What does it mean to study the form of cities? (4) What are the uses of ‘environmental’ images in the study of Arctic cities? 1. How are cities ‘Arctic’? Arctic urbanism and the Arctic City are not given concepts – but are constructed through discourse and practice. The idea of a unique region called ‘Arctic’ functions as a framework that allows for comparing and developing perspectives not just within, but also across the national borders that usually constrain the writing of urban planning and development history and theory. Rob Shields demonstrates how discourse constructs the Canadian North as a ‘margin’, which allows for a ‘comparative stock-taking of common spatial insights’ across locations.26 Kenneth Rea adopted a similar stance in his 1994 historical comparative study of the development of northern Canada within a ‘political-economic framework’, which provided an ‘overall view of northern development in Canada and abroad’.27 Rea argued for the relevance of comparing northern ‘situations which are at least superficially similar’, but acknowledged that a problem with this comparative operation is that the pervasive idea of an under-developed North obscured what was, in reality, a set of variations of typical regional development problems.28 Ken Coates agrees that the Arctic and Subarctic are probably very similar to other remote regions.29 He questions whether it is helpful to define North as an analytical category as many northern cities are more similar to southern counterparts than to other settlements in the circumpolar region. However,

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he also finds that while commonalities across the circumpolar North are few, they still make comparative analysis fruitful and may help overcome researchers’ conceptions of northern exceptionalism. The Arctic is thus a helpful categorization that enables comparisons of otherwise disparate urban contexts. Further, historians Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin contend that while the natural sciences and to some extent archaeology and anthropology have long studied conditions of the Arctic across national borders, it is only recently that historical scholarship has considered the trans-national North as a valuable analytical category that disrupts the narratives of the national capitals.30 This change corresponds with the construction of the Arctic as an international political region as described by Keskitalo.31 She highlights the importance of tracing the efforts and understandings that construct the ‘Arctic’, and reminds us that ‘work on “Arctic” issues involves participating in region-building’.32 Likewise, studying cities across the Arctic is in itself a construction of the Arctic City. 2. Arctic cities and the development discourse Development has played out in particular ways in the individual regions of the Arctic. Similar living conditions have over time diversified, partly as a consequence of national policies and administrative systems. Today, dependency on subsidies is still prevalent across the region; economic activity is often highly localized and typically more closely linked to southern metropolitan centres than to regional economic and industrial systems.33 Development was a core tenet of Modernism and was central to the formulation of social, economic and urban policies in the circumpolar North for a century. Development policies have shaped the contemporary society of the North to a degree where the Arctic, like the Third World, has been almost synonymous with development. Arturo Escobar explains that development ideologies and policies in the Third World have resulted in permanent under-development.34 Lee Huskey and Thomas A. Morehouse suggest that a core characteristic of development in remote regions is that it has primarily been concerned with overcoming economic, democratic and other problems relating to remoteness.35 Despite well-meaning efforts, ‘development’ subscribes to a Western knowledge and planning rationality and perpetuates asymmetrical centre-periphery relationships. Across the Arctic, development is a legacy of colonialism. Researchers study post-colonial cities from a central perspective, and planners and officials represent the power of capitals and central cities outside the region.36 Dryzek and Young outline two models of colonialism in the circumpolar North. One is a potentially benign diffusion of the dominant culture and economic growth, while the other is what they call ‘internal colonialism’, which is a structural continuation of ‘economic exploitation, dependency and political domination’.37 Research on the history of Arctic cities has to acknowledge underlying assumptions that northern settlements are ‘remote’ and thus ‘dependent’

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and in need of development. Administrators, decision-makers and architects are structurally biased towards ‘central’ perspectives on the character and role of cities in the North. Such latent tendencies are entrenched outside the region, but also residually influence the mindset of local administrators and urban practitioners. 3. The study of urban form Urban form understood as the structural relationship between buildings and urban space can be studied in any number of ways. In their review of the literature of urban morphology, Pierre Gauthier and Jason Gilliland distinguish between two modes of research of urban form: ‘internalist’ studies that consider form to be an independent system that evolves in stages, and ‘externalist’ perspectives that regard form to be the result of political, economic and cultural forces in the environment.38 Amos Rapoport supports the latter view and suggests that ‘any consideration of built environments must take into account not only the “hardware” but also people, their activities, wants, needs, values, lifestyles and other aspects of culture’.39 Gauthier and Gilliland further propose that form is studied either with a normative purpose, to provide prescriptive guidance, or with a cognitive purpose in order to explain phenomena of city form. While this book is not a conventional morphological study of northern settlements, Gauthier’s and Gilliland’s distinctions are useful to clarify that the adopted approach involves critically studying and describing a phenomenon to support theory development. This is substantially different from the large proportion of architectural and urban design theory that is normative and seeks to formulate principles along which design practices should evolve. Further, the research of the book aligns with the ‘externalist’ perspective and focuses on the social, economic and political contexts of the ‘production’ of urban form in the analysis of Arctic cities. 4. The uses of city images The contemporary city in the Arctic is the result of historical priorities that policymakers and planners articulated as visions in the past. Also, anticipatory images of the city’s future inform the decisions and priorities of planners and policymakers in the present. In this book, ‘city images’ combine historical representations, phenomenological narratives of urban space, sketches of cognitive mental maps and speculations about the urban futures of cities in each of the three countries. The city images are, in part, ‘environmental images’ – mental representations of the everyday world that evolve from individual interaction with urban space that is ‘soaked in memories and meanings’.40 Urban design theorist Kevin Lynch proposed that researchers could synthesize collective perceptual urban form based on input from representative individuals. His concern was to map, include and give authentic ‘form’ to urban space on the margin of the contemporary

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modern metropolis. While the amorphous urban landscapes that Lynch studied were far from the Arctic, they share some similarities with the unconsolidated space of many Arctic settlements. In contrast to Lynch, Rob Shields is critical to the ‘positivistic, sociologically and culturally naive “environmental image research” of the 1960s and 1970s’.41 Shields suggests that ‘a clear distinction must be made between research into people’s existential participation in their environment and research into the culturally mediated reception of representations of environments, places, or regions which are “afloat in society” as “ideas in currency”’.42 Further, Shields disapproves of the inherent behaviourist assumptions in the research, and points out that ‘place-images, and our views of them, are produced historically, and are actively contested’.43 Thus, while the city images in this book engage in the global creation of the ‘Arctic City’, this happens in ways that seek to circumvent the possible instrumentalist application of an environmental ‘image’ towards way-finding, cognition and sense of place within architecture and urban design. In books on Arctic communities, authors often portray the effects of the climate on human life in landscape scenes that represent the relationship between people and the environment in a given location.44 Such landscape scenes are, according to Bo Wagner Sørensen, representative of the outsider’s ‘objective’ gaze. For the anthropologist, however, this initial landscape is supplemented by a ‘second landscape that is produced through local practice’.45 For the academic author, presenting an image of a city and its urban landscape serves to ‘establish an authorial presence’ and legitimize the observer’s claim to have indeed been there.46 The city images of the book also lean on Lynch’s suggestion that the trained observer can engage mental images of the city’s form through a visual reading of the urban landscape. It is important, however, not to succumb to the enticing spatial causality that his method is sometimes believed to imply, but critically engage a wider range of historical and contemporary situated representations of place in the study of the Arctic City.

Territories of Arctic urbanism The recent development history of the Arctic provides an important context for the components and potentials of the current and future status of urbanism in the region. In this way, the study in this book distinguishes itself from other historical studies that benefit from more objective perspectives awarded by the distance of time. The ‘Arctic’ is a construct that makes comparisons possible across the northern territories of different countries. The association of many cities with the Arctic is in many cases quite recent and is a result of the cultural

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and political production of the Arctic as an international region. The range of settlements in this territory is substantial, and it is impossible to identify the typical Arctic settlement. For instance, the small hamlets that public perception typically associates with the Arctic are only home to a small proportion of the population of the region. Also, the Soviet-era housing blocks in Russia’s Far North, which are by far the most widespread type of residential architecture in the Arctic, are not unique to the region, and do not in most architects’ minds come close to responding to the identity and particular challenges of the Arctic. Thus, the idea of the Arctic City only reflects selected dimensions of the urban territory of the North, and many cities and settlements in the circumpolar North have never been framed by architects and planners as Arctic. Instead, they are conceptualized according to national and international frameworks of urbanism. This might even be the case for the majority of northern settlements, particularly as the Arctic has expanded in recent decades to include a much wider urban territory and a population in the millions. This book analyses the origins, structure and consequences of the Arctic City. This analysis cannot be approached by studying any singular settlement. Rather the Arctic City is formed by a set of visions, ideas and assumptions that influence the design and planning in the region in various ways. To understand the multiple ways the Arctic City has interacted with actual urban policy and planning in the area, the urban territories selected as cases are very different. However, they all have a record of public, academic and architectural debates on the role and design of urbanism and cities in the Arctic. These debates, concerning the political and economic framing of settlements as well as their planning and design, have played out quite differently in the three countries – and on diverging timelines. The urbanism of the Canadian North is representative of the North American tradition of urbanism, Greenland (as part of Denmark) was developed according to northern European urban ideals, while the Soviet Far North featured an advanced Communist urban planning and design culture. During the twentieth century, all three countries had government-initiated programmes for northern urbanization and city-building. While these were quite different and reflect political and national ideologies, it is nevertheless possible to analyse and compare the interaction between policies for northern settlements and the visions and designs for cities across the three territories. Russia is by far the largest and most urbanized Arctic country. Since the population is shrinking, very little has been built in most parts of the Far North since the fall of the Soviet Union. This means that northern settlements function as more-or-less well-preserved records of the urban development policies and design strategies of the Soviet era. Canada’s North is the second-largest Arctic territory, but has a relatively small population. Urban planning in Canada’s North is well-documented, and some of the experimental urban design projects of the twentieth century have become international references for Arctic city-building. Urban development continues in an Arctic Canada

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that sees continued resource extraction and increased Indigenous political autonomy. While the North of Russia and Canada was significant to the formation of national identities in the two countries, Greenland did not play a similar role in Denmark. Also, Greenland is a high-income society where 90 per cent of the Indigenous population live in urban settlements.47 The island has a unique and well-documented urban planning history and is a particular case of colonization and de-colonization in the Arctic. Over time, the discourses on development, city-building and design in these three countries as well as the other Arctic territories have interacted to form the idea of the Arctic City.

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PART TWO

Arctic urban development

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CHAPTER FOUR

Developing Russia’s Arctic cities

Prelude: Greening the Soviet Arctic city Trees line the streets of Murmansk. They are not tall, but they are planted in dense linear strips along the avenues, making Murmansk a surprisingly green city despite its northern location. During the accelerated urban growth of the late 1960s, Murmansk had a landscaping department with over 100 workers and nine horticulturalists.1 Urban trees are also abundant elsewhere on the Kola Peninsula. In Monchegorsk, great care was taken to conserve patches of the original taiga in the city centre. Starting in the 1930s, a substantial effort went into not only preserving, planting and managing urban vegetation, but also identifying the species of plants that could thrive in, and ornament, urban environments under the region’s climate.2 This was not just a whim of the local workers’ soviet (council), but a result of a scientific programme for urban planning and beautiful cityscapes in the North. The Polar-Alpine Botanical Garden of the S. M. Kirov Kola Branch of the Academy of Sciences, the world’s northernmost botanical garden, was formally started in 1931 (following preliminary work from 1924), under the directorship of Nikolai Avrorin. At an elevation of 360 metres, the garden is situated at the centre of the Kola Peninsula, more than 100 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle and not far from Monchegorsk and Murmansk. The Khibiny Mountains surround the garden, snow covers the ground more than half the year, and trees and shrubs grow slowly. The surprisingly lush garden contains plants and trees like evergreen rhododendrons, Manchurian alder, chokecherries from Amur, as well as fir and larch from Siberia.3 Researchers collected seeds and plant samples from both within and outside the USSR, which were then cultivated and acclimatized over

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several years under the region’s marginal conditions for plant growth. The garden’s staff studied the aesthetic qualities of grasses, flowers, shrubs and trees, and evaluated the robustness and durability of plant varieties over periods of up to ten years.4 The purpose of this process was to identify which species of plants were suitable for boulevards, parks and gardens for recreational use, and the list of fifteen tree species that came out of experiments in the 1930s is still in use in Murmansk.5 The institution has also published several editions of a regional flora, as well as handbooks on urban landscaping.6 Beyond the garden itself, experiments were also carried out with industrial production of daffodils and tulips in the disused mines of the surrounding mountains. The purpose of this operation was to supply cities in the region with flowers for national celebrations, such as May Day, Victory Day and the October Revolution Day celebrations.7

FIGURE 4.1   The Polar Alpine Botanical Garden, located in the Khibiny Mountains 145 kilometres south of Murmansk, was founded in 1931. © Peter Hemmersam.

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The original aim of the botanical garden was to support the national plan for large-scale city building in the region, enhance the productivity of Soviet workers by promoting public health and well-being, but also to assist the food-producing agriculture.8 Soviet state policy intended to advance all regions of the union to the same level of industrialization and economic development. The botanical garden contributed to the building of Arctic cities by making it possible to achieve a level of urban greening that corresponded to standards elsewhere in the union. For urban gardeners throughout the Arctic and Subarctic USSR, the garden became a resource, and planners looked to Murmansk and the urban greening of the region’s cities for inspiration.9 The programme for the beautification of new industrial cities in the 1930s was part of the Stalin-era urban design programme of grand boulevards, vistas and squares that celebrated the achievements of the communist state. The classical architectural style of these cities was, according to Vladimir Paperny, intended for ideological and propaganda purposes by the government, rather than the needs of workers and their families.10 Also, assumptions of Soviet mastery over nature led to the instrumental exploration of urban vegetation to further urbanization in the region.11 The practical application of scientific methods in the Botanical garden reflects a continuity between science, applied science and technology under Soviet state ideology. The botanical garden is still in operation as a branch of the national Russian Academy of Sciences, but its purpose has changed over time. During the Khrushchev era ‘thaw’ in the 1950s and 1960s, the focus of operations shifted to enhancing the liveability of cities in the north and improving everyday life for individuals and families. Andrew Bond suggested that vegetation in Arctic cities became more than an aesthetic ‘frill’. Greenery was an essential psychological booster that enhanced the connection to nature, worked to reduce soil erosion and improved local climatic conditions by providing shelter from icy Arctic winds.12 Thus, the botanical garden cultivated robust grasses and trees that could thrive in northern urban spaces and help generate beneficial microclimates. Even more recently, the role of the botanical garden changed again to cultivating plants that are suitable for re-naturalizing the many abandoned industrial areas of the region.13 In the Soviet Union, the discourse of science was ideologically associated with the development of industrial cities and the visionary technological advancement of society. While fulfilling a pragmatic purpose, the PolarAlpine Botanical Garden also supported such grand narratives of future technological achievements, as illustrated by its director Nikolai Avrorin, who in 1964 wrote that: achievements of physics and technology do not cross out at all, but on the contrary, increase many times over the effectiveness of the creative efforts of botanists and plant breeders as they provide a possibility of

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unlimited use of artificial sources of heat and light for cultivation of useful and beautiful plants in any corner of our planet and at future space stations.14 The urbanization programme for the Soviet North was unrivalled in scale, and the operations of the botanical garden in developing urban landscaping programmes were advanced by international standards of the period. However, the first industrial cities in the Arctic region were built hurriedly using forced labour, and nearby Khibinogorsk (later Kirovsk) had to be relocated after a few years because insufficient care had been taken to ensure the climatic suitability of the location. In conclusion, the advanced approach to the urbanization of territories and the advancement of Socialist society represented by the Polar-Alpine Botanical Garden contrasted with the reality of city building in the Arctic region that was grim and often haphazard.

Mastering the North Russia is by far the largest and most populous of the Arctic countries. Here, urbanization started early and inspired later developments around the world. The cities of the Soviet North were developed before, and well beyond cities anywhere in the Polar region. From the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922 to 1989 (two years before its dissolution), various state organizations built sixty-eight cities and up to 500 towns and smaller settlements in the Far North of Russia.15 The population of the North continued to grow throughout this period, but after 1991, most communities in the region started shrinking. Despite this decline, the Russian North is still home to the majority of the population of the Arctic.16 According to Helge Blakkisrud and Geir Hønneland, the concept of a Russian North was not primarily a spatial entity when it came into official use, but referred to the Indigenous populations of the region.17 However, after the Second World War, the concept of the Far North as an administrative designation became significant in state development policies. The Far North spans regions north of the Arctic circle. It includes large tracts of Siberia and covers, in combination with the so-called ‘Territories equated to the Far North’, over 50 per cent of Russia. While the European Arctic to the west is relatively warm due to the North Atlantic Current, the interior of Siberia is the coldest permanently inhabited region on the globe, and here the Far North extends south of the Arctic circle. The borders of the North have changed over time in response to evolving priorities, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the boundary of the North shifted considerably southward.

FIGURE 4.2   Map of Arctic Russia with the administrative divisions ‘the Far North’ and ‘Territories Equated to the Far North’.

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Northern outposts The development of the Arctic closely links with the colonization of Siberia. The Russian state first expanded into Siberia in the sixteenth century. The motivation for annexing Siberia included a desire for the political prestige of empire, as well as for trade and resource extraction potentials. Siberia (and eventually Alaska) played a role in the Russian public imagination as a treasure trove, a land of future possibilities and even a manifest destiny of the Russian state.18 The first settlements constructed during the Tsarist expansion into Siberia and the Arctic were military and trading posts. The Russian state had significant income from the fur trade in Siberia in the seventeenth century. By the start of the eighteenth century, Russia had annexed most of Siberia, which resulted in the building of cities such as Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk. However, substantial urbanization and settlement, something that had long been the ambition of the Russian state, only took place with the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway between 1891 and 1917.19 While this expansion happened primarily towards the east, northern territories and populations remained relatively undisturbed. In the European Arctic, Arkhangelsk was founded as an important port for foreign trade with Europe and America in the sixteenth century.20 In most of the North, city-building only took off in the early twentieth century. During the First World War and the Russian Revolution, newly founded Murmansk became a strategically important harbour and was connected to central Russia by rail. Together with Arkhangelsk, it was the only route for military supplies from the West during the civil war. The subsequent large-scale development and urbanization of Siberia and the Far North, however, primarily took place in the Soviet era.21

Colonizing the Arctic Starting in the 1930s, the Arctic saw a large number of new industrial cities emerge as a result of central economic planning and the mandates of different parts of the Soviet state system – including the military. While the Russian Far North, like Siberia, had long been considered part of the country, it was only with the Soviet industrial expansion that infrastructure began to tie the territory and its inhabitants systematically into state space.22 Just as the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway had kickstarted the colonization and economic exploitation of the East, several infrastructural projects in the Arctic played similar roles. These projects include the railway from St. Petersburg to Murmansk, which was built in two years during the First World War and triggered the urbanization and industrialization of the Kola Peninsula. And in 1933, the White Sea-Baltic Canal was completed.23 However, the largest and most significant infrastructural development

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project in the Soviet Arctic was the Northern Sea Route. New ice-breaking ships opened navigation from the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait. They linked the North Atlantic and the European Russia to the Pacific and the interior of Siberia by the navigable Ob, Lena and Yenisei rivers. The Northern Shipment policy provided substantial subsidies for shipping and infrastructure operations in the North to support industrial development.24 The first ship sailed the entire route in 1932; however, navigation of the waterway, including to the industrial cities along the Siberian rivers, was (and still is) only possible during summer. The Northern Sea Route was a result of Soviet concerns about maintaining a strategic presence in the Arctic and establishing transport links, industries and resource extraction sites away from the country’s southern regions that were more exposed to foreign aggression. The organization set up to develop this infrastructure, the Committee for the Northern Sea Route (Komsevmorput), was in charge of the sea route and associated trade, including the region’s timber exports to Europe between 1920 and 1932. The second Soviet fiveyear plan in 1932 halted foreign trade, and as part of policies to make the union economically self-sufficient, the Main Administration of the Northern Sea Route (Glavsevmorput) took over the responsibility for shipping. Further, it held a broad mandate for the economic development of the North. Until 1938, this powerful organization dominated all aspects of the Soviet Arctic, including infrastructure development, shipbuilding, aviation, industrialization, mining and urbanization. With its main operational base in Murmansk, it directed exploration and investment in its European Arctic waters and islands as well as the vast territories north of the sixty-second parallel east of the Ural Mountains.25 Glavsevmorput was also in charge of cultural and economic modernization of the Indigenous populations of the region.26 The organization even had a subsidiary, Arktikugol, which was responsible for coal mining in Norwegian-administered Svalbard. Beyond numerous settlements and cities, Glavsevmorput also operated a number of polar stations for surveying and researching the Arctic region and its resources. The establishment of Glavsevmorput reflected a realization in the Soviet Government that the development of the Arctic required a particular and unified approach. To that extent, the organization combined scientific work and exploration with infrastructural and industrial operations.27 Glavsevmorput was a powerful instrument of the Soviet state. Despite being short-lived, it had a lasting legacy, and the transport links, harbours and settlements established during its brief life still exist today.

Socialist development After the Bolshevik revolution, communists, including Vladimir Lenin, largely adopted imperial Russia’s position that Siberia and the North were integral to the country and a future space of societal and economic

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development.28 The core motivations behind the Northern policy under both Lenin and Stalin were to secure sovereignty and to exploit the region’s natural resources. These motivations were coupled with an ideological impulse to bring socialist modernization to what was perceived to be a backward and underdeveloped region.29 According to Marxist thinking, unequal development and backwards geographic areas were a consequence of capitalist exploitation, and the ‘Engels dictum’ decreed that socialist development should abolish the exploitation of peripheries and industrialize the entire national territory.30 The purpose was to free ‘large-scale industry … from the restrictions of space’ and to abandon the distinction between city and countryside.31 The first five-year plans of the 1920s and 1930s dictated the transfer of industry to the North and East, which made Siberia and the Arctic increasingly central to the Soviet economy.32 This reorientation aligned with military strategies for the dispersal of strategic production facilities across the vast territory of the union. The State Planning Committee (Gosplan) outlined a balanced industrial development of individual regions, which would ultimately make them self-sustainable. In the Far North, these policies led to the construction of mono-industrial settlements and cities with up to 50,000 inhabitants near mineral deposits and power sources.33 The mono-industrial towns of the North were products of large vertically integrated production enterprises with little cross-sectoral coordination. State organizations responded to industrial production targets set out in central economic plans. Thus, industrialization was prioritized over urbanization, and so cities were often the ‘by-products’ of state desires for resources.34 The dispersal of resource extraction and processing sites across the territory of the North was facilitated by heavily subsidized transport, which often reflected a lack of attention to economics.35 As Charles Emmerson points out, ignoring costs in the pursuit of government production targets was a sign of ideological conviction for Soviet officials.36 Also, under communism, the environment of the North was considered irrelevant, except as an asset that could be exploited for economic gains.37 In the 1960s, the government pivoted away from the idea of regional self-sufficiency and adjusted planning policies and transport subsidies accordingly. New comprehensive development plans for the North targeted resource exploitation for the economic development of the country as a whole. This policy change was part of the Third Programme of the Communist Party, which emphasized temporary exploitation as a means towards a future developed communist state.38

Populating the North Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, the industrialization of the Arctic suffered from widespread labour shortages, and government

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strategies for populating the North took several forms over the years.39 First, the forced labour of the Gulag system played an indispensable role in developing industries and extracting resources in the Soviet Arctic. Second, state propaganda appealed to the youth to heroically contribute to ‘building communism’ in new frontier communities. Third, the government secured benefits for the workers and their families, who chose to settle in the modern industrial cities.

The Gulag According to historian John McCannon, there was a stark contrast between the heroic image of Arctic development espoused by Soviet government propaganda and the reality of blunders, crime and general misery that affected the population of the North during the pioneering years of development.40 In the early Soviet period, inmates of the Gulag camps made up a significant proportion of the population of the region, numbering upwards of 2,500,000 by the mid-twentieth century.41 The Soviet government considered the workforce of the Gulag to be crucial to the success of northern development. Forced labour was essential in constructing the infrastructure, industry and settlements of the North, in addition to extracting resources through mining and logging. In addition to criminals and political prisoners, so-called ‘special migrants’ (often former peasants) were also forcibly sent to industrial sites and mines as workers. Even after completing their sentence, former inmates were often required to settle in the vicinity of the camps and boost the workforce of the local industries. During the Stalin era, profit-seeking government organizations built Gulag settlements and camps, some of which later evolved into cities, according to standard designs that were not adapted to the harsh environments of the local conditions and with little care for the well-being of the inhabitants.42 The use of inappropriate urban plans and temporary construction methods and materials ultimately had an adverse effect on these settlements that later turned into cities.43 The government abandoned the Gulag policy in 1950s, and while forced labour continued to exist in some locations, most industries and industrial settlements had to adapt to attract workers and their families to the North.

The ‘Red Arctic’ Official propaganda and popular culture heralded the urbanization of the Arctic as an achievement of the Soviet system.44 To build an industrial workforce, the government encouraged young workers to venture north and be ‘part of building communism’ in the region.45 Glavsevmorput was the dominant force in the development of the Far North in the 1930s, and its

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mandate to explore and colonize the Arctic contributed to the creation of a persistent myth of a heroic ‘Red Arctic’.46 The propaganda operation of this organization established an ‘overarching aesthetic that held sway over fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, and official doctrine and public attitudes from the beginning of the 1930s’.47 Glavsevmorput was instrumental in glorifying polar exploration and celebrated the heroism of scientific explorers as well as pioneering workers, which helped install the Arctic as a space of ideological achievements for the duration of the USSR. Glavsevmorput presented the Arctic urban and research outposts as the finest of Soviet culture. They were populated by ideologically motivated workers and equipped with the most modern facilities and cultural amenities. In reality, however, there was a significant mismatch between the propaganda and the limited resources and planning abilities of Glavsevmorput in establishing these outposts within the rushed time-frame of the central planners.

The ‘small peoples’ of the North Beyond urbanization and industrialization, Glavsevmorput was also in charge of the welfare and ideological education of the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic and northeastern parts of the Soviet Union. Up to sixteen different aboriginal groups have historically inhabited the Russian Arctic, including Sámi in the West and Nenets, Khanty, Evenk and Chukchi groups across the vast territory of Northern and Eastern Russia. A 1926–7 census of the Soviet North identified an Indigenous population of over 150,000.48 In addition to these Indigenous groups, ethnic Russians have, since the early eighteenth century, migrated to Siberia and the Arctic and have become ‘nativized’, resulting in groups with mixed identities that are today referred to as ‘old settlers’ – not unlike the Canadian Métis.49 After the Communist takeover of government in the 1920s, policies towards these Indigenous groups were relatively benign in terms of recognizing the cultural diversity and dignity of the so-called ‘small peoples of the North’. In theory, the Bolsheviks recognized the rights of Indigenous groups and even considered them ‘authentic proletarians’. However, after Glavsevmorput took over the administration of Indigenous communities, they came to be seen by the government as subject to ‘Sovietization’. The state educational system reinforced assimilation and the dominance of the Russian language. Sedentarization of nomadic populations was necessary in order to be incorporated into the Soviet state and economy, which for instance resulted in the establishment of reindeer-herding collectives.50 The influx of Russians to the North during the pioneer industrial development period also contributed to assimilating Indigenous peoples into Soviet culture and ways of life.51 Today the vast majority of Russia’s Arctic population are Russian speakers of Slavic descent living in cities. At the same time, people identified as belonging to Indigenous communities

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mostly live in rural and remote areas and engage in traditional lifestyles.52 These remote areas include the regions of the Siberian Far North that were left untouched by large-scale industrialization due to a lack of mineral and other raw materials.53 The Indigenous rights record after 1991 is mixed. Some individual and group rights have been strengthened, but at the same time, the increased centralization of the Russian state has resulted in limiting self-determination and local democracy. While territorial and land rights exist for some communities, groups like the Sámi in the Kola Peninsula have fewer politically recognized collective rights compared to the Sámi in neighbouring Finland, Sweden and Norway.54

The rise of the Socialist city In 1953, the death of Joseph Stalin and the ascendance of Nikita Khrushchev to power led to a limited liberalization of society. The Gulag system was abandoned, which had significant consequences for the cities and industries in the North that had relied on low-cost labour. New government policies focused on the well-being of workers and the general urban population. The adoption of industrialized construction led to a dramatic increase in the production of new homes, resulting in the urban landscape of mass-housing that has later come to be associated with Soviet cities.

Urban magnificence In the years following the revolution and the civil war, the urban population of the USSR grew dramatically.55 This growth was the result of the economic and social policies of the government that included industrialization and the total restructuring of the agricultural sector. In the 1920s and 1930s, architects experimented with standard models for housing and other communal functions which resulted in proto-Modernist avant-garde designs that were sparse and egalitarian and intended for the working class. However, massrealization of these projects often suffered from a severe lack of skill and construction materials, and none of the prototypes from this period became widespread across the Soviet Union.56 After Stalin’s rise to power in the early 1930s, attention turned from these utopian and egalitarian projects to elaborated and grand schemes in the Socialist classical architectural language that went hand-in-hand with the officially sanctioned ‘socialist realism’ style of art. These projects were primarily city centre developments, and the luxurious housing developments were often aimed at communism’s avantgarde. Usually, housing complexes were organized around monumental urban spaces, as exemplified in the Arctic by the Prospekt Lenina in central

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FIGURE 4.3   Classical and monumental urban plan for Monchegorsk near Murmansk by Sergei Brovtsev et al. from 1936.

Murmansk or the over-sized Prospekt Metallurgov in Monchegorsk. This grand architecture was, according to Mark Smith, a political message about the necessary and heroic sacrifice of the workers in revolutionary circumstances and in times of war and conflict.57 The architecture of the period belonged to what Vladimir Paperny calls ‘culture two’, expressed as an architectural style that attempted to appropriate and consolidate history in an attempt to stabilize power in an otherwise highly progressive era.58 Parperny posits the monumental Stalinist architectural manifestation as a contrast to the architectural experimentation and utopianism of the previous decades that he calls ‘culture one’.

Housing in an era of beneficence The extensive destruction of housing stock during the Second World War vastly exacerbated the severe housing shortage crisis that resulted from mass-urbanization after the revolution. The housing reform initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s resulted in a shift away from the idea of individual sacrifice for the benefit of the state towards personal welfare and adequate housing programmes.59 In his role as head of the local party organization in Moscow in the pre-war years, Khrushchev had agitated for modernizing the construction sector, and he engaged in ambitious plans for mass-housing.60 The results of these plans materialized during the postwar reconstruction of the city, and the first four to five-storey apartment blocks built from prefabricated modules, which later came to be typical of Soviet cities, were realized in Moscow in 1949. However, construction experiments like these were not coordinated across the country, and postwar reconstruction strategies and housing programmes varied significantly between the cities of the Soviet Union.61

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In a prominent speech at a construction industry conference in 1954, Khrushchev expressed disapproval of elaborate dominant architectural styles in favour of rational mass production of buildings across the union.62 He criticized architects for focusing on individual monuments and for disregarding construction costs and efficiency. His criticism of the profession was an indictment of the work-intensive ornamental character of Stalinist architecture in favour of the aesthetic of an industrialized architecture that took advantage of economies of scale. To Khrushchev, all other concerns were secondary to the cost and speed of construction, and he outlined a union-wide construction programme that used prefabricated modular reinforced concrete slabs.63 Building components across the USSR were to become standardized, which would dramatically raise the productivity of the construction sector. Khrushchev’s housing programme became official policy in 1957, and the target was to end the housing shortage within a period of ten to twelve years.64 This shift to the systematic mass-provision of housing signalled, according to Mark Smith, the start of the communist welfare state and a new public discourse on housing that made it legitimate for individuals to formulate claims and desires concerning living conditions.65 Khrushchev presented the modern housing architecture as highly ideological and as a way to build socialism and ultimately communism by transforming the consciousness of people through the provision and design of housing and associated urban areas.66 In scale, the programme surpassed similar undertakings in the West, and it became a dimension of the ideological struggle of the Cold War.67

K-7 The 1957 housing policy outlined organizational, financial and architectural changes, and specified that new blocks of individual flats for families should follow standard plans and construction methods. As a result, opportunities for architectural elaboration beyond the standard designs were virtually eliminated. The most iconic building type of Khrushchev’s housing programme is the very basic four- or five-storey walk-up apartment blocks (colloquially called ‘Khrushchyovka’). The limit of five storeys eliminated the need for costly and technically complicated elevators and rubbish chutes. The height restriction also meant that there was no use for expensive cranes for construction. Many buildings of the early years of the new housing policy were constructed of brick, but modular concrete panels eventually came into use. Prefabricated modules allowed for all-season, efficient and rapid construction by unskilled labour.68 The most widespread among the national standard housing types was the K-7 model, which was designed in 1961 by the Moscow Design Institute under the directorship of architect, engineer and planner Vitaly Lagutenko. K-7 was based on earlier models developed in Moscow in the early 1950s and was optimized for rapid construction.69 The designers considered it a

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FIGURE 4.4   ‘Building with cross-concrete beamed walls and external walls from reinforced concrete double-layered panels.’ Model K-7 was designed by V. P. Lagutenko and built across the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.

temporary building with a lifespan of up to twenty-five years, and many were replaced with higher-quality housing in the following decades. In Moscow, construction of new K-7 models stopped in 1971 in favour of taller and more advanced typologies. However, the model continued to be built in some regions until the end of the communist era.

Quantity over quality Khrushchev’s housing programme was an incredible numerical success in the early period between 1957 and 1961. However, after a few years of

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staggering growth, production began to slow, and problems started to become apparent.70 While substantial, the housing programme was beset with issues such as poor construction techniques and craftsmanship, snags in matching construction materials with production targets, and a lack of coordination between housing construction and the associated urban infrastructure development.71 During the construction boom, there was an ‘obsession with square metres’ as a result of the centrally mandated construction targets.72 This led to a rush to complete apartments, which often led social services such as shops, kindergartens and schools to be de-prioritized.73 This neglect also included municipal services and infrastructure, which often had to be retrofitted later at great expense. Likewise, poor craftsmanship in housing stock resulting from construction haste soon diverted significant resources towards necessary repairs. During the 1950s and 1960s, Khrushchev encouraged Soviet construction professionals and engineers to study the industrial construction and the planning of Modernist housing districts in the West. This industrialized architecture had few decorations and other architectural frills and seemed to represent the perfect solution to the massive housing shortage in the USSR.74 However, Western observers in the 1970s commented on the low quality of the finished residential buildings in the Soviet Union. In particular, they noted that deficiencies in in-factory manufacturing, poor transport routines and a general lack of care during construction added up to low productivity and poor results.75 Despite these deficiencies, the results of the housing programme were impressive. The housing stock of the USSR increased by 85 per cent from 1950 to 1960,76 and construction from 1955 to 1985 resulted in 50 million new apartments.77 By 1963, 62 per cent of all urban housing in the USSR consisted of K-7 or similar types of apartment blocks.78 This construction programme constituted a massive change in the cities of the Soviet Union. It resulted in what Ekaterina Kalemeneva describes as a ‘transformation of the Soviet urban everyday life, giving rise to new cultural patterns of the domestication of the living space’.79 During the building boom, officials argued that a lack of qualified architects necessitated the adoption of highly standardized construction and designs. The few available architects were occasionally involved in quality control during construction and architectural ornamentation but were mainly relegated to focus on one-off public buildings.80

Industrialization and standardization In the post-war period, several uncoordinated ministries and other economic organizations oversaw infrastructure development and various industries built buildings and settlements. Even as late as the 1950s, many cities in the USSR did not have approved general plans.81 Consequently, the government established the State Committee for Construction (Gosstroy) in 1950 to

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take responsibility for all urban planning and building activities to meet the targets of the national five-year plans. The industrialization of construction and the development of standardized concrete panel systems were a significant concern for Gosstroy. The State Committee for Civil Construction and Architecture (Gosgrazhdanstroy), a subdivision of Gosstroy, was tasked with designing most of the standard building design series as well as their construction systems.82 Gosgrazhdanstroy organized the development of a standard housing typology and was in charge of seven research and design institutes. In addition, a series of ‘zonal’ research institutes studied the impact of local climates on construction and urban development.83 The standard designs developed in the late 1950s corresponded to four major climate zones. However, these standards were often not considered suitable by local planners in the most extreme climate zones such as in areas of the Far North.84

The proto-communist cityscape In 1958, the State Committee for Construction issued Rules and Norms of Planning and Building Cities, which established compact city development as a norm across the USSR to support urban planning and housing construction and avoid urbanization of the countryside.85 This policy mandated that housing should be constructed in a model urban unit called a microrayon (microdistrict), which became an indispensable part of the Soviet Union’s public housing programme.86 This urban unit represented the lowest level in the planning hierarchy and was designed to house around 12,000, but sometimes up to 60,000 people. The microdistrict was the result of innovative developments like the Novye Cheryomushki district in Moscow, built between 1954 and 1965 as a testbed for a new urban design that integrated housing, institutions and services in an open scheme where individual buildings ‘floated’ in a landscaped park.87 Housing, workplaces and recreational spaces were spaced and located according to principles of separation of functions and studies of everyday life. Planners arranged districts according to scale so that every family had a maximum distance of 150 metres to a kindergarten and 300–850 metres to the neighbourhood school.88 Bigger roads circumvented the microdistricts, which only had secondary streets within, and a central principle was that children should avoid crossing any roads in their daily movements. Schools, kindergartens, shops and social spaces made up the core of each district, while other functions, such as hospitals, culture houses, etc., served larger areas consisting of several microdistricts. The provision of shared services in these developments, such as shared dining facilities, was explicitly aimed at liberating women from patriarchal family structures and freeing them up for industrial employment.89 In this way, planners designed the microdistrict to break open the compartmentalized life of

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families, thus repeating the ideas behind the experimental 1920s and 1930s avant-garde proto-Modernist communal super-blocks.90 According to Mark Smith, the Soviet urban planning and housing programme represented the most comprehensive and ambitious strategy towards enhancing a socialist consciousness and ultimately achieving a communist society.91 The housing programme was a massive success in terms of numbers and dramatically raised living standards for millions. The urban unit of the microdistrict became a core component in the development of Soviet cities in the following decades. While the vast Soviet housing programme had many similarities with Western counterparts, it was notable for being directed at an entire society, and not just the working class.92

The Soviet Arctic City During the Second World War, Siberia and the Far North became prominent strategic counterpoints to the embattled south and west of the Soviet Union. Factories were moved east to escape the German Forces in European Russia, and Arctic mining was boosted to replace operations lost in the west. After the conflict ended, the Far North became increasingly crucial to the Soviet economy as a supplier of minerals and petrochemicals. In the post-war period, northern cities grew dramatically, and large numbers of workers migrated from the South to live in newly built apartments and enjoy the services provided in the modern cities of the North.

Northern benefits The gradual abolishment of the Gulag system during the 1950s resulted in labour shortages in the North. The deficit became more-or-less permanent and shifted the economy of Siberia and the North towards resource extraction rather than manufacturing, which moved to where labour was more readily available. The government also loosened policies that dictated a uniform economic development across the entire USSR, allowing planners to locate industries near population centres in the North to have access to workers.93 Before this change, the Northern Shipment programme had subsidized transport, housing, food, fuel and supplies of industrial materials across the regions, and planners had scattered industrial towns over the territory with little concern for operational costs. This programme was, however, not the only subsidy programme that helped shape the urbanization of the North.94 The history of providing personal benefits to attract people to the North started in the late Tsarist period, where the government would grant tax exemption to northern settlers. In the Soviet Union, increased wages for workers in northern industries had been introduced in 1932.95 Glavsevmorput offered a 50 per cent wage increase to employees at its Arctic

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stations north of the fifty-fifth parallel and a 100 per cent increase for workers living above sixty degrees latitude. The organization considered the high labour cost in the North feasible as the economic productivity of northern resource extraction communities was high.96 After 1945, the government assigned benefits to two geographical zones: the ‘Far North’ and ‘Regions Equated to the Far North’.97 Here, workers would have up to forty-two days of paid leave every year, and wages would be up to 80 per cent higher in the Far North, while in Regions Equated to the Far North it would be up to 50 per cent higher.98 In addition, pensions in these zones were increased or even doubled. While wage benefits had already been in place since the 1930s, the post-war programmes also provided accommodations that were better than elsewhere in the USSR; apartments were more extensive, had higher ceilings, were better heated and had superior insulation.99 These measures reflected a concern for attracting not only skilled workers but also their families and encouraging them to stay in the North. Special care was taken to improve employment opportunities for women, for instance, by introducing secondary industries in otherwise mono-industrial towns.100 The definition of the North that determines where such benefits apply has varied considerably over time. During Tsarist colonization, its extent was primarily determined by climatic factors, while the economic potential of the region became more important in the early Soviet period.101 The influential economist Samuil V. Slavin provided a widely used definition of the North in 1972. This definition focused on the potential for industrial development, and Slavin based it on (1) the remoteness from central industrial centres, (2) the harshness of climatic conditions (wind, darkness, permafrost), (3) the state of the available transportation network, and (4) the construction and labour cost in a given location.102 Despite the Northern Benefits programmes, transience continued during the 1960s and 1970s, and the actual provision of services in new towns and urban districts was inconsistent. The inherent bias in economic planning towards industry over housing and social amenities continued throughout the Soviet era.103 Nevertheless, the Northern Benefit programmes established living standards as a crucial dimension of the development and planning of cities in the North, and ideas about the quality of urban life would eventually inform urban design models that were unique to the region.

Urban design for the Far North In 1954, the Commission on the Problems of the North was created under the Council for the Study of Productive Potential at the USSR Academy of Sciences to coordinate research on northern economic development. As the commission’s chairman, Slavin was instrumental in changing public policies to pursue better living conditions for workers in the North. He also played

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a role in installing the notion of the Soviet North as a single, although internally differentiated, region in Soviet academia and policy making.104 Following directions for improving welfare and better living conditions in the North, academic planning institutions developed urban design models for Arctic industrial settlements. These institutions included the Commission on Acclimatization of the Population in the Far North, established in Moscow in 1960, and the Department of Urban Planning in the Far North, established at the Leningrad Branch of the Soviet Academy of Construction and Architecture in 1956. The latter organization played a critical part in the development of Arctic urbanism and was reorganized into the Leningrad Zonal Scientific Research and Planning Institute of Standard and Experimental Housing and Public Building Construction (LenZNIIEP) in 1964. Gosstroy’s national standards for buildings and planning turned out to not work well for the extreme conditions of the Arctic, and planners, architects and engineers often had to adapt standard models on-site to meet local climatic conditions.105 At the time, most Arctic cities did not have dedicated architecture and planning offices, and large organizations in Moscow and Leningrad were responsible for planning in the North. The architects and researchers at the Department of Urban Planning in the Far North in Leningrad sought innovative ways to provide ‘normal’ living conditions.106 The experts at the department saw their role as rectifying the urban mistakes made in the Arctic (including the Gulag camps), and the proposed Arctic urban designs did not replicate standard models developed for other parts of the country.107 In particular, they studied how urban layouts that improved urban microclimates could better everyday life and make northern communities more attractive.108 The researchers published many of the design proposals in the inter-disciplinary journal on northern development, Problemy Severa (Problems of the North). In the journal, staff at the department along with colleagues at other institutes suggested increasing urban densities as a way to generate sheltered microclimates and limiting time spent outdoors in transit between everyday functions.109 Compact urban form, the researchers argued, would reduce the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure and modern lightweight construction materials would enable the rapid modular erection of buildings, which was appropriate for the short construction season of the Arctic. Eventually, these Arctic urban design studies that combined the pragmatic utilitarianism of the standardized housing architecture with a concern for livings conditions resulted in the formulation of models for entirely enclosed and climate-protected Arctic futuristic towns.110 Central planners and decision-makers never seriously pursued any of these radical ideas. Still, they nevertheless influenced architects across the circumpolar region and inspired other, more pragmatic experiments with architectural and urban forms in the Soviet Arctic.

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Laboratory city: Norilsk Norilsk, with a population of 175,000, ranks among the coldest cities on Earth. The city was built to exploit the local deposits of nickel, copper, platinum, palladium and other minerals. The technical solutions and permafrost construction techniques developed in Norilsk found widespread use; the city functioned as a laboratory for climate-adapted architectural and urban design solutions that became prevalent in Soviet Arctic citybuilding.111 The main technical challenge during the early development of Norilsk was the structural stability of buildings in the permafrost region.112 By the late 1950s, the city had run out of development areas with bedrock, and engineers developed technology to freeze buildings in place in the permafrost layer.113 The first design for the city of Norilsk was the 1940 General Plan that featured Stalinist monumental urban squares, boulevards and neo-classical building designs. To support construction work and resource exploitation, Norilsk had a series of large Gulag camps.114 The gradual abolishment of forced labour during the 1950s and 1960s led to significant labour shortages, and Norilsk, along with other northern cities, had to compete to attract a qualified workforce.115 The second general plan from 1961 focused on improving living conditions and generating favourable urban microclimates, and the problems of drifting snow became an urban design priority.116 Snow removal had become easier with the arrival of mechanical equipment during the 1950s. However, when existing trees were uprooted to make way for machines, the result was accelerating winds and increased snowdrift. The urban design solution was to build closed contour perimeter blocks, which came to dominate the city. The layout also served to minimize costly underground technical infrastructure that could compromise the structural integrity of buildings built on permafrost.117

FIGURE 4.5   The 1940 development plan for Norilsk by Vitold Nepokoichitsky.

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During the 1960s, visionary architects suggested even more comprehensive urban design solutions that addressed Arctic conditions. One such proposal was the 1961 Experimental Residential House of Aluminum and Plastics for Norilsk by S. P. Odnovalova and M. V. Tsimbala of LenZNIIEP.118 Other visionary but unrealized ideas for Norilsk included Shipkov and Trouschinsch’s winning design from the 1965 competition for a new urban district in Norilsk. This project proposed a super-long wind-blocking climate wall and urban blocks with interiorized urban spaces and glasscovered climatized winter gardens.119 In addition, Shipkov, Shipkova, Popov and Gavrilin proposed a residential structure for 2,000 people in the shape of a pyramid.

FIGURE 4.6   Residential project for the southwest district of Norilsk by Shipkov and Shipkova (1965). © L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui.

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For these architects, such visionary urban designs would transform the natural conditions of the region. Closed-contour blocks and other more pragmatic urban design measures represented unsatisfactory solutions to the design of cities and urban life in the Arctic.120 Nevertheless, as Matthew Jull demonstrates, it was the closed perimeter blocks of Norilsk that later evolved into compact versions of the Modernist microdistricts with an enhanced micro-climatic performance that became the de facto prototype for Arctic city development.121 Thus, Norilsk was a consequential case of practical experimentation with city-building under Arctic conditions. At the same time, it was a historical centre of attention for visionary architects, whose radical proposals for Arctic urban design inspired the international discourse on Arctic cities that started to emerge in the 1960s.

Visionary Arctic cities Speculative urbanism has a long history in the Soviet Union. This history includes Mikhail Okhitovich’ ‘disurbanist’ projects for linear cities and the

FIGURE 4.7   ‘Norilsk microdistrict (No. 1) with an area of about 24 hectares. It extends along Lenin Avenue. The sports centre and plazas are located in the centre of the microdistrict. The layout of a new microdistrict (No. 10) differs from the first in that the designers were not compelled to take into account the previously existing layout. The principles used for providing a shelter from wind and snowstorm were particularly successfully applied in this microdistrict.’ S. V. Slavin, The Soviet North: Present Development and Prospects, trans. Don Danemanis (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 88.

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‘Sotsrogod’ (Socialist city) by Nikolay Milyutin from around 1930. These proposals made industry the central function of cities, and they visualized different dimensions of the Soviet ideological push for mass-urbanization, collectivization and modernization. In the USSR, the Far North was particularly associated with the socialist endeavour.122 The challenging environment where standard construction practices did not perform well called for visionary innovation and radical architectural speculation.123 Providing good living conditions and acclimatizing Soviet populations to the harsh conditions of the North became an issue for planners and architects.124 Around 1960, architect/ researchers at LenZNIIEP suggested the development of ‘settlement[s] with moderated natural climate for regions with frequent winter winds’ that eliminated streets and cars and reduced the inhabitants’ exposure to the elements by introducing glass-covered winter gardens and entirely domed settlements.125 This type of enclosed community would be as autonomous as possible, and ‘able to function as a single organism’.126 The 1960 design by M. B. Tsimbal for ‘a settlement with artificial climate for regions with comparatively severe natural conditions’ for 16,000–18,000 inhabitants is an illustrative example of such concepts for fully enclosed Arctic cities.127 A smaller prototype project was a ring-shaped multi-storey building with a central glass-covered space for communities with up to 500 inhabitants designed by N. Pershin and Y. Pivovarov.128

FIGURE 4.8   General view of a settlement with artificial microclimate with residential buildings of elliptical shape (1964). S. P. Odnovalov and M. V. Tsimbal (LenZNIIEP).

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In these proposals, the architects anticipated the adoption of mechanized construction and lightweight building materials such as aluminium and plastic. Cargo planes and airships would transport building materials to remote locations, and helicopters would replace cranes during construction.129 These visions aligned with a multitude of proposals by architects, engineers and planners for the future Arctic transport of goods and people that included atomic-powered ships, cargo submarines, high-speed monorail systems, vertical take-off and landing aircraft and air-cushion vehicles.130 Among the few realized projects for climate-protected settlements is a residential project for 4,500 residents, which was constructed in the late 1970s at Udachny in the Sakha Republic. This design for a residential district consisted of a series of apartment blocks connected by indoor galleries to schools, kindergartens and a central community hub.131 The architects of the LenZNIIEP introduced the term ‘Northernness’ to describe the extraordinary conditions of settlements across the Arctic. By arguing that the challenges of the Arctic demanded unique solutions, they were able to deviate from the doctrine of Soviet city building.132 The extravagant designs and striking visualizations of these northern city projects ensured that they entered popular culture through popular science and science fiction literature and magazines.133 While repeating tropes of

FIGURE 4.9   The residential project for 4,500 residents at Udachny. A series of apartment blocks are connected by an indoor gallery to a central community hub. Map data: Google, Image © 2020 CNES/Airbus.

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the technological triumph over a hostile environment, these popularized images of comfortable industrial towns also played a part in normalizing the Arctic as an inhabitable region. This normalization of northern towns helped shift the narrative away from the inhospitable Gulag-landscape of previous decades.

Learning across the blocks The radical modernization taking place in the young Soviet Union fascinated many Western architects. Famously, Le Corbusier visited the USSR in 1933 and found a vibrant and dynamic architectural scene.134 Reversely, modern Western architects also inspired Soviet architects and planners, and the celebrated German architect Ernst May played an active role in promoting Modernist architecture and urban planning in the Soviet Union. During the urban construction boom after the death of Stalin, Soviet officials and organizations returned to studying Western experiences and practices.135 For instance, Vladimir Kucherenko, a close collaborator of Khrushchev and head of the Main Moscow Construction Trust, visited industrial facilities and new town projects in the UK and even met Prime Minister Anthony Eden in 1955. In 1956–7, after Kucherenko became president of the All-union Academy of Construction and Architecture and Chairman of Gosstroy, he extended invitations to architects and planners from the UK, Sweden and Finland to contribute to the Soviet housing programme. In 1956 and 1957, Soviet experts visited the United States and Scandinavia, as well as the influential Interbau building exhibition in Berlin. As a result, the architecture of the intensive housing and urban development phase in the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s followed Western architectural trends closely.136 International learning also took place in the Far North. The economic colonization of the Arctic Kola Peninsula along the Murmansk Railway used similar Canadian development schemes as a reference in the 1920s.137 In the 1950s, planners and architects at LenZNIIEP studied planning and construction practices in other northern countries.138 International academic articles about Arctic construction and urban design were translated and published in Soviet journals, and architects were well acquainted with relevant international projects. These include Ralph Erskine’s enclosed shopping centre in Luleå from 1955 and Camp Century that the United States’ military constructed under the Greenland ice sheet in 1959.139 Experts from LenZNIIEP even travelled to Greenland in 1976.140 Soviet architects also learned from Canadian projects and delegations visited the Canadian Arctic in 1965 and 1968.141 In 1971, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Jean Chretien both visited the Soviet Arctic, and a formal corporation agreement with Canada resulted in an extended exchange of delegations and technical reports on northern development and planning over the following years.142

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Later, Soviet representatives participated in meetings and seminars on Arctic development organized by international bodies, such as the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, where they contributed to an emerging international discourse on the architecture and planning of Arctic regions.143

Urbanism in the Russian Arctic According to Lenin, cities were central generators of progress. In the political life of the Soviet Union, urbanization was a means to ‘create’ an industrial working class that would embrace Marxism.144 The early Sovietera Arctic cities were components of plans to economically develop the entire territory of the union to build industries that would make the USSR economically self-sufficient. The post-Stalin development of the Arctic that started in the 1950s increased the focus on benefits for workers in the North. Andrey Petrov refers to these two historical phases as representing ‘Stalinist-Gulag and “developed socialism” discourses of development’.145 Despite ideological and political differences between the two periods, there is significant continuity in the underlying rationale for city building in the North, and even today the strong desire for resources is a decisive factor in northern development policies. Despite this continuity, changing policies and priorities over time have had significant consequences for the design and development of cities. Today, cities of the Russian North struggle with climate change and depopulation, but their development and design history is, in many ways, the origin of the global discourse on Arctic architecture and urbanism.

Utopianism and pragmatism In the early days of Soviet Socialism in the 1920s and 1930s, architects proposed various imaginative city concepts. In the following decades, Soviet urban planners and architects maintained a capacity for visionary urban design thinking. The fantastic Arctic urbanism of the 1960s echoed trends in international architectural culture and was presented by Soviet architects as an alternative to the bleak and depressing urban landscape of decades of pragmatic, standardized urban development in the North. The challenges faced in the North, and the apparent potential for improvement, justified new and extraordinary ideas for an urbanism of the Arctic. While traces of this visionary thinking are evident in later development and planning of northern communities, pragmatic considerations led to outcomes that were often far from these ideals. Nevertheless, the gradual improvement of the quality of urban living that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s could not have taken place without the articulation of such visions.146

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Gregory Andrusz contends that the political discourse around city building in the Far North in the early Soviet period concerned not just visions, but also a combination of ideological and highly pragmatic concerns. These concerns included ‘(1) the need to build socialism in one country; (2) the economic backwardness of the first socialist state; (3) the low level of education and shortage of qualified workers; (4) an external threat which necessitated a high level of expenditure on defence’.147 Such concerns resulted in design strategies that were both visionary and pragmatic, and which, in conjunction, explain many of the unique urban design features of the Soviet urban North. These design features include: ●●

The closed-perimeter configuration of standard housing blocks for wind shelter.

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The use of standard housing blocks in compressed configurations leading to denser cities than elsewhere in the Arctic. This compactness is also a consequence of the cost of technical infrastructure that favours a concentrated urban form.

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The density and design of formal urban spaces that celebrate state ideology and result in northern city cores that bring to mind nineteenth-century European metropolitan urban scenes. Urban vegetation schemes further support this atmosphere.

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An urban feeling consequent to the high standard of services and institutions (such as culture palaces) in many Northern cities compared to southern situations.

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The social engineering of the microrayon which intended to overcome the ideological problems with the family-centric design of standardized housing blocks. This implied a focus on planned neighbourhood space – a feature that is absent in other parts of the Arctic.

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Being built to eventually become components of a fully fledged Marxist economic and territorial development rather than temporary camps, and thus much more substantially constructed than cities in many other parts of the Arctic.

Monuments of development The North is one of the most urbanized regions in Russia, and the cities here are also by far the largest in the circumpolar Arctic. The acceleration of Soviet urban development in the 1960s meant that more cities were built here than anywhere else in the world over a relatively brief period, and the scale and speed of Soviet urbanization was an ideological statement

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in itself.148 The cities in the Arctic were ‘elements of large urban ensembles that reflect[ed] the grand visions and the historical destiny of society rather than any individual desires’.149 Modern science and technology were central to the construction techniques and rational planning that supported the city-building programme, and social studies informed the instrumental engineering of community life according to the dominant ideological thinking of the time. The history and contemporary physical manifestation of northern Russian cities are the most expressive manifestations of the high Modernist development discourse found anywhere in the Arctic. While Soviet urban planning later came to be seen as unresponsive and undemocratic, it did for a period pioneer international ‘new town’ development. Western architects admired schemes for northern cities, but actual urban development in the North often turned out to be misguided and poorly executed. The insistence on meeting performance targets resulted in urban environments and homes of poor quality. The non-market provision of housing made urban districts socially integrated, but this came at the cost of individual choice and care, which exacerbated the problems of already inadequately built living districts.150 The economic base of many northern communities became precarious during the economic reforms of the 1990s, and the ecological impact of these cities and their inhabitants on their local environment has

FIGURE 4.10   Nikel is a monumental industrial city in the subarctic landscape. © Peter Hemmersam.

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become highly problematic. Nevertheless, northern cities are monuments of the era of development and appear as visually striking urban fragments in the open landscapes surrounding them. Their highly developed Sovietera Modernist urban planning footprint continues to dominate the urban everyday spaces of these cities in ways with few parallels elsewhere in the Arctic.

The ‘dark’ urbanism of the North Soviet propaganda celebrated the urbanization of the Soviet Far North, and popular culture depicted it as a heroic and ideological endeavour. However, the history of cities in the region has a ‘dark’ side, and the government omitted the destructive environmental, human and economic consequences of the development from the public rhetoric.151 These components of the urbanism of the region are dark because they are unrecognized by the general public and not immediately visually evident in the urban space. Moreover, they reflect the ‘dark side of humanity’ via such sites as those of historical oppression, atrocities and violence. ‘Dark’ also references Timothy Morton’s dark ecology, which implies a recognition of the profound implications of humanity into ecology in ways that leave no privileged or outside perspective or position for rationalization.152 As mentioned by Morgan Ip, this means that the North cannot be seen as separate from humanity’s collective activities elsewhere.153 These dark facets of the cities of the North have historical roots, but they remain present and even potent in today’s urbanism. The initial momentum for urbanization in the North included military and strategic concerns for upholding sovereignty in the Arctic. This led to the development of national transportation infrastructure and a regional economy removed from potential enemy incursions into the southern parts of the union.154 Today, the North is home to restricted-access military cities, both abandoned and functional military-industrial production facilities, air bases, naval ports, bombing ranges and training grounds. Little information about these installations is publicly available; they are not found on maps and are thus ‘dark’. Severomorsk outside Murmansk is the home of the Northern Fleet and its nuclear submarines, and the Russian military is currently establishing new bases along the Northern Sea Route and on several Arctic islands. The military presence is likely to have consequences for the role of northern cities in the foreseeable future. Another ‘dark’ dimension of the history of the North is the Gulag with its multiple camps. Along with the industry and infrastructure of the region, the criminal and political inmates of the Gulag camps built numerous cities in the Arctic. Estimates of the total numbers of prisoners range in the millions, and many died or experienced extreme hardship during their internment. Ekaterina Kalemeneva distinguishes between settlements that started as

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Gulag camps with little regard for local conditions but still existed after the abolishment of the system in the 1950s and the ‘proper’ planned towns that developed later. These had a full range of public services and cultural institutions and were designed with care for local climatic conditions from the start.155 The Soviet state largely ignored environmental externalities in pursuit of economic expansion, and the development of the North celebrated the dominance of Soviet man over nature.156 Massive industrialization projects resulted in widespread degradation of vegetation and ecosystems as toxic pollution spread across the Arctic. Adding to the harmful effects of the mineral and petrochemical extraction and processing sites that proliferated across the region, the ecological footprint of the military in the North included dumps for ammunition and sites for manufacturing, testing and storing nuclear fuel and reactors. Mining companies also experimented with atomic devices in the North. However, these experiments were quickly abandoned due to excessive radiation leaks. It is no surprise that the cities of the Russian Far North are among the most polluted in the world and that the soot-covered snow in some northern settlements is visually ‘dark’. In addition to these dark dimensions of urbanism in the Arctic, Soviet ideologues saw an opportunity to Sovietify Indigenous peoples during the urbanization of the North. Assimilation took many forms and included forced collectivization and eradication of traditional livelihoods. This oppressive history of northern urban development is also ‘dark’, and the contemporary urbanism of the North still does not reflect the presence and interests of these populations, who traditionally reside in smaller rural settlements. Indigenous rights were, along with democratic processes, accountability and local agency, a marginal concern for the various organizations of the Soviet state that planned cities in the North. While northern cities share many features with contemporary urban development in the West, the planning of Soviet cities left urban dwellers in the ‘dark’. Citizens had little say on urban planning or wasteful government practices.

Birth of a climate-adapted urban design A perception of the Arctic as an uninhabitable space persists among the general population of Russia and in other northern countries. Here, the Far North is seen as a hostile environment where ‘normal’ people have to be protected by architecture and technology. In the Arctic, people generally spend more time indoors than those in more temperate climates, and indoor urban space is an essential motive in architectural design proposals for northern cities.157 Despite the limited success of projects from the 1960s and 1970s, the experimentation of Soviet architects nevertheless contributed to making interior climatized urban spaces a central component of Arctic urban design.

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One considerable concern in improving microclimates in Arctic cities is the problem of snowdrift, and northern planners and architects have addressed this in three ways. The first is the use of partly open snow fences that slow wind by introducing small-scale turbulence. Planners have used this technique in various places such as Norilsk.158 The second is the use of vegetation to create favourable microclimates around residential buildings and in urban spaces. This effect can be observed in the Kola cities that have a history of urban greening due to the work of the Polar-Alpine Botanical Garden. The last principle method involves using buildings as windscreens.159 While the first two approaches to wind protection and microclimate generation are both in use in various parts of the Arctic in and outside Russia, it is the compact ensembles of buildings around protected or enclosed urban spaces that have come to be widely associated with Arctic architecture and urbanism.

City image: Murmansk Murmansk is the most populous city above the Arctic Circle, with close to 300,000 inhabitants. It has a diverse economy and an all-year ice-free harbour in Kola Bay, strategically close to Western Europe. From the thirteenth century, the Kola Peninsula belonged to the Novgorod republic. It was initially inhabited by Sámi but was settled by Russians from the sixteenth century. It remained sparsely populated until the twentieth century when a harbour and a railroad were built by the Tsarist regime to receive supplies from Western allies during the revolutionary war. Later, Murmansk became the main base for the Northern Sea Route which controlled shipping along the northern coast, the inland rivers of Siberia and to the Far East. Geological surveys during the first decades of the twentieth century uncovered various minerals in the region (apatite, copper, iron and nickel), and large-scale exploitation became a vital part of Soviet plans for northern colonization and national economic self-sufficiency. In the late 1920s, Kola became the location of the first Gulag camps. By the 1930s, the region held up to 250,000 prisoners.160 During the Second World War, the Kola Peninsula was the scene of horrific conflict and Murmansk was extensively bombed. In the post-war decades, the region became heavily militarized and home to the USSR’s Northern Fleet. At the end of the Soviet period, the Kola Peninsula had over 1,100,000 inhabitants, primarily living in a cluster of resource cities along the Murmansk–St. Petersburg railway, and in 1993, the population of the Kola Peninsula constituted two-thirds of the entire Arctic population of Russia.161 Even after losing a significant part of its population, Murmansk Oblast, mainly composed of the Kola Peninsula, remains the most urbanized region in the Arctic, and Murmansk is its cultural, infrastructural, administrative and economic hub.

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The planned residential neighbourhoods built between the 1960s and the 1980s are the most prominent feature of the city, punctuated by supermarkets, new neo-traditional churches and the garage cities which serve a variety of social functions beyond parking. The city abounds with political statues and war memorials in addition to numerous monumental cultural institutions, museums, culture palaces, cinemas and theatres. In the city centre, the capitalist economy of today’s Russia reveals itself in the numerous shopping centres and the shops that have been retrofitted into residential buildings or added as free-standing kiosks along the boulevards. The industry and logistics that remain the city’s economic lifeblood are visually evident at the busy harbour and in the long ore and coal trains that pass through the city centre. Finally, Murmansk is also a green city. Trees and green belts line streets and boulevards, and formal parks are scattered around the city centre and within the residential neighbourhoods.

FIGURE 4.11   The dense vegetation of the urban spaces of Murmansk. © Peter Hemmersam.

Encountering the new Murmansk

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n 7 May 2014, I traversed the urban landscape of Murmansk with three students from the Tromsø Academy of Landscape and Territorial Studies.162 Starting at the Polarnie Zori Hotel, the walk took us to the Forum shopping centre located between the central and southern districts of Murmansk. Turning the corner of the hotel, we realized that it was a

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refurbished Soviet-era apartment block. The front of the building was a kind of new Potemkin façade facing the central urban boulevard, while the rear had received only minimal attention in recent years. The repurposed housing block fits into a pattern of adaptive reuse we noticed all along our walk: from small details such as tank or digger treads used as rainwater grills to the reuse of precast concrete slabs from a demolished building to construct new garages. To us, this creative reuse of available materials became evidence of a culture of material scarcity. Passing through one of the ubiquitous garage districts of Murmansk, and the Kamennoye Plato district, we encountered an example of climate-adapted architecture. A covered and heated staircase connected the hill-top settlement to the public transit artery of Prospekt Kol’skiy at the foot of the hill. Small shops flanked the stair, but most of them were closed as a newer shopping centre at the top of the hill had taken over retail operations. Proceeding to the urban interval between the central and southern urban districts of Murmansk, we encountered a postSoviet car-based city. Here, fences surrounded properties. There were big parking lots and few sidewalks, and we were struck by the contrast to the extraordinary openness and general pedestrian accessibility of the older residential districts that are the heritage of public land ownership under the Soviet system. This new urban space was home to elements that we would expect of such a zone: logistics operations, petrol stations, bus garages, car dealerships and big-box shopping centres. However, we also found other functions that reflected societal changes in recent decades, such as the neo-traditional orthodox Holy Trinity monastery that was under construction. While builders used modern equipment such as cranes, we were able to observe the actual building of traditional full-timber architecture. This monastery was not the only new/old religious building we had seen among the Modernist housing blocks of the city. The most peculiar observation in the urban fringe zone was a steel love lock tree. This installation provided young couples with a place to hang padlocks with their engraved initials to declare unbreakable love. Such love padlocks are found on the Ponte Milvio in Rome or the Parisian bridges on the Seine where lovers throw the padlock keys into the river to consummate their pact. In Murmansk, a steel tree in a parking lot outside a supermarket replaced bridge railings, and lovers could deposit keys in a steel trunk that was bolted in place. Our walk took place just days before the traditional 9 May Victory Day parade. Nearing the end of our transect walk, we observed soldiers picking up flowers at a plant nursery at what we suspected was a former collective greenhouse farm. Leaving behind the residential districts that were potent reminders of the unique period of Soviet urban development, the more recent car-dependent middlezone felt strangely familiar to us. It reminded us of similar spaces in other capitalist European cities. This walk was a tour of the ‘new’ Murmansk that had not replaced the Soviet city but had popped up in the interstitial spaces of the city’s Modernist masterplan.

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FIGURE 4.12   The 200-metre Okhotny Ryad indoor staircase and shopping gallery connects the hilltop Kamennoye plato district to the main thoroughfare, the Prospekt Kol’skiy. CC-BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ deed.en. Image © Dim 137 / https://domofoto.ru/photo/21360

Components of the city image Murmansk extends along the eastern edge of Kola Bay. Its harbour is industrial and only publicly accessible in a few locations. The city is hemmed in by hills to the east, separating it from the hinterland. Murmansk has many of the features of a linear city. Its three districts are arranged along a road that runs parallel to the bay and connects Murmansk to Severomorsk, the naval town to the north, and the Kola settlement to the south. The central part of this road, the Prospekt Lenina, is the main street and one of two north-south routes for the world’s northernmost trolley busses that connect the three districts. This central avenue continues through the southern district of the city as Prospekt Kol’skiy. Merging with Ulitsa Kominterna that passes the train station, Prospect Lenina becomes the main street of the northern district, the Prospekt Geroyev Severomortsev, which extends further towards Severomorsk. A ring road skirts the urban area east of the city and continues south towards St. Petersburg. Green spaces separate the three city districts: Leninskiy to the north, the central Oktyabr’skiy area and the Pervomayskiy district to the south. A large industrial estate is located east of the northern district. The historical city centre is set within a pre-Modernist urban grid on the flat terrain by

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FIGURE 4.13   The monumental city centre of Murmansk and the 1980s housing development overlooking the city. © Peter Hemmersam.

the old harbour, while Modernist high-rise residential districts rise on the hills in the rear. The housing typologies reveal the age of specific areas. Neoclassical Stalinist urban architecture dominates the city centre, while the 1950s and 1960s urban boom architecture surrounds and infiltrates the core, and neighbourhoods of nine- to sixteen-storey tower blocks dominate the southern and parts of the northern districts. Most apartment buildings lack parking basements, and as a consequence, large garage districts with identical tin-sheds are scattered around the city. The central node and meeting point of the city centre is the ‘five corners’ square near the railway station. The northern and southern districts have similar, but smaller, central cross-roads with shops and cultural facilities. Also, shopping centres, such as the Forum Mall located between the central and southern districts and the Severnoye Nagornoye in the Pervomayskiy districts, are important urban spaces and meeting points. Power and district heating plants with red-and-white-striped chimneys are towering landmarks in each of the three districts of Murmansk. Equally iconic is the nineteen-storey Azimut/Arctica hotel, the tallest building north of the Arctic Circle, which marks the centre of the city on the ‘five corners’ square. On the hill to the north, Alyosha, a thirty-five-metre high statue of a soldier and monument to the ‘defenders of the Soviet Arctic’ during the

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FIGURE 4.14   A standard five-storey walk-up concrete panel housing block and one of the omnipresent garage districts of Murmansk. © Peter Hemmersam.

Great Patriotic War, stands guard. Nearby, the gold-domed Church of the Saviour on the Water looks out over the city centre, perched just above a lighthouse-looking memorial to dead Northern Fleet sailors.

Downscaling and upgrading the city Today, Murmansk is a diversified transport hub, and a centre for Arctic shipping. The city’s harbour connects the northern and eastern parts of Russia to Western Europe, North America and Asia.163 In recent decades, Murmansk has benefitted from its proximity to Scandinavia, in terms of industrial investment. The harbour is thriving and is home to Russia’s fleet of atomic ice breakers and the still-important fishing fleet. Murmansk benefits from its economic diversity, and it has the most attractive labour market in the region.164 Despite the increased centralization of power in Russia in recent years, the Arctic ‘frontier’ is again becoming important to the state, as income from oil and gas production has become vital to the country’s international standing and economic capability. The Arctic has again become an arena for Russian geopolitical and military posturing in recent years.165 The Murmansk region is still home to the Russian Northern Fleet, as well as numerous air bases

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and six military ‘closed cities’, including Severomorsk immediately north of Murmansk.166 While these cities are essential to the economy of the region, coordinating regional planning with cities operated by the Ministry of Defence, or other levels and branches of government, presents challenges.167 While individual and regional income in Murmansk has increased in recent years, living costs are high, and the construction of new housing has been minimal.168 The city has lost around 30 per cent of its population over twenty years, and continued depopulation is a significant threat to the city’s economic future. Other challenges to further development of the city include lingering risks to the population’s health and the state of the environment.169 The Murmansk region has the world’s largest concentration of civilian and military nuclear facilities.170 Some parts of the Kola Peninsula are among the most polluted in the Arctic, and Murmansk experiences severe environmental challenges from industry and the waste produced by the city itself.171 Murmansk has long competed with Arkhangelsk for the role of the ‘capital’ of Russia’s European Arctic.172 The idea that Murmansk should promote itself as ‘the Capital of the Arctic’ was outlined in the 2010 Social-Economic Development Strategy for the Murmansk Oblast.173 A core component of this strategy includes the development of megaprojects for economic growth. For instance, Murmansk was positioned to be the principal beneficiary of investments in the offshore Shtokman Gas Condensate project, which the gas company put on hold in 2012. However, as the strategy also notes, there is no guarantee of significant local job growth resulting from megaprojects, as the modern extraction industry relies on a small specialized workforce and increasingly invests in fly-in-fly-out operations.174 Also, linking the city’s fortune to variable global commodity prices would lead to significant uncertainty about the future. While mining and shipping will likely continue to support the city in the future, it remains unclear if the economic base can be widened sufficiently to stabilize or even grow the population in the future. The 2010 strategic plan explicitly mentions the challenge of attracting and retaining young talent that can contribute to improving the economy. It acknowledges that the ‘town which was formed in the second half of the last century in many ways does not meet the requirements of a modern, attractive urban environment’.175 Further, the strategy notes that ‘only a modern urban economy, creating an abundance of new work places [sic] and a comfortable modern urban space … will be able to attract and retain talented young people’.176 The strategy proposes that the development of a masterplan for the city could help stimulate ‘projects for the creation and renovation of public spaces and public areas, shopping streets; activities aimed at improving the quality of outdoor urban infrastructure (landscaping and lighting, pedestrian and green areas, etc.); support and promotion of urban greening projects, improving the quality of urban ecology’.177

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Such formulations about quality urban spaces echo the early days of city building on the Kola Peninsula when the Polar-Alpine Botanical Garden first researched and acclimatized urban trees and plants for the greening and beautification of northern cities. Significant contextual differences between then and now are nevertheless evident. The 1930s programme for making Arctic industrial cities more attractive was a celebration of communism. Today, the initiative resides with local authorities who consider quality urban environments an advantage in the inter-city or inter-regional competition for young entrepreneurial talent. While the regional government’s development strategy document is vague on the specifics of urban space improvement, the document continues a tradition of considering the urban environment of Arctic cities to be crucial to attracting and retaining the young and qualified individuals who contribute to developing the city’s economy and future existence.

The future of Russia’s northern cities The Soviet-era colonization of the North resulted in a system of permanent settlements: large cities with diversified economies and populations in the hundreds of thousands, in addition to smaller industrial cities, transport nodes and mono-industrial towns with tens of thousands of people.178 Further, rural and agricultural settlements contained up to a few thousand inhabitants.179 Russia’s Arctic is still more urban than the rest of the country. Yet, as a consequence of past development policies, many cities are overly large, population numbers are not sustainable, and the dispersed settlement pattern hinders growth because of transport costs.180 National policies for the development of the North have in recent years supported the depopulation of settlements and the restructuring of industries.181 The building of Soviet cities and industry between the 1930s and the late 1980s was sometimes a result of uncoordinated priorities of various national economic sectors. At the same time, the policy of territorially balanced economic development adopted by Gosplan in 1932 resulted in an unsustainable situation where a permanent workforce shortage drove up production costs while planners wilfully ignored shipping costs. These problems have only been exacerbated after the 1990s when transport subsidies and preferential investment and trade conditions for the North disappeared. This has resulted in the closing and relocation of industries, and peripheral single-industry towns have found it increasingly difficult to connect to more extensive industrial networks and regional labour markets.182 The cities of the North are, as mentioned by Blakkisrud and Hønneland, economically both under- and over-developed.183 Many industrial towns are too large for their shrinking populations, and at the same time, they are dispersed across a vast territory. They are also poorly connected with

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FIGURE 4.15   Housing district in Zapoljarny on the Kola Peninsula. © Peter Hemmersam.

infrastructure, which frustrates economic redevelopment. Economic restructuring has exacerbated differences between communities and regions, and concurrent de- and re-industrialization means that there is not one single economy of the North. While some cities are booming as a result of developing diversified economies, or of hydrocarbon extraction, such as Novy Urengoy, others are contracting.184 Just as in the past, exploitation of natural resources promises new jobs in the North as well as economic growth for the country. The national economic dependence on gas and oil revenue is a compelling force behind the ongoing restructuring of the North. However, despite the promise of future resource extraction, the region might not see substantial job growth as the extraction industries increasingly rely on temporary camps, fly-in-flyout employees and a steadily smaller workforce.185 Today, the shrinking population of the North is concentrating in its larger cities, and many post-industrial communities are withering and turning into slums, along with older districts in larger cities. In many places, apartments are now privately owned, but the dilapidated exteriors of buildings have received little care for decades.186 Polish geographer Mariusz Czepczyński explains that the post-socialist urban landscape of the former Eastern Bloc European cities is in a ‘liminal state … characterized by ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy’, in which ‘the old landscape is re-interpreted and decontextualized, while the new landscape is constructed, both physically and mentally’.187 This is an apt description of the condition of many Northern

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Russian cities. Urban spaces that celebrated the state ideology have lost their original meaning, and entrepreneurs and businesses have added retail spaces and commercial iconography to what used to be non-commercial streetscapes.188 Corporations and individuals are increasingly privatizing public urban space, and a dramatic increase in private car-use has transformed mobility patterns and resulted in logistics and shopping areas along major roads on the outskirts of cities.189 In some places in Russia, apartment buildings from the 1950s and 1960s are embraced with a certain nostalgia. In other locations, their low technical standard and the lack of maintenance of these rapidly built structures mean that they represent an undesirable and alienating past and are abandoned or demolished.190 The future sustainability of cities in the North is also under threat by the deepening political centralization in Russia, which leaves little room for strategic decision-making at a local level. Moreover, climate change has radical, but very different consequences across the vast region.191 While retreating sea ice promises a prospering Northern Sea Route and increased connectivity for the region, increasingly unstable winters mean that existing ice roads will become unusable. Another significant consequence of climate change is the increasing instability of permafrost in many cities. Widespread melting already leads to structural problems in cities like Norilsk, and mounting costs may threaten entire communities in the North. Despite these challenges, the ‘frontier myth’ is alive in Arctic Russia as nowhere else in the Arctic. It is still integral to many Russians’ understanding of living in the Far North – in spite of hardness and struggle.192

CHAPTER FIVE

Developing Canada’s Arctic cities

Canada’s North is vast and home to a complex diversity of peoples, but its urban history is relatively short. With notable exceptions, urbanism has been marginal in mainstream discourse on northern development in Canada, which has centred on Indigenous rights and well-being, energy infrastructure, mining, geostrategic interests and environmental challenges. Despite the relative absence of urban planning and design in the abundant scholarship on the North, essential definitions of northern architecture and Arctic urbanism nevertheless took place in the Canadian North in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The influential urban projects for Frobisher Bay and Ralph Erskine’s urban scheme for Resolute Bay were never – or only partly – realized, while Fermont in northern Quebec was completed in the 1970s. The urban ideas and models proposed and tested in these projects travelled the Arctic and impacted public discourse, policy-making, development schemes and urban planning in other northern regions.

The myth of the North Northern Canada consists of the federal territories that extend into the Arctic climatic zone: Yukon, Northwest Territories (NWT) and Nunavut. This region has a population of 113,000 out of which Indigenous peoples (First Nations, Métis and Inuit) comprise about 60,000.1 The Inuit homeland (Inuit Nunangat) that stretches from Nunavut to Yukon, and which also includes Inuvik in northern Quebec and Nunatsiavut in Labrador, has a population of around 47,000.2 However, climatic, social, cultural and

FIGURE 5.1   Map of Arctic Canada with the territorial divisions of the North suggested by Louis-Edmond Hamelin.

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economic factors suggest that the north of Canada extends well south of the sixtieth parallel to include the subarctic zone that Ken Coates and William Morrison refer to as ‘the forgotten north’.3 This Subarctic boreal belt spans the entire country, from the northern parts of British Columbia in the west to Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador in the east.4 This inclusive definition increases the population to the millions and dramatically expands the variety of settlements, towns and cities in the Canadian North. Rob Shields proposes that the North plays a critical role in the imagination of Canadians and that the myth of the Arctic or the North is more central to Canada’s identity and politics than in any other northern nation.5 The North is construed as a ‘resource and economic hinterland’, and equally as nature and a ‘mythical heartland’ that contrasts Canadian nationalism to American popular culture.6 Coates compares the perceptions of the North in Canada to the American obsession with the frontier. He argues that the formation of the North as a unique space that exists outside ‘traditional conceptual frameworks’ obscures the colonial reality of northern community and resource exploitation.7 The North is at once a space for development and a wilderness that should be preserved. This double perspective has been the basis for paternalistic government policies, which has historically left little agency to local and Indigenous northerners. However, there are significant contrasts within the discourse on northern territories and northern development. Northern Indigenous desires diverge from southern obsessions. Differences also exist between English-speaking Canada and Quebec. In 1980, LouisEdmond Hamelin contended that while concerns with the purity of northern landscapes infused the Anglophone discourse, the Quebecois generally framed the north (of Quebec) as ‘an engineering zone rich in resources and hydroelectric potential which [was] the “future” of Quebec’s development’.8

A new urban North The urban development of Canada’s North is the result of a complex history of colonial and economic development policies and periodic investment by private industry. The result is a range of settlements built for different purposes and inhabited by diverse groups. The first Euro-Canadian settlements were trading posts along significant rivers that sometimes also functioned as missions. The more substantial urban history of the Canadian North started with the Bonanza Creek gold strike in Yukon in 1896.9 The town that became the centre of the mining boom, Dawson City, had modern amenities, sidewalks and electricity, and became a national symbol of the economic potential of the North.10 Yellowknife, the largest city in the NWT, also started as a gold-mining town in 1935 before it eventually became the territorial capital in 1967. Another type of northern settlement was the transportation hub. Whitehorse, the capital of Yukon, was the head of navigation on the Yukon River and became the terminus for the railroad from

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Skagway in Alaska in 1900.11 An early airport was built here, and during the Second World War, the town benefitted from the construction of the Alaska Highway and the Canol oil pipeline. Norman Wells, at the other end of the Canol pipeline – yet another type of northern settlement – was a companyoperated town that started as a construction camp for Imperial Oil in 1919. Before the Second World War, most northern settlements were small and seldom exceeded 1,000 inhabitants. The war led to rapid change in the Canadian North, such as the construction of highways, bases and airfields. This influx of aeroplanes, roads, railroads and snowmobiles significantly changed connectivity and mobility after the war. Newcomers arrived to work in new industries, and Indigenous populations experienced rapid social change. The Canadian public and political establishment were increasingly exposed to reports about the social conditions of Arctic communities, and the resulting public investment in health, education and welfare provisions transformed the economy of the North and led to the emergence of new types of settlements. Controversially, the federal government experimentally relocated groups of Inuit to ‘colonies’ in otherwise uninhabited regions to secure Canadian sovereignty.12 This policy was later abandoned in favour of assimilating Indigenous groups into mainstream Canadian society through urbanization.13 New technology such as snowmobiles transformed hunting practices and housing programmes facilitated urbanization and adaptation to southern culture.14 Also, the school system expanded across the Arctic and Subarctic in the 1950s, and communities grew around trading posts and sites with government services, schools and clinics.15 Northern populations were relocated to support industrialization in some cases, such as when Inuit were moved to Makkovik in Labrador in the 1950s to work in the newly opened uranium mine.16 In the early 1960s, J. Fried mapped the various types of settlements that had emerged after the Second World War. These included the ‘isolated technical station’, the ‘military base’, the ‘outpost service settlement’, the ‘serviced native enclave’, the ‘regional administrative centre’, the ‘frontier town’ and the ‘mining settlement’. The urbanization of the majority of the Indigenous population was completed by the mid-1960s.17 Until the 1970s, mining operations in the North usually involved building permanent communities of workers and their families, but when air commuting became more widespread, this practice became less prevalent.18 However, in many cases the federal government continued to insist that mining companies establish permanent settlements to ensure that industrial activities contributed to generating wage employment and local development.

Diefenbaker’s northern vision Dawson City, the largest city of the North around 1900, became a focus of federal northern development policy in the late 1950s. While Dawson

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City had been an icon of civilizational expansion into the North to the Canadian public during its peak under the gold rush, the town has since been in decline. During his 1958 campaign for re-election and his travel to Yukon in 1959, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker expounded Dawson City’s historical significance as a frontier town and its potential value as a tourist destination.19 Diefenbaker and the Conservative Party promised to capitalize on the riches of the North, and generate a new ‘sense of national purpose’.20 Dawson City’s past became a reference to the idea of northern riches and future development, and the government supported the construction of a national gold-mining heritage in the city by financing a ‘Gold Rush’ festival in 1962 and supported tourism by restoring buildings from the town’s heyday.21 Developing bases and settlements in the North was a Cold War response to the threat of Soviet bombers over the Arctic, but it was also motivated by an eagerness to promote Canadian sovereignty in response to the geopolitical ambitions of the United States that had dominated the North American Arctic since the 1940s.22 While the Second World War had brought significant changes to the North, these had mostly been infrastructural

FIGURE 5.2   Dawson City: ‘Palace Grand Theater – Built in 1899; now houses the Gaslight Follies. It is one of the approximately seventeen buildings included in the National Historical Site’. CC-BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bysa/3.0/deed.en. Image © JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ MD https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:DAWSON_HISTORICAL_COMPLEX_NATIONAL_HISTORIC_ SITE.jpg

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projects and cultural encounters with the local population and did not provide sustainable local jobs and regional economic growth. US road and airbase construction had, however, changed public and political awareness of the strategic and potential economic value of the North and demonstrated how technology could overcome the challenges of northern landscapes.23 The Conservative policy seized on perceptions of the North as a ‘utopist land of modernization and prosperity’, and Diefenbaker promised that, in order to enable development, the northern territories would eventually become self-governing provinces.24 While in office, the Diefenbaker government initiated the ‘Roads to Resources’ programme that resulted in infrastructure projects across the North, including over 6,400 kilometres of new roads and the conclusion of the Pine Point Railway in the NWT. New airstrips connected sites across the North, new towns increased the industrial and governmental administrative capacity of the region, and hydroelectric electricity became a significant northern export.25 The hope was that the revenue from resource exploitation would eventually repay government investment in the North, and contribute to overall national economic activity.26 Implicit in Diefenbaker’s northern policies was not only resource exploitation but also an intent to more firmly incorporate the North into Canada. Diefenbaker’s government did by no means invent colonialism in the North, but what was significant during this period was the central role the issue played in the government’s rhetoric and electoral appeal. Andrey Petrov describes the 1950s policy of industrialization, as ‘Diefenbakerism’ – a ‘hegemonic discourse of northern development … [and] the culmination of resource Fordism’.27 Also, according to Matthew Farish and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, ‘the late 1950s were the apogee of Arctic modernization in both dream and practice’.28 There was, however, little government concern for the rights and interests of local populations, and no coherent policy to engage Indigenous groups in development projects.29

Northern development The NWT was established within the federal governance system in 1895. Yukon became a distinct administrative structure in 1898, and despite the transfer of large tracts of land to the provinces, much of the North remained under direct federal control during most of the twentieth century. Diefenbaker’s administration reinforced the role of the federal Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources in managing the territory and reinforced its role in northern policy making, economic planning and community development. This branch of government eventually evolved into the highly influential Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND).30 During much of the late twentieth century, DIAND had wide-ranging jurisdiction relating to Indigenous peoples and was also

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responsible for economic development and environmental protection in the federal territories. According to Kenneth Rea, the lesson from the Second World War was that ‘commercial feasibility’ in itself was not sufficient to ensure proper resource distribution in the region, which supported the case for increased public policy and planning for northern development.31 Attention to the development gap in the North had a lasting effect on Canada’s northern policy.32 During the 1960s and 1970s, increased public attention to the social conditions and the general welfare of northern populations changed government priorities.33 According to Frances Abele, this resulted in two contrasting policy strands.34 On one side, a top-down policy prescription for the benefit of local populations. On the other side, a more liberal perception of the individual disadvantage of each Indigenous person, which led to an increased involvement of local communities in planning. Only in the 1970s, with the emergence of strong Indigenous voices in the public debate, was this opposition somewhat lessened. The counter-culture of the decade rejected industrial modernization, and resistance to cultural assimilation was voiced by an aboriginal rights movement that echoed international social movements. This movement found public traction through support for Indigenous land rights and protests against environmentally hazardous industrial projects.35

Model towns of the North The Diefenbaker government’s ‘Northern Vision’ focused on enabling and supporting industrial mining and hydropower developments. This support not only resulted in new infrastructure but also in plans for redeveloping existing and building entirely new settlements for workers and administrators. Beyond Dawson City, the government engaged in various other northern urban development plans, and Inuvik on the MacKenzie River delta became the first new model town in the Arctic. In 1953, it had become clear to the government that it needed a new administrative centre in the western Arctic, and Diefenbaker officially inaugurated the town in 1961. The design of the settlement was highly pragmatic and followed Modernist planning principles of functional zoning and infrastructural efficiency. The government intended the construction of a model town to demonstrate Canadian Arctic technological achievements, and in particular, the feasibility of building a settlement on permafrost.36 A core technological development in Inuvik was the overground ‘utilidor’ system that connected individual houses to central water, sewage and electricity networks. The elaborate infrastructural system of Inuvik was only reproduced in parts by planners elsewhere in the North, but social scientists studied Inuvik’s multi-cultural community of Inuit and southerners ‘as a new model for “Arctic living”’.37 The prescriptive Modernist planning of Inuvik

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focused on technical performance and included little consultation with the Indigenous population, and the resulting design is strikingly similar to other Canadian towns.38 When the initial construction phase was completed in 1960, a monument was erected with a plaque that read: ‘This was the first community north of the Arctic Circle built to provide the normal facilities of a Canadian town. It was designed not only as a base for development and administration but as a centre to bring education, medical care and new opportunities to the people of the Western Arctic’.39 Inuvik was planned as a ‘normal’ southern town to demonstrate the feasibility of living contemporary ‘metropolitan’ lives in the North and attract southerners.40 To the government, attracting skilled workers from elsewhere was an essential precondition for modernization of the North. This effort involved various branches of government, such as the Department of Agriculture, which experimented with growing vegetables and even with the cultivation of lawns that would help recreate a southern suburban setting.41 Following the example of Inuvik, the federal government promoted city building in other locations in the Arctic with a focus on the economic development of Indigenous communities. A prominent example is the first mining community north of the Arctic Circle at Nanisivik on northern Baffin Island.42 These newly planned settlements in the North, whether they were government or industry initiated, were in many cases better designed and

FIGURE 5.3   Inuvik 1961. Royal Canadian Navy/Department of National Defence.

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serviced than many other Canadian towns.43 Planners used international mid-century Modernist urban planning models for the new resource towns, and according to Lucie Morisset, they presented these communities as peaks of modernity and ‘model towns of the North’.44 Beyond their economic and civilizational functions, these model cities demonstrated Canada’s technological capacity for city building in the adverse conditions of the High North.

Housing in the Arctic The Inuit population of the NWT urbanized rapidly during the post-war decades, and healthy and adequate housing became a core concern for federal agencies. From 1959, the Eskimo Housing Loan programme supported the construction of simple prefabricated ‘matchbox’ houses of less than 30 square metres across the NWT. Later, other programmes for incomeregulated housing promoted centralization of the population to facilitate government service delivery and permanently settled communities grew in

FIGURE 5.4   ‘While the maintenance condition is generally good in NWT, the older rather primitive single-family home areas of Frobisher Bay make a rather miserable impression.’ Gunnar Lind Pedersen, Gunnar P. Rosendahl, and Hans Ølgaard, Rejse til The Northwest Territories, juni 1979 og juni 1980 [Travel to the Northwest Territories, June 1979 and June 1980] (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1980), 33.

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and around regional centres.45 The early decades of federal northern housing provision saw experimentation with standard designs, ranging from woefully inadequate plywood houses to metal or Styrofoam igloos and insulated tent structures.46 In the late 1960s, federal policies shifted towards increased homeownership, and housing programmes eventually targeted First Nations populations and expanded into Yukon. The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation (NWTHC) was formed in 1972 and built thousands of units in the following years. Many of these new houses were of the so-called Weber type. These larger units had internal subdivisions, low pitched roofs, and were raised on pillars to deal with permafrost conditions.47 In 1978, the NWT government suggested that ‘the basic requirements for housing are no different in the north, however, energy and infrastructure requirements of emulating southern examples are prohibitive’.48 Such concerns led to the development of modern houses that were explicitly designed for Arctic conditions.49 Today, private and public bodies build a wide array of housing types in the Canadian Arctic, and extensive development work has gone into improving energy efficiency and ease of construction under northern conditions.

Beyond wilderness suburbs Vast distances and underdeveloped infrastructure meant that many of the resource towns that were built by corporations in northern Canada during the post-war period were isolated. Mining communities and other northern towns with a large proportion of outside workers had a high population turnover, and companies and governments sought ways to make communities more stable by building settlements that were attractive to employees and their families.50 In terms of urban design, Morisset suggests that the desire to ‘attract, maintain, and stabilize the workforce by targeting families, rather than single workers, favoured the choice of this Anglo-Saxon type of housing: a home on a plot of land in a monofunctional residential area’.51 The resulting ‘southern’ towns in the North, called ‘wilderness suburbs’ by Ira Robinson and ‘northurbs’ by Andrey Petrov, made the transition to northern living as negligible as possible for southerners.52 These isolated post-war Canadian resource towns were mostly constructed from the ground up on undeveloped land and followed Modernist blueprints closely.53 Gerald Ridge, who analysed settlements across Yukon and NWT in the early 1950s, summarized the urban design ideals of the day: new planned subarctic resource communities should be compact, wooded buffers should separate industrial and residential zones, and central districts should take the form of shopping centres.54 In line with widely adopted principles at the time, he proposed clustering housing in neighbourhoods and servicing these with appropriate social facilities.55 Reflective of the societal context in the 1950s, Ridge based his suggestions on the assumption that new resource

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towns were for a ‘white’ population and argued that planners should avoid interference with Indigenous settlements. From the 1970s, the authorities increasingly sought to regulate townbuilding by resource companies.56 Changes to town planning practices reflected increasing attention to Indigenous peoples’ concerns and right to self-determination. Such changes echoed international mainstream planning trends that focused on user involvement.57 It had become increasingly clear to planners that dispersed suburban patterns were ill-suited for the North and that there was a need for new solutions for northern communities.58 Low building densities made infrastructure expensive to construct and maintain. Snow removal was costly, and movement around town became inefficient.59 Rather than reproducing southern designs and relying on technological solutions to the challenges of the climate, planners and architects increasingly explored new design solutions to social and environmental issues.60 Specifically, there was a surge in attention to the design of social amenities and shared spaces that would help build a sense of community to counteract the sense of isolation that often afflicted southerners in these northern mining towns. Climate-controlled centres that integrated multiple programmes catering to different user groups were designed to be places to pass free time.61 In the NWT, the government suggested that such complexes would ‘provide a considerable boost to community morale in terms of offering a point for the expression of civic pride, a structure for community services, and a central meeting place for the people’.62 In 1974, Leaf Rapids in north-western Manitoba built its town centre completely enclosed, combining its school, clinic, hotel, sports arena, curling rink, library, offices, shops and other services under one roof.63 Outside the centre, pedestrian paths linked directly to surrounding residential districts. This pattern was an expression of the ‘Radburn’ urban design principle that located roads and car traffic at the perimeter of the development and clustered dwellings around communal green spaces and pedestrian paths.64 The late 1970s was a time of crisis for the mining industry. Only a few new towns were built during this period, and alternative urban design models replaced enclosed town centres in the 1980s. For instance, planners of Tumbler Ridge in north-eastern British Columbia designed the town around a winding main street rather than a shopping centre, which they considered incapable of creating a sense of place that would help to build a local community.65

The urban experiment of Modernism We must make massive use of nuclear power, satellite communications, and all other means in order to produce the electric environment and the high energy civilization in the North … with its total environment controlled by men with vision.66

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Talking about the Canadian Middle North, rather than the Arctic, P. D. McTaggart-Cowan, president of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, expressed a vision of the North as a future landscape of progress, science and technology in 1967. The statement echoes Diefenbaker’s vision of the northern destiny of Canada and illustrates sentiment in an era where politicians and academics formulated grand master plans for northern development. These plans included industrial and military installations, infrastructures and cities, and seized on the opportunity for creating modern individuals in the North.67 Farish and Lackenbauer argue that the ‘post-war Arctic [was] an immense scientific laboratory’ and Douglas West concurs that ‘the North was a “living laboratory” or a “mirror to the nation” where ideas [were] being tested’.68 The vast expanse of the North was conducive to large-scale thinking, and Rob Shields suggests that the cost of transport and labour made megaprojects the only viable option for economic development.69 The first northern megaproject was the Alaska Highway that was built in 1942 by the US Army, and it was followed by the construction of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line radar picket in the 1950s. These military projects were later accompanied by industrial undertakings such as the trans-provincial iron ore complex of the Labrador Trough, the multi-decade hydroelectric development of the James Bay region, as well as the oil and gas projects in the Arctic archipelago, in the Beaufort Sea, and off the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland in the 1970s. These northern megaprojects involved technological, economic and social development and experimentation, and required the construction of infrastructure and towns. Experimental urban schemes functioned as markers of modernity and progress, and the planning and construction of these settlements were intended to overcome nature’s hostility to man. They reflected a utopian streak in international urban planning and design culture, illustrated by the ‘techno-sublimity of Archigram’ and the radical architectural designs and urban visions of the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal.70 These visionary city designs were examples of what Michelangelo Sabatino and Rhodri Windsor Liscombe refer to as ‘contemporary modernist hubris’.71 They were architectural utopian universalist formulations that transcended cultural divides, applied technology to overcome obstacles, and ignored local desires and economic feasibility. The North itself presented little resistance against fantastical projections and experimentation with people and the environment in the form of a political constituency.72

An Arctic new town at Frobisher Bay I think of a vast programme on Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, hiding resources that Canadians have little realization of. (John Diefenbaker, 1958)73

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The most iconic urban project for Arctic Canada in the 1950s was the community plan for Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island. Frobisher Bay was a fast-developing community, a military airbase and a hub for civilian air travel. It had never seen any significant urban planning, and the government initiated a development plan in 1958. The town was intended to become the administrative capital of the eastern Arctic as well as a model community, and the urban proposal presented by the government was a public communication that the North was the modern future and that it was ‘open for business’. Southern Baffin Island has a long history of Inuit habitation, and in 1914, a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post opened near Frobisher Bay. The US Army Air Force built the ‘Crystal Two’ airfield in 1942 to facilitate operations in the North Atlantic, and the Canadian government took over the facilities in 1944. An Inuit settlement gradually emerged near the base, and in 1949 the Hudson’s Bay Company relocated to nearby Apex Hill. This area eventually developed into a suburban cluster of homes for airbase and airline personnel, several kilometres from the Inuit settlement. From 1951, the airfield became a transit point for the US military flying to the Thule airbase in Greenland as well as a refuelling facility for longrange nuclear bombers.74 Frobisher Bay also became the location of a Cold War surveillance radar and a logistics hub that serviced the DEW Line of radar posts across the Arctic. The military left in 1957, and in 1959, the Department of Transport took over control of Frobisher Bay, which had become a stop on civilian trans-Arctic routes to and from Europe. As a result of the transfer from military to civilian control, there was a spike in public and political concern over the social conditions and the housing shortage among the rapidly growing Inuit population, and a realization of the urgent need for comprehensive urban planning.75 The government also hoped that a new city with an international airport and modern amenities would attract southern Canadians and businesses that would boost regional economic activity.76 The first urban proposal for Frobisher Bay, developed by the federal Department of Public Works in 1958, was an elaborate architectural megastructure designed to house 4,500 people in round high-rise towers surrounding a central dome with public functions. The semi-climatized dome housed churches, a fire station, shops, restaurants, a vehicle garage and a wide range of urban services – even a funeral parlour. This central space was designed as an ‘attractive small town based on English town planning practice of closed vistas’, and had ample park space and plants.77 The architects argued that it was psychologically necessary to provide a climate-protected landscape setting for social life that contrasted the vast and harsh Arctic landscape, and the design of dwellings ensured that families would have a degree of privacy during long winters.78 The clustering of residential towers around the dome eliminated the need for corridors between buildings. This, the designers argued, would help overcome social problems and increase the feeling of safety and social

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control of urban space, particularly for women.79 The city design integrated Inuit and southerners.80 The Department of Public Works based the project on experiences from locations like Aklavik and Whitehorse, but local and cultural considerations played little role in the project presentation.81 Rather than insisting on an Inuit-specific design iconography, the architects argued that the round high-rise towers resembled silos that were a ‘typical Canadian form of architectural expression’.82 The overall form of the city is reminiscent of Egli’s 1951 proposal for an Antarctic city in which cylindrical residential towers surround a central building.83 Underlining the science-fiction-like character of the 1958 project, the Department of Public Works proposed burying a nuclear reactor in a nearby hillside. Student of geography, Shiela MacBain complained in 1970 about the ‘unrealistic blueprints for a model community’, and according to architectural historian Andrew Waldron, the ‘unrealistic space-age’ project for Frobisher Bay was a radical departure from the usual pragmatic designs of the federal department.84 The government made no real effort to realize the proposal, and Canadian and Russian architects briefed on the plan after 1958 reported that it was not taken seriously in planning and government circles.85 Nevertheless, the project was met with widespread public interest

FIGURE 5.5   ‘The town site plan illustrating the various buildings within the scheme. Note the reasonable areas allowed for park development.’ B. A. Gardner and William Edmund Fancott, Frobisher Bay: The Design of Accommodation for a Community of 4500 People (Ottawa: Department of Public Works, 1958).

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and appeared in newspapers and various journals, such as the Illustrated London News.86 The project was also studied and discussed as a basis for further architectural experimentation with Arctic urban form in the Soviet Union in the following decades.87 After 1958, the urban development plan was reworked into three varieties by a consortium of architects and engineers.88 The consultants’ brief reduced the target population to 1,000 with a possible extension of up to 4,000, and the Frobisher Development Group Committee presented one of these proposals to the government in 1960.89 The chosen compact development model was located on Astro Hill above the Inuit settlement and consisted of three 6- to 8-storey buildings around a central plaza with residences, a cinema, a hotel, a nursery and a community hall. The federal government announced funding for the plan in 1961 but halted the development after Diefenbaker’s 1962 election losses.90 In 1963, the US military withdrew from Frobisher Bay. Around the same time, the need for stops on civilian transAtlantic flights disappeared when new aeroplane types entered service, and projected mining activities in the North failed to materialize.91 The sudden availability of airbase facilities led the government to reconsider the urban development plans, and only fragments of the previously approved project were realized.92 In 1968, DIAND presented a revised urban plan for Frobisher Bay. This development included new integrated housing areas that ended the urban segregation of Inuit and southerners.93 It also proposed a down-scaled version of the previous plan in the form of the multi-purpose Astro Hill ‘omni-building’ with a hotel, shops, government offices and residences, effectively replacing Apex Hill as the town centre.94 Tunnels connected the omni-building to nearby residential buildings. These were eventually closed as a consequence of anti-social behaviour, and according to reports from the late 1970s, the Astro Hill complex was considered socially problematic.95 In 1974, Moshe Safdie, the chief planner of the 1967 Montreal Expo, was commissioned by the NWT government to design a housing development for Frobisher Bay. His radical but unrealized project consisted of a series of octagonal two-unit fibreglass residential structures. During the 1970s, the architectural firm Papineau Gérin-Lajoie Le Blanc built two highly visionary projects in Frobisher Bay: the Gordon Robertson Education Centre in 1971 (now Inuksuk High School) and Nakasuk Elementary School in 1973. The interiors of these almost windowless buildings responded to contemporary theories on learning environments, and their lightweight fibreglass panel construction gave them a high-tech, space station-like appearance that reinforced a notion of environmental encapsulation.96 Frobisher Bay changed its name to Iqaluit in 1987, and in 1999 it became the territorial capital of Nunavut. Today, Iqaluit is home to almost equal numbers of Inuit and southerners. It has a population of around 8,000 inhabitants and is projected to grow to about 13,000 by 2030.97 Growing Inuit cultural self-assertiveness and increased political autonomy

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FIGURE 5.6   The Nakasuk Elementary School by Papineau, Gérin-Lajoie, Le Blanc (1973). CC-BY-SA-2.0-DE https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/ deed.en. Image © Ansgar Walk https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nakasuk_ School_Iqaluit_2000.jpg

has, according to Edmund Searles, led to Iqaluit ‘suddenly becoming an epicenter of Inuit power and authority’.98 Rob Shields further suggests that it has become ‘a place where Inuit culture and identity can prosper and be expressed’.99 A prominent example of architectural Inuit cultural iconography is the giant igloo of the Anglican cathedral first designed by Ronald Thom in 1970 and rebuilt after a fire in 2005. Still, most buildings in Iqaluit follow mainstream Canadian architectural trends.100 Most Inuit in Iqaluit have adopted an urban lifestyle, and traditional activities such as hunting have become a leisure-related cultural expression. Thus, according to accounts, some Inuit outside Iqaluit consider its ‘southern’ lifestyle as not quite Inuit, in contrast to life on the land.101

The ‘Ecological Arctic Town’ Besides the futuristic 1958 project for Frobisher Bay, the most well-known urban proposal of the peak period of northern modernization and citybuilding is Ralph Erskine’s design for Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island. Located at latitude seventy-four along the Northwest Passage, Resolute Bay’s history of Inuit inhabitation is evident in archaeological finds. Still, it had no permanent population when the government built a military weather

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station and airport there in 1947. In 1953, a group of Inuit from northern Quebec were relocated to Resolute Bay by the federal government.102 After civilian authorities took over the airport in 1964, Resolute Bay functioned as a supply base for the High Arctic, and the government anticipated further industrial resource extraction in the region. To strengthen its role as a logistics hub and to address the social conditions of the Inuit population, the government hired Ralph Erskine to design a new town in 1970. He had already in 1958 visualized ideas for an ‘ecological arctic town’, and this concept formed the basis for the design of Resolute Bay.103 The iconic architectural gesture of Erskine’s design was an almost one-kilometre long curved windscreen building or climate wall that contained shops, a hotel, municipal offices, apartments and row houses, an indoor park, an arena and other recreational facilities. Programmes and pedestrian movements were concentrated in the internal public space of the wall to increase possibilities for social encounters.104 Thus, the compact master plan would provide a feeling of ‘togetherness’ to counter the sense of isolation that often afflicted southerners in the Arctic. Resolute Bay periodically had up to 550 inhabitants, but the new design was expected to house 1,200 people and was expandable up to 3,000. The new town, located some distance away from the existing settlement, was intended to be a prototype of an ethnically integrated Arctic town and address the practical as well as social problems of the local Inuit.105 The wall-building sheltered the enclosed urban spaces and detached Inuit homes from wind and snowdrift.106 However, as Alan Marcus has remarked, Erskine’s urban design would have allowed panoptic surveillance of the

FIGURE 5.7   ‘Section of the center with winter garden, beneath skylights which thanks to reflectors receive sunlight’, ‘Resolute Bay New Town, Cornwallis Island, Canada’. © Bauen + Wohnen, Volume 31 (1977).

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Inuit houses by the southern residents of the multi-storey climate wall.107 Despite ambitions to socially integrate groups, both the design and the realized urban setting reflected what later research on postcolonial cities would identify as a ‘dual [city], ethnically, socially, and spatially segregated between the “European” town and “native” settlement’.108 The construction of the project was suspended in 1978 when the expected boom in Arctic resource extraction failed to materialize, and other locations had assumed some of the logistical roles of Resolute Bay.109 Only a small fragment of Erskine’s climate wall was completed, and it was decided to move the existing Inuit homes to the prepared town site, rather than finish constructing the purpose-designed units.110 The new location away from the water turned out to be problematic for the Inuit who depended on daily access to the sea.111 The town site was also several kilometres away from the airfield and what is today the Canadian Armed Forces Arctic Training Centre which shares facilities with the Polar Continental Shelf research programme. Consultation with future residents took place during the planning of the new Resolute Bay settlement through a user reference group with both Inuit and southern immigrant workers. This process influenced site selection, house types, the clustering of homes and the proximity of housing types, which was supposed to encourage integration between Inuit and southerners.112 Although Erskine and others had proclaimed his unique sensitivity when it came to mapping local conditions and user involvement in the design, the design he proposed for Resolute Bay was nevertheless a version of what he considered a universal concept for a (Sub)Arctic town, initially developed for Northern Sweden.113 Erskine’s universal design concept for a Subarctic city and his will-to-form led to the relocation of the settlement to a virgin site and a grand architectural gesture rather than an incremental improvement to the existing situation. The iconic form and the enticing visualizations of the proposal contributed to making Erskine’s design and concept for an Arctic city a celebrated icon of city-building in the Canadian Arctic – inspiring architects working around the circumpolar North.114

City image: Fermont The visionary Arctic urban projects at Frobisher Bay and Resolute were never – or only partly – built. As a consequence, Fermont in northern Quebec has become the most celebrated realized urban design in the Canadian North. Located 1,100 kilometres from Montreal, at fifty-three degrees north, Fermont is situated in the Middle North, according to Hamelin’s classification.115 It is situated in the ore-rich Labrador Trough that straddles the Labrador-Quebec border. Mining in the region started in Schefferville in 1953, and the Iron Ore Company of Canada constructed a railroad to

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FIGURE 5.8   The outline and road network of Erskine’s plan are clearly visible today. When the development was cancelled in 1978, existing houses were moved from their previous location close to the airfield to the prepared town site. Only a small section of the wall was built. Map data: Google, Image © 2020 Maxar Technologies.

transport ore to a new deep-water harbour in Sept-Îles on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. In 1960, the Wabush Mining Company built the town of Wabush across the provincial boundary in Labrador.116 Later, mining companies planned and constructed additional mines, processing facilities and several new towns in the region, including Fermont. The Québec Cartier Mining Company began planning the town in 1969 as a model community to attract a workforce to the North. The design followed the principles for local climate mitigation put forward by Ralph Erskine, who also functioned as a consultant to the architects Desnoyers and Schoenauer.117 The architects designed the town according to a set of

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principles: a compact urban form, a beneficial microclimate generated by a windscreen building and climate-controlled pedestrian access to community facilities.118 The town is located on flat terrain and faces Lake Daviault to the south and east. Perimeter roads provide access, but the interior of the town is pedestrian-friendly. The compact layout of the town reduces walking distances within the settlement and to the surrounding recreational landscape. Compactness also reduces the costs of building and maintaining infrastructure, including snow clearance.119 The pedestrian outdoor spaces in the centre of the town are sheltered from the winter winds by a 1,300 meter long, five-and-a-half storey tall wall-building. Besides providing a beneficial microclimate to the town, the wall houses the primary communal and commercial services and the town’s administration.120 The interior public spaces of Le Mur Écran (The Screen Wall) enable social encounters and interaction all year round. The social functions of the wall include a pool, hockey rink, bowling alley, school, cultural centre and a shopping centre. In addition to the 344 apartments in

FIGURE 5.9   The original urban plan for the central district of Fermont is wellpreserved. Map data: Google, Image © 2020 Maxar Technologies.

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FIGURE 5.10   Le Mur Écran protects the lower row-houses from the northern winds. © Peter Hemmersam.

the windscreen, the original design of the town also included 411 bungalows, 214 semi-detached units and 144 row-houses. Initially, the designers did not intend to build single-family dwellings, but consultation made clear that ‘some future residents … aspired to live in “bungalows” like “other people”’.121 Despite user input in the design phase, the design of the town was not universally appreciated. Bernadette Blanc reported that the wall screen building ‘seemed alien’ to some inhabitants and enhanced the feeling of living in a ‘cocoon’.122 Also, the compact urban form meant that equipment and vehicles cluttered the space between buildings. Residents felt that they had little individual choice in the comprehensively designed town, and, as Blanc suggests, ‘contrary to what the designers believed, it is not by forcing people to meet in one particular place that interaction is automatically created’.123

Components of the city image Arriving from the Mont-Wright or Fire Lake mines, or the neighbouring towns of Labrador City or Wabush, the town of Fermont is approached from the north. A water tank on a hill announces the town’s name and a retired yellow mining dump truck functions as a welcoming monument. Past the massive truck, the wall building rises as the facade and entrance to the town. Le Mur Écran is the central point of orientation and is visible

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from anywhere in the town. Along the long wall, the blue sports arena is visually conspicuous, the entrance to the main municipal functions is a bright red section of the wall and the tallest building in town – the white hotel – rises above the wall complex. The original urban core is still the centre of the town, but the shift workers’ camps and the housing areas to the north of the wall constitute a distinct new district. An older addition to the town is the trailer park located to the west of the central area, and the flats within the wall also have a distinct identity as a separate residential district. The most active place of everyday interaction in Fermont is the commercial space inside the climate wall, particularly around the doubleheight interior ‘square’ with the supermarket and the liquor store. The shopping centre is close to the indoor sports facilities and the cultural centre, but these functions have separate entrances. The school and sports fields are natural gathering points for the town’s children and youth, and the marina and beach on Lac Daviault are recreational gathering places during summer. The southern and eastern edges of the settlement open onto the lakefront and the historical northern boundary – the wall – separates the pedestrian-friendly core of the town from the car-dominated district to the north. Fermont has a primary access road going north, which leads to the mines and the other towns in the region. There are several overlapping transport networks within the town. In wintertime, Ski-doos move in the open spaces between the buildings. The road system is deliberately fragmented to produce quiet residential streets,

FIGURE 5.11   The interior street of the climate wall. © Peter Hemmersam.

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and a fine-grained pedestrian network enables easy access from most of the town to the interior of the wall. The path that runs parallel to the wall on the south side is an essential connector between the pedestrian routes that filter into the central residential area and the many entrances to the wall.

Fermont’s winter landscape

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n early April 2014, I conducted field reconnaissance in Fermont. While the weather was relatively mild, the ground was still covered by deep snow, which restricted my movements to cleared paths and roads. I started my walk at an industrial park at the northern edge of the town that housed the supporting operations and equipment manufacturers for the mining operation, including the base for the yellow school buses used to transport miners to work. This industrial area was also the location of the new parallel settlement for the relatively recent fly-in-fly-out workforce. The temporary residential camps are located north of the multi-storey wall-building that shelters the permanent residential area from the winter winds. A large parking lot symbolically separates the shift workers from the central district, while still providing access to the city services and amenities housed inside the windscreen. There were Ski-doos (snowmobiles) all over town. They were parked at designated parking areas near the climate wall and outside many homes. Children played with kid-size Ski-doos inside the settlement. They could go anywhere, and at the playground, the snow-covered equipment was marked with orange stakes to avoid collisions. During my walk, I noticed campaign posters for an upcoming election. I also saw several ‘offre d’emploi’ notices advertising jobs, which was an indication of the difficulty of attracting workers to the town’s secondary businesses and municipal services that do not match the salaries of the mining company. New Skidoos, trucks with oversized tires and numerous RVs, provided, along with the live lobsters in the supermarket, evidence of the high income among the town’s miners. Leaving the industrial area behind, I crossed the parking lot and passed through the half-empty shopping centre inside the wall building. The interior decor and colours were an authentic 1970s style. Emerging on the south side, the function of the wall became evident: it was noticeably warmer and more sheltered here than to the north. I further encountered smaller examples of seasonal architectural climate adaptations, such as a canopy that covered an urban staircase to prevent snow and ice build-up, as well as removable structures erected around the entrances to the wall to keep them clear from drifting snow. Proceeding through the compact central district, where children were playing in the open green areas, I saw signs announcing ‘hidden’ programs like the Catholic Knights of Columbus residing in a basement. Finally, I arrived at the recreational lakefront beach, which marks the southern perimeter of the settlement. Here, a notice prosaically declared the frozen lake closed for the season.

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FIGURE 5.12   An entrance to the wall. © Peter Hemmersam.

Inside the wall, a central, one-and-a-half storey tall interior street acts as the primary longitudinal movement space, but directional and level changes fragment and divide this central corridor into a multitude of low-ceiling passages that penetrate the entire length of the structure.

Fermont today Fly-in-fly-out operations have put an end to the building of new towns in northern Quebec, and Fermont remains the only significant mining town in the north-eastern part of the province.124 The town was incorporated in 1974, but despite having a municipal government, the mining company still dominates life in Fermont.125 The town’s population has peaked and declined according to world market prices of ore. In 1981, it was 4,200, and around 2010, the population temporarily rose to 6,000 when a new mine opened. Today, Fermont has around 2,500 residents, of which 1,000 inhabit the wall. The semi-detached houses in the central district have been painted in bright colours in recent years, but Le Mur Écran is still a monument of 1970s design. Its interior is brown and orange, ceilings are low, and many of the interior spaces receive little daylight. The central part of the wall is partly empty. The bowling alley is closed, and several shops in the commercial centre are vacant. Nevertheless, the wall is the symbol of Fermont. While the architects’ pre-construction representations of the town pictured it from the south to make the sheltering function of the climate wall

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evident, contemporary promotional images now feature the wall-building seen from the north as the central icon of the town. The wall is at the scale of nature,126 and many online photos of Fermont reveal a fascination with the compact and recognizable urban form. The dense urban spaces of the town contrast with the suburban layout of other mining communities, such as Labrador City and Wabush. Despite its decades-long history, Fermont is not an entirely permanent community, and has, for instance, no cemetery. For most people, living in the town and renting a house are tied to work contracts. Nevertheless, Fermont has an ‘air of permanence’.127 While the inhabitants initially considered residence in Fermont to be a temporary event, attitudes have changed over the decades. Despite its transient population and the boom-and-bust cycles of its dominant industry, the distinctive design and well-developed planning of the town have contributed to a strong sense of place among its occupants. Geographers Martin Simard and Carl Brisson report about a sense of belonging among the residents, and architect Adrian Sheppard claims that ‘after the normal period of growing pains and some adjustments, one can discern a pride of place, and a willingness on the part of the community to contribute to the life of the town’.128 The steady influx of shift workers has been a source of unease among some inhabitants of Fermont.129 The camps and the new housing for shift workers are separated from the ‘old’ part of town by the wall, but its shops and bars are also the main arenas for interaction between the two groups. The spatial separation of transient southerners and the locals was a characteristic feature of northern communities in the 1950s and 1960s. In Fermont, this separation has re-emerged, but it is now the local population that is the privileged group, while the temporary workforce remains ‘outside’ the wall. When Fermont was constructed, the architects and planners considered it the first of a new generation of northern towns.130 However, the innovative, compact design with intense social spaces, contrasted with the future residents’ desire to live in bungalows, ‘like everywhere else’, and its ground-breaking urban design was never replicated elsewhere in Canada.131 Fermont never reached the same level of fame in the architectural community as Erskine’s unrealized project for Resolute Bay. The town is located well below the Arctic Circle, but architects and planners worldwide nevertheless admired Fermont as the most comprehensive example of a northern settlement based on designs for energy conservation and microclimate amelioration.132

The urbanism of Arctic Canada In Canada, the North has been romanticized and idealized as a mirror to the nation, and the planning and design of settlements in the Arctic and Subarctic have reflected southern imaginations and concerns.133 Post-war

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FIGURE 5.13   The wall is the icon of Fermont. © Peter Hemmersam.

visions of new towns were images of modernity that echoed popular ideas of technological progress and the development of ‘uninhabited’ space. Some Modernist urban schemes became iconic of the conditions and opportunities of the Arctic, at the same time as they were able to express a dramatic northernness.134 However, Indigenous self-government and cultural selfassertiveness have increasingly made it clear that northern cities are first and foremost a northern affair. Thus, since the 1970s, notions of a northern homeland have collided with ideas of the North as a resource frontier. Roy Bowles suggests that many northern towns were ‘created as “tools” or instruments to aid in particular economic projects’.135 Resource companies built towns according to various public planning requirements. Hence, the urbanism of the primary city building period in the second half of the twentieth century reflected a range of policy priorities of different branches and levels of government. This was the case for the federal territories, who gradually acquired increased political autonomy, but also for the provincial North, where plans for towns and settlements addressed local political concerns. Unlike the USSR, the Canadian state did not invest heavily in settling large numbers of southern immigrants in the North to modernize and industrialize the region. Instead, the policy from the 1950s was that the government constructed military, metrological and scientific installations as well as administrative settlements while supporting and encouraging

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industry to exploit northern resources and build both temporary and permanent settlements. Reflecting this policy, as well as the concerns listed above, a contemporary overview of prominent types of settlements in the Canadian North includes (1) Indigenous settlements and hamlets with elements of traditional lifestyles and elements of a subsistence economy, (2) Resource towns – often with a limited lifespan, (3) ‘Heritage’ and ‘Arctic’ towns that capitalize on the frontier myth or eco-tourism, (4) Epicentres of Indigenous cultural identity and art, and (5) Administrative centres with a large proportion of Euro-Canadians.

Searching for a northern vernacular In the 1950s and 1960s, planning of northern towns took place in Ottawa, the provincial capitals and other southern urban centres. Urban plans from this period mostly replicated southern models of urban design.136 Viable alternative concepts of northern urban design were not widely available to planners at the time. Reproducing southern urban environments made new settlements attractive for southerners and encouraged them to move north and contribute to the economic development of the region. Also, the ‘southern’ urban environment played a role in assimilating Indigenous peoples into the Canadian majority culture and transforming them into a ‘governable’ and salaried workforce that contributed to the national economy. Already in the 1950s, however, planners working in the North started arguing that southern urban models were ill-adapted to the climatic conditions of the North and that they were culturally inappropriate to the resident population.137 The lack of appropriate pre-existing urban models led to experimentation with social development and climate-adapted construction and planning. Some urban designers and architects argued that there was potential for developing a unique northern Canadian architecture based on local conditions and culture.138 In the 1970s, the exploration of a northernspecific architecture increased with the emergence of a post-development discourse. This discourse encompassed a search for region-specific, local and practical knowledge about northern construction.139 Examples of the architectural dimensions of this ‘polar vernacular’ include iconography that references Indigenous culture, for instance in the igloo cathedrals in Inuvik and Iqaluit, but also in the high-tech environment-responsive designs of the Iqaluit schools by Papineau Gérin-Lajoie Le Blanc.140 Experiments with a northern vernacular involved innovative solutions for dealing with snowdrift, the limits to outdoor activity imposed by the long winter and the possibility for adequate daylight in buildings.141 Despite many suggestions and experiments with compact housing typologies, pushback from residents who preferred a ‘southern’ suburban-style living has nevertheless occurred repeatedly.142 Thus, while government planners in the late 1970s suggested that ‘new solutions or appropriate modifications of the old [were] evolving

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to provide a set of urban planning and design principles which are unique to the northern environment and provide special insight into the process of community building north of 60°’, Sheppard and White found that ‘a northern vernacular … failed to materialize’.143 Today, the settlements of the Canadian North exhibit a range of urban and architectural designs. While it is difficult to identify one particular style of architecture and urban design across the North, many practical approaches and solutions that were implemented in northern city building have been described and explored in the ‘Winter Cities’ literature that emerged in the 1980s.144 This literature became an important influence on city planning and urban policies across the Arctic and in many other cities with a northern climate.

Climate-protected social spaces In the northern urban development of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, planners and architects proposed compact, pedestrianized and climatized multi-use urban town centres across the North. Gerald Ridge proposed in 1953 that the ‘central business district, developed along the lines of a shopping centre, would help to offset any unfavourable commercial developments as well as being more economical to construct’.145 Early designs for climatized public spaces, such as the 1958 Frobisher Bay Development Plan, proposed enclosing entire settlements. Over time, however, the NWT government found that proposals for completely domed communities were impractical, partly because warm domes would compromise the stability of permafrost in a given town site, but also because of construction costs and the general psychological undesirability of isolating people from the surrounding landscape.146 Nevertheless, urban plans across the North from the 1970s included enclosed town centres. Architect Blanche van Ginkel pointed out that these northern interiorized town centres corresponded to general trends in Canadian urbanism at the time for ‘tighter grouping of residential units, a more cohesive core, multi-functional buildings, energy conservation [and] reduced automobile dependence’.147 Rather than covering entire settlements, some of these town centres had climatized pedestrian connections to surrounding residential buildings. The Astro Hill complex at Frobisher Bay had connecting tunnels to nearby buildings, while the central town-complex of Radisson in Quebec was connected to nearby residential buildings via enclosed pedestrian bridges.

Impermanent and unsustainable communities Despite the prominent role of the government in the development of the North, many northern Canadian towns were planned and built by private

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corporations. These company towns often had a high turnover of southern guest workers. Some resource towns constructed after 1950 were operational for decades, but others only lasted a few years and became ghost towns after industries closed down.148 Many of these towns were erased entirely, such as Gagnon in Quebec after many of the inhabitants moved to nearby Fermont. In some locations, buildings were moved to new places. For instance, when Uranium City in Saskatchewan closed down in 1982, 400 homes were moved 350 kilometres to Fort McMurray in Alberta.149 Some towns, however, continued to exist beyond mine closures, such as Schefferville in northern Quebec, where mining ceased in 1982. It continues to be the home of First Nations groups who incorporated parts of the town into the local reserve.150 Temporary buildings or those with a short operational life are also characteristic of northern settlements. Gabrielle Goliger reports that houses in the Arctic NWT ‘had a life expectancy of about 15 years … due to the wear and tear caused by nature and also to heavy use by large families crowded into their homes through much of the year’.151 Sub-standard houses were temporary solutions to the housing shortage caused by the rapid urbanization of Indigenous groups, and Indigenous housing in many places lacked technical utilities, even in towns where these existed. Modern homes have gradually replaced sub-standard types across the North, and governments have improved infrastructure to make communities more sustainable. Nevertheless, ad-hoc construction and the temporary nature of northern settlements have long been an impediment to comprehensive practices of urban planning that could have increased community sustainability by providing long-term solutions and permanent provisions of public services.152

Ad-hoc planning As a consequence of the colonial-style governance of the northern Canadian hinterland, the planning of communities and settlements here took place in an uncoordinated fashion. While the central government initiated much of the early top-down regional development, there was no central organization responsible for urban development and planning in the NWT during the first decades of urban expansion.153 Rhodri Windsor Liscombe contends that the planning of Arctic settlements reflected ‘inadequately researched policies formulated by the Canadian Government for northern and arctic development’.154 During the 1950s and 1960s, airports, harbours, military bases, telecommunication and schools were the mandates of different branches of government, and the development of northern communities happened primarily through government housing programmes that paid little attention to overall urban planning.155 The territorial government of the NWT took over the federal housing programmes after 1974, and

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according to a 1978 NWT administration report, ‘many of the problems facing northern communities today can be attributed to the lack of proper planning over this period of growth and expansion’.156 Supporting this claim, Danish planners touring the NWT in 1979 and 1980 commented that there was little evidence of systematic urban planning in settlements in the territory and that most places they visited had an ad-hoc appearance.157

Learning from elsewhere In the early twentieth century, Soviet planners had looked to Canada for inspiration on territorial economic development. Likewise, Canadian planners and architects studied urban development in other parts of the Arctic after the Second World War. According to John D. Hamilton, there were few relevant urban projects in Alaska, but Greenland became a particular inspiration for the development of the Canadian North.158 Housing typologies in Greenland were to some extent copied in Arctic Canada, but the impact of these models was ultimately limited.159 Beyond housing, Canadian scholars analysed cities and urban planning in northern Scandinavia. The decision of the NWT government to hire Ralph Erskine to design the new town at Resolute Bay in the 1970s is an indication that politicians and administrators considered Scandinavian urban design practices relevant to the Canadian North.160 Primarily, however, Canadian planners and decision-makers found inspiration in the regional, urban and technological development in the Soviet Union.161 In 1965, Arthur Laing, Minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources, visited the USSR to study ‘methods of construction in permafrost, methods of resource extraction [and] methods of looking after humans and maintaining morale in a latitude where it’s dark for two months every winter’. He ‘returned enraptured by the Soviet north’.162 In 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau also led a delegation to the Soviet Union to seek inspiration for northern development. He visited Murmansk and Norilsk and signed a formal agreement about knowledge and scientific exchange between the two countries.163 Later that same year, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Jean Chrétien, initiated the exchange during his visit to cities in the Soviet North.164 One example of Canadian learning under the agreement was a 1977 NWT government delegation to the Soviet North to report on town planning.165 A further example of the Canadian exposure to Soviet urban planning is the exhibition of a domed urban design for the accommodation of workers for the Aikhal diamond mine at the International and Universal Exposition in Montreal in 1967.166 Knowledge exchange also took place through publications. In addition to other Russian literature on northern development, the National Research Council of Canada translated the journal Problemy Severa (Problems of the North) into English between 1958 and 1978. Also, Canadian experts participated in the international

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conferences on northern development and planning organized by the United Nations Economic Commission on Europe in the 1970s and 1980s.167 While it is well-documented that knowledge exchange took place, it is less obvious exactly which practical ideas travelled and were taken up among Canadian decision-makers and experts. The exchanges nevertheless played a part in motivating architects and planners to consider design and planning in the North to be distinct from practices elsewhere. By engaging in international knowledge exchange and pursuing the development of a unique urbanism of the North, they contributed to the establishment of an international discourse on the Arctic City.

Experimental visions Similar to the technological triumph of the Soviet colonization of the North, Canadian development schemes were expressions of modernity and demonstrated technology that enabled the occupation of a barren region.168 Engineers working in the Arctic during and after the Second World War were faced with a range of technical challenges and had to come up with solutions through experimentation. Thus, according to Robert Fairfield, the DEW Line of radar stations across the Arctic that was constructed hurriedly in the 1950s ‘employed a great many uneconomic measures of a usefully experimental nature’.169 Planners continuously experimented with urban forms for northern settlements that were distinctly different from southern models.170 This experimental dimension of mid-century northern engineering extended to town-building, and the development of settlements in the Arctic was to a large extent framed by the federal government as experimental.171 The building of Inuvik was an experiment in northern construction, but it was also a social experiment with the integration of population groups and the cultural assimilation of Inuit. According to Ken Coates, northern resource towns were also experiments in social organization.172 For example, at Nanisivik, efforts were made to introduce Inuit to wage labour as miners, and government planners hoped that they could reproduce this prototype for urban and social development across the Arctic.173 Experiments with northern architectural design in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with a particularly visionary and experimental period in international architectural culture. Sheppard and White suggest that ‘the northern “frontier” offered an ideal test site for ideas already present within a broader zeitgeist; megastructures, capsular cities, prefabrication, and modularity’.174 In new northern resource towns with no pre-existing populations, planners were at liberty to test the latest planning theories.175 The Danish planners who visited the NWT in 1978 and 1980 observed that ‘one experiments considerably more than we do [in Greenland] and uses one’s imagination much more’.176 The 1958 visionary urban plan for Frobisher Bay and the high-tech projects in the NWT by Papineau Gérin-Lajoie Le

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Blanc are prominent examples of the experimental architecture and urbanism of the period. While the planners and architects behind these visionary and experimental schemes envisioned a possible future Arctic, the plans and designs were often realized in an uncoordinated way that did not, overall, engender radically new forms of cities and communities across the North.

Canada’s Arctic urban futures A hundred years of urban development in Canada’s North has resulted in a wide variety of towns and settlements. Urbanization changed the North in numerous ways, but development policies and urban planning did, in many cases, not deliver the projected benefits and social outcomes. The mixed results of the Modernist development schemes eroded public trust in policies of social reconstruction. Despite the assumption of equalization through modernization, many northern communities have continued to be marginal and unsustainable without government support.177 Communities in the North rely on fishing, hunting and trapping, tourism, forestry and cultural production. However, northern economic development in Canada has depended on mining since the gold rush. Canada produces nickel, gold, diamonds, aluminium, coal, copper, lead, zinc, platinum, potash, uranium and rare earth elements from around 200 mines, many of which are in the Subarctic and Arctic. In addition, the economy of the North relies on oil and gas extraction, and there is a broad political consensus that the prospects of the Canadian North depend on resource extraction for the foreseeable future.178 Boom-and-bust cycles in the resource industries have had negative consequences in many places, and discontinued extraction operations have often had little lasting positive effect on local communities.179 Some towns in the North still struggle with the after-effects of mining, such as environmental pollution and lingering health challenges. In many places, the environment has suffered lasting damage, for instance, in the form of large-scale hydroelectric installations.180 Further, the remoteness and tenuous infrastructural connections of many former resource towns leave them with little hope of economic recovery. Many small and isolated northern towns and settlements face an uncertain future, and it is unclear if they will benefit significantly from forthcoming resource extraction projects in terms of income and employment.181 Small settlements in the North are not economically sustainable due to a lack of jobs and low education attainment, as well as the absence of connecting local and regional infrastructure.182 However, there are significant differences between northern towns, and some locations are more economically developed and competitive in terms of attracting investment and newcomers. Interestingly, Andrey Petrov, in a study, found that ‘the more southerly towns [of the North] tend to have a weaker creative class than some more distant and remote communities’.183 While there may be many possible reasons for

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this difference, it is not unreasonable to assume that a heightened ‘sense of place’ in Arctic communities plays a role in attracting businesses, tourists and entrepreneurial individuals. When the economy of the North diversifies beyond mining, governmentbased income and subsidies towards tourism and other industries, it is possible that increased bottom-up planning and urban development will become more commonplace.184 Sheppard and White outline dimensions of a potential urbanism of contemporary Arctic communities that reflect local knowledge and community practices.185 They catalogue the material potential of settlements, such as mines and industry, but also transport infrastructures such as airstrips and harbours that enable flows of people and goods, and demonstrate how these are intimately tied to the economic future of settlements. Increased public attention to the North as a cultural space has led to an interest in new and experimental architectural designs that reflect local and Indigenous cultural contexts.186 The oft-repeated idea that the architecture and urbanism of this environment should diverge distinctly from the planning and architectural culture of southern Canada reflects perpetuated perceptions of the Arctic as a unique space. In reality, the planning and architecture of northern and Arctic communities still mostly follow southern patterns. Also, Petrov suggests that northern-specific architecture and urban planning principles based on local knowledge and agency have been hampered by the ‘neo-liberal triumph’ of the North, in which the government released market forces in communities that had little political agency, causing lingering instability and uncertainty.187 Current debates on urbanism and development in the Canadian North revolve around issues such as Indigenous rights, climate change, sovereignty and resource exploitation. These extend previous controversies, but the debate over climate change is a relatively recent addition with potentially farreaching consequences for the planning and future of settlements. Northern development remains contentious, and while some people support resource extraction and jobs, others prioritize environmental protection and climate action. Such divisions are not only evident in local versus central policy debates but also exist within and among local and Indigenous communities in the North.188 Sheppard and White have demonstrated that importing concepts from climatically similar, but culturally and economically very different places like northern Scandinavia is problematic.189 Also, there is still no consensus on what good urban design models are for the Canadian North. Ongoing devolution of power to territories and Indigenous self-government will lead to cultural, social and political changes that may result in very different ideas about urbanism in the North in the future. Northern urban design is stuck between a need to learn from elsewhere and a desire to become ‘unexceptional’ while still addressing the challenges and exploiting the opportunities of the North.

CHAPTER SIX

Developing Greenland’s cities

Greenland is the largest island in the world. Unlike the Arctic regions of Canada and Russia, Greenland is not contiguous with its southern historical metropolitan centre of administration, Denmark, which is several thousand kilometres away. The country has a highly developed political autonomy and is on its way to becoming the first independent Indigenous country in the Arctic. Towns and settlements in Greenland are small. They are isolated from each other and are only accessible by air or sea. The urban planning of Greenland dates back to the large-scale modernization programme that was initiated by the Danish government in the 1950s. There is, however, one proposed urban plan that precedes this programme by several decades.

Prelude: ‘Queen of the Polar Lands’ – Greenland’s Danish capital The earliest idea of a city in Greenland can be found in a 1911 article by Danish architect and urban planner Alfred J. Råvad in the architectural journal Architekten. A regular contributor to the journal, Råvad wrote a column entitled ‘The Architect as Sociologist’. He had lived and worked in Chicago since 1890 and had been influenced by trends in the emerging field of urbanism and modern urban planning in the United States.1 In addition, Råvad was actively involved in the public debate on urban expansion and design, including Daniel Burnham’s and Edward H. Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, an early example of modern metropolitan planning.2 In 1914, while he was still in Chicago, Råvad published an additional series of illustrated articles entitled ‘The Capital of Greenland’. His concern was not the independence or self-rule of the Inuit nation but the expansion of the

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FIGURE 6.1   Map of Greenland with the larger and other significant settlements.

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Danish realm through the establishment of a city in what he considered to be an underdeveloped part of the kingdom. This expansion, he argued, would allow the Danes to appropriate Greenland psychologically and in practice and, as a result, exceed its Scandinavian neighbours Sweden and Norway in size and geostrategic importance. He called this ‘the nationalization of Greenland’.3 Råvad argued that the city would play a civilizational role and that a thriving city was a prerequisite to ensuring that Danes properly appropriated the country. In the article series, he referred derogatorily towards ‘Eskimos’, claiming that they had ‘no nationality’ and were incapable of dealing with the challenges to the country posed by the ‘development of the World’.4 While he regarded Greenland to be part of the Kingdom of Denmark, he did not consider Greenlanders to be Danes. Instead, he saw Danes as playing a civilizing role in Greenland, which he described as ‘the white man’s burden’, referring to Rudyard Kipling’s 1898 poem about the US conquest of the Philippines.5 Råvad argued that the re-colonization of Greenland was an extension of the historical Norse/Icelandic settlements in Greenland. He gave the (re) developed region the Norse name of Østerbygd (Eastern settlement). Further, he named the proposed new city Erikshavn (Erik’s Harbour) after both the Danish Arctic explorer Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen and Erik Thorvaldsson (Eric the Red) who is considered to be the founder of the Norse settlements in Greenland in 985.6 A proper city, Råvad claimed, would constitute a much more substantial civilizational intervention than the ‘colonies’ in Greenland at the time, which were merely religious and trade missions. As an example of the type of colony he desired, he pointed to the Labrador coast across the Davis Strait, which, together with Newfoundland, formed a comparable British dominion with a majority population of 4,000 ‘whites’ and only 1,000 ‘Eskimos’. The intended location of the proposed city took advantage of Canadian plans for a trading route from Vancouver on the Pacific coast, via railway to Port Nelson and Churchill in Hudson Bay and through the Hudson Strait. Ships departing Canada would pass the southern tip of Greenland on the way to Europe. Råvad saw establishing a city here as an opportunity to directly expose Greenland to world civilization, breaking its long isolation. In addition, he argued, construction of a properly equipped trade port would contribute to Denmark’s international status as a trading nation. A technological optimist, Råvad envisioned that a way to control the sea ice that posed an obstacle to ships around the southern tip of the island could be found. Further, he proposed harnessing the power of Greenland’s moving ice sheet as a limitless supply of electrical power. Råvad selected the Tasermiut Fjord as the site for this capital port city, close to present-day Nanortalik, an area with patches of Subarctic climatic and even sheltered forests. He was likely unaware of this, having never visited Greenland, but he suggested that southern Greenland had sufficient

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agricultural potential to support a city. For this purpose, he suggested that suitable vegetation should be cultivated by importing plants from similar climate zones around the world. The establishment of a city would, according to Råvad, create a market for food production from greenhouses and animal husbandry. To support such an industry and to contribute to the colonization of Greenland, a specialized university focused on mining and agricultural expertise should be founded. Råvad proposed ‘seeding’ the new city with selected Danish and Icelandic families to ensure that it would become a truly Danish city, independent of what he considered to be an encroaching German cultural dominance in Denmark. The tough conditions of the northern location, according to Råvad, would also push the inhabitants to develop an increased capacity to secure housing, clothing and food. He even suggested that the peripheral location would increase the desire for enlightenment, leading to more advanced social and moral qualities among the settlers. Such high achievements among the inhabitants would ensure the city’s cultural and industrial success. Råvad’s ultimate aim was to increase Greenland’s population to 50,000 and, by establishing yet more settlements, eventually 100,000 inhabitants, making Greenland the ‘Queen of the Polar Lands’.7

The beautiful city Råvad’s designs for the new Greenlandic city were inspired by the City Beautiful movement, exemplified in the design of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, on which Råvad worked as an architect under Daniel Burnham. Burnham was the exhibition’s chief designer and a foundational figure in the Beaux-Arts-inspired urban planning movement, which sought to promote a harmonious social order in the rapidly expanding industrial American metropolises of the late nineteenth century. Inspired by the movement, Råvad’s sketches of boulevards, monuments and landscaped parks were aimed at creating striking vistas and an elegant cityscape to instill civic pride and virtue in the inhabitants. Råvad envisioned the Greenlandic capital to be built on art, science and Danish architectural motives (albeit adjusted to Greenlandic conditions). Råvad divided the city into governmental, commercial, residential and industrial sectors. The government district, Thingvolden (Parliament Hill), would be raised prominently on a hill, a dramatically staged version of the old Norse parliamentary assembly locations (such as Thingvellir in Iceland). There would be boulevards and streets of European dimensions, parks for recreation and an electric railway/street-car system connecting the city sectors and providing access to the hinterland. In the new city, sanitary homes would be constructed according to the standards of the European and North American housing reform movements in the proceeding decades. The houses would be aesthetically pleasing,

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FIGURE 6.2   ‘The proposed city is divided into three parts: one, the outermost, for the government and metropolitan element, the middle one, for trade and the future business district and a third, the innermost, for industry – for factories and yards …. The real center of urban life will be around the slipway and the bay …. Here, the bridge between the capital and the commercial city, the most prominent public buildings, the interesting coastlines surrounded by the high mountains, the islands, the market bustle, the naval station, the fresh, salty Atlantic water with the changing impressions and lifestyles will give rise to a real capital life, which will contribute greatly to the city’s reputation and prosperity.’ Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: III. Stedet [The Capital of Greenland: III: The Place]’, Architekten 16 no. 23 (1914), 239.

sufficiently large, urban garden-style, single-family dwellings offering both independence and hygge (cosiness). Houses would be built around enclosed squares to create sheltered, semi-public courtyard spaces with small gardens. The houses would thus turn away from the surrounding streets,8

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FIGURE 6.3   ‘A suggestion for a Greenlandic garden city-system.’ Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: VI. Turist-Værdien [The Capital of Greenland: VI: The Turist Value]’, Architekten 16 no. 30 (1914), 310.

and Råvad cited Roman villas and buildings in New Orleans as precedents for this spatial organization. The courtyards would also include children’s playgrounds, community halls and libraries. The houses for the European population would be built of brick, while the homes of the Inuit would be somewhere between the ‘barbaric and the civilized’.9 According to Råvad, the beautiful, thriving city would also attract tourists, mainly from the United States. The city would be a hub for experiencing Greenland’s spectacular nature, which would require the construction of infrastructure and roads. His articles even detailed the contents of the local souvenir shop and plans for a hotel on the city’s main avenue. In Råvad’s vision, music and theatre would be essential to distinguish the new city from older colonial settlements. Artists would be invited to explore and ‘cultivate’ the local landscape.

A comprehensive image of the future Råvad’s urban vision was wide-ranging and explicit in terms of planning and architecture, as well as in its economic, social and cultural measures. His grand visions of city-building as a critical component of the development of Greenlandic society resonate with the economic development policy of the Danish government after 1950. As late as in 1986, architect and professor

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Hans Erling Langkilde, the head of the supervisory council of the Greenland Technical Organization (GTO), responsible for planning Greenland’s cities, referred to Råvad’s proposal as ‘a comprehensive picture of Greenland’s future and dreams of moulding it into a new form whose ideas are derived from a Western, technologically highly developed civilization’.10 In 1914, however, the ideas that Råvad set forth for the future development of Greenland ran directly counter to the deeply rooted isolation policy. The Danish colonial policy was to restrict contact with the outside world beyond government and trade monopoly officials. This policy also encouraged a scattered settlement of Greenland, supporting hunting as the primary economic activity with a royal trade monopoly handling the exports of fur, hides and blubber. In the first decades of the twentieth century, small efforts were made to develop and diversify Greenland’s export economy with sheep farming and industrial fishing. Mining operations were also encouraged – centred on the profitable cryolite mining activities in Ivittuut. The local population was rarely consulted on such policy issues, although the early twentieth century also saw efforts to increase the involvement of Greenlanders in governance.11 The isolation policy and encouragement of traditional lifestyles continued, by and large, in the decades following Råvad’s 1914 proposals. No effort was made to attract a Danish and Icelandic population to reside permanently in Greenland, and no new cities were founded. For another quarter of a century, Greenland was to stay more or less sealed off from the modern world. When change finally occurred, it was not the result of new policies or attitudes in Denmark and Greenland, nor did it come as a result of new ideas and initiatives by urban planners.

The New Order With Hitler’s invasion of Denmark on 9 April 1940, Greenland found itself to be an unoccupied territory of an occupied nation. As a result, the Danish ambassador to the United States, without the authority of his own government, allowed the US military to construct war infrastructure in Greenland. With the end of hostilities in 1945, Danish sovereignty over Greenland was re-established. Still, the geostrategic importance of Greenland for the United States had not diminished, and in 1951 a new treaty made the American bases in Greenland permanent. In 1953, twenty-seven families were relocated to Qaanaaq on short notice to make way for an expansion of the US Thule Air Base. This airbase was an essential part of the Danish government’s commitments to the Western alliance. Still, the move, which took place just before Greenland ceased being a colony, left a lingering sense of resentment in Greenlandic society.12 The American military presence in Greenland brought the small population of Greenland in contact with thousands of American servicemen

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during the war. The strategic cryolite extraction supplied the United States’ aluminium industry, and the military constructed harbours and airfields, as well as weather and radio stations around the country. The Americans also provided news services, humanitarian aid and entertainment. The supply of civilian goods and merchandise which used to come by ship from Copenhagen now came from American harbours. The combined impact of these factors contributed to raising Greenlanders’ expectations regarding the future of their economy and contacts with the outside world. After the war, the desire for change and modernization was evident in Greenland as well as in Denmark.

Complete change The end of the Second World War ushered in entirely new political circumstances. Greenland had been governed independently from Copenhagen during the war, and upon its conclusion, Greenlandic voices increasingly called for equitable investment and development from Denmark. Moreover, general knowledge of Greenlandic living conditions increased significantly in Denmark after the war, resulting in rising political awareness of the health and social conditions of the Greenlandic population.13 Finally, colonialism came under international pressure with the founding of the United Nations, and Iceland’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1944 compelled Danish politicians to pay more attention to their relationship with Greenland.14 Similar initiatives in other European colonies at the time reflected a desire to grow colonial economies that could contribute to the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Increased investment and political attention were also part of geopolitical manoeuvring to discourage the alignment of colonies (and former colonies) with the Sovietdominated Eastern Block during the emerging Cold War.15 In 1947, the Danish Government established the Greenland Commission (Grønlandskommissionen) in consultation with the Greenland Provincial Council. The main recommendation of the commission’s report from 1950 (‘G-50’) was to modernize Greenlandic society according to Western European standards for health, education, economy and infrastructure.16 Particularly, the commission addressed the economic development of Greenland and identified the potential for industrialized fishing. Subsequent legislation closely followed the G-50 recommendations but also included measures overhauling the education system and making other administrative changes. This set of reforms, which became known as the New Order (Nyordningen), also put adequate housing on the agenda to address social and public health issues and to handle the population boom resulting from healthcare improvements. With this policy of reform, Greenland came to experience comprehensive urbanization every bit as ambitious and comprehensive as Råvad’s proposal.

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Urban planners in the 1950s were familiar with his suggestions, as evidenced in the 1951 report from the Danish Planning Expedition which became pivotal in subsequent urban planning in Greenland.17 The planners of the expedition endorsed Råvad’s idea of locating a capital where it would have maximum exposure to the outside world and function as an economic and cultural hub for national development. However, it would be focused on the importance of aeroplanes rather than steamships. While the report differed significantly from Råvad’s civilizational and imperialist rationalizations, the new programme also included a large number of Danes residing in Greenland, although only temporarily. These experts and skilled workers were tasked with equipping Greenlanders with the skills and means to make Greenland economically sustainable as a modern industrial society. The G-50 report proposed that a number of towns be developed to support industrial fishing and fish processing, which would necessitate the concentration of services and people in selected locations. Three settlements on the mostly sea ice-free southwest coast were identified as suitable candidates for this new role: Narssak (Narsaq), Egedesminde (Aasiaat) and Godthåb (Nuuk). Other settlements were seen as underdeveloped and unsuitable for more substantial urbanization and industrialization. Greenlandic and Danish politicians agreed that the policy goals were ‘to develop Greenland for the Greenlanders’.18 However, Greenland possessed little administrative capacity and infrastructure in 1950, so Copenhagen would direct the policy-making, planning and implementation. The Greenland Commission produced a plan for the total economic, technical, urban and infrastructural development of the country, including its harbours, institutions, housing and communication, power, water and sewage systems. In its scope and vision of building a new society, the plan was inspired by the US Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Western Europe after the Second World War.19 The Danish government aimed to ‘elevate’ Greenland to the advanced Danish level of economic and physical development and poured large amounts of funds into the undertaking.20 Various policies and laws were passed to enable this development, and critically, a Danish constitutional change in 1953 made Greenland an integral part of the kingdom, subject to the same laws as the rest of Denmark.

Adjusting course: G-60 Supporting the development of the private sector to achieve economic sustainability was a critical dimension of the G-50 policy recommendations. The report projected an influx of people to the proposed industrial locations in anticipation of the decline of the traditional hunting economy. The hope was that investing in infrastructure and providing an available workforce would attract private investment in industry. However, projected private investments did not materialize for various reasons, and in 1960, another

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commission (Grønlandsudvalget, ‘G-60’) was established to adjust course. It had become increasingly clear that achieving equivalence between Greenland and Denmark by transferring Danish administrative and economic structures to the Arctic, as envisioned in the G-50 report, was not entirely realistic.21 By 1960, it had also become evident that the physical and economic development of Greenland was not a one-time effort that the government could accomplish within a few years but rather an ongoing, long-term endeavour.22 In the absence of private industry, the government decided to directly fund and build fish processing plants, which also required investment in modern trawlers. The commission saw these investments as closely associated with urbanization and housing for employees in the expanding fishing industry. The G-60 report encouraged depopulating rural settlements and concentrating people in industrial towns in an attempt to streamline Greenlandic society.23 The Ministry of Greenland’s subsequent investment plans during the 1960s were, in reality, spatial plans for all of Greenland that promoted development in the primary open-sea towns: Holsteinsborg (Sisimiut), Frederikshåb (Paamiut), Godthåb (Nuuk) and Sukkertoppen (Maniitsoq). During the 1960s, the ministry increasingly focused on urban planning as a means to further develop the private sector, for example, through the establishment of industrial zones connected to urban centres by roads.24 The G-60 report laid the grounds for increased Greenlandic influence on development to address a growing unease among Greenlanders about these rapid changes and the non-elected Danish officials who promoted and oversaw their planning and execution. Greater involvement of local voices took the form of the establishment of the Greenland Council (Grønlandsrådet) with both Greenlandic and Danish politicians in 1964. In addition, municipalities were tasked with a wider array of services, similar to Danish municipalities, but initially this did not include the urban planning of settlements and cities.

A Modernist ‘urban planning tradition’ Urban planning in Greenland accelerated after 1960, but the first instance of urban planning following established Danish practices had taken place a decade earlier. To realize the ambitions set out in the G-50 report, the Greenland Department (Grønlandsdepartementet), in collaboration with the Danish Planning Laboratory (Dansk Byplanlaboratorium), organized a ‘planning expedition’ to Greenland in 1950. The expedition members included town planners and technical experts. Its purpose was to propose a spatial plan for the entire open-water sector and four town sites on the west coast of Greenland, where the majority of the population lived. The

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FIGURE 6.4   The Planning Expedition’s proposal for a urban plan for Godthaab (Nuuk) for 9,000 inhabitants. Hugo Lund Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland, Narssaq, Sukkertoppen, Egedesminde, Godthaab [Proposed Urban Plans in Western Greenland, Narssaq, Sukkertoppen, Egedesminde, Godthaab] (Copenhagen: Grønlandsdepartementet, 1951).

planning expedition was also charged with investigating the possibility of transforming Nuuk into the country’s administrative centre. The expedition’s report assessed the urban planning potentials and challenges based on data, surveys and technical appraisals. In addition to relying on statistics produced in Copenhagen, the expedition’s experts interacted with local officials and political bodies and even conducted limited community involvement.25 The resulting report proposed entirely new Modernist urban plans for all four locations. Despite stating that ‘a

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Greenlandic town cannot have the same form and architectural expressions as a Danish town’ due to landscape and climate, the report’s functionalist and Modernist urban designs for dense urban settlements were expressions of the Danish and international urban planning ideals of the era.26 The report linked the physical form of settlements to desired economic and social development targets. The authors argued that the towns’ visual appearances should reflect their economic organization, and residential and industrial programmes should be separated, in line with Modernist planning principles of the time. The proposed urban designs included multistorey housing (apartment blocks and terraced houses) hitherto unseen in Greenland, and the report authors argued that the G-50’s preference for one-family detached houses was unpractical. Instead, due to the limited availability of land suitable for development, concentrated housing forms were preferable. It would also be more hygienic and cost-effective to provide trash disposal, water, sewage and roads to multiple residential units at the same time. Apartment blocks were more economical to build and heat, and the report suggested abandoning traditional construction methods in favour of concrete and prefabrication techniques to enhance such benefits. While not widely circulated, the report was translated into Greenlandic, and its suggestions and plans set the tone for what Per Skjelbo, urban planner and consultant to the Greenlandic home rule government, later called an ‘urban planning tradition’ in Greenland.27 In the absence of other, further developed and formally adopted plans, these urban design proposals became the basis for subsequent urban planning in Greenland.28 Professor Hans Erling Langkilde, who was a member and chairman of the supervisory council of the GTO, the de-facto planning body in the 1950s and 1960s, agreed that the report achieved lasting influence and cemented perceptions of the importance of urban planning in the growth of Greenlandic towns.29

The Greenland Technical Organization The Directorate for Greenland (Grønlands Styrelse) in Copenhagen had hired a chief architect to prepare a programme of housing construction in 1946. The office of the chief architect evolved into a bureau designing almost all new buildings in Greenland in the first years after the war. This bureau was transferred to the GTO, once it was established in 1956. The GTO had offices in Copenhagen and Nuuk and eventually operations in all towns and settlements in Greenland. The organization conducted and oversaw the planning and construction of housing, institutions and physical infrastructure. In addition, the GTO managed buildings and operated technical equipment, including water supplies, sewage treatment, electricity generation, telecommunications, harbours and maritime operations. This broad mandate reflected the idea that the particular technical, climatic and weather-related challenges of construction in Greenland required

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FIGURE 6.5   The report of the Planning Expedition was illustrated with plans and illustrations of cityscapes, including a visualization of a modernist urban design for Maniitsoq (Sukkertoppen). The accompanying text suggests, tongue-in-cheek, that ‘the entire population of Maniitsoq could be housed in one single high-rise’, while admitting that technical and economic efficiency was not the entire purpose of the planning exercise. Hugo Lund Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland, Narssaq, Sukkertoppen, Egedesminde, Godthaab [Proposed Urban Plans in Western Greenland, Narssaq, Sukkertoppen, Egedesminde, Godthaab] (Copenhagen: Grønlandsdepartementet, 1951), 32.

coordination between sectors and actors through a single, integrated organization.30 Because of this wide-ranging authority, GTO dominated Greenlandic social and economic development in the following decades.31 It was nevertheless considered to be a technical operation that had little need for local expertise or input.32 The organization was directed by a chief engineer, who reported

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directly to the prime minister in Copenhagen, not to the governor or the national council (Landsrådet) in Greenland. From 1955, a technocratic committee (Anlægsudvalget) conducted overall strategic planning until it was replaced in 1964 by the Greenland Council (Grønlandsrådet), which had 50 per cent Greenlandic political representation. In 1964, an advisory council (Tilsynsrådet) consisting of experts in various fields, such as architecture, engineering and planning, was also established to ensure access to expertise and the proper application of technological solutions. After 1974, the majority of the committee’s members were Greenlandic, reflecting the gradual transfer of political authority from Copenhagen to Nuuk. In 1987, the administration in Nuuk took over the GTO, renaming it Nunatsinni Teknikkikkut Ingerlatsivik (Nuna-Tek), and in 1990, Nuna-Tek was divided into several publicly owned, for-profit companies. Engineer Gunnar P. Rosendahl became head of the GTO in 1956 and continued as its director until 1989. Remarkably, he was born and spent parts of his childhood in Greenland (his father was a former colonial governor) and had contributed to surveys and water management plans during the 1950 planning expedition. In an organization mostly free of political oversight and with few budgetary restraints, Rosendahl exercised significant influence on the priorities of the strategic steering committee (Anlægsudvalget). He insisted on the importance of urban planning to direct investments, and the committee stated that regional and urban plans based on technical surveys and data collection should inform the development of strategic investment plans. In 1960, the ministry’s intentions were materialized in a draft investment plan (Investeringsskitse 1960–84), which was a revision of the 1950 Planning Expedition’s report and essentially functioned as a national spatial plan for Greenland, despite never receiving formal political approval.33 The adoption of formal urban plans in Greenland with the involvement of local actors did not happen for several decades after the founding of the GTO. In the absence of powerful private interests and investments in Greenland at the time, the GTO conducted planning through the sequencing and placement of infrastructure, housing and public buildings that the organization constructed. During the first development phase after 1950, the Planning Expedition’s drafts for the four south-western towns functioned as urban plans. From the late 1950s, the GTO produced updated plans for more towns and settlements.34 Only in 1977 did the Danish parliament pass a formal act on urban planning (Lov for Grønland om arealanvendelse, byudvikling og bebyggelse), which ensured more extensive local, democratic and transparent processes. At this time, a national planning committee (Landsplanudvalg) was established with Rosendahl as a member. In 1981, the Greenlandic ‘Home Rule’ administration formally took over responsibility for planning. The G-50 report had assumed that the development of Greenland to Danish standards could be accomplished within ten to twenty years, and the GTO was tasked with supporting the development of a private industrial

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sector that would make the island economically self-sustaining. However, in this early phase, the GTO did not make any efforts to train a local workforce to participate in construction, as planners and policymakers assumed that skilled workers would become unemployed when the initial construction period ended.35 To support the massive construction of the early development period, specialists and skilled workers from Denmark were employed on temporary contracts. The GTO thus was a substantial employer in the country, as well as a critical economic operator in construction, mining and shipyard operations. Housing the workforce of several thousand Danish builders and experts in other fields became a significant construction and planning challenge on its own, and sparked a revolution in the types of housing constructed in Greenland during the 1960s.

The architecture of mass housing Before 1950, houses built in Greenland, disregarding the homes of colonial administrators and traders, were mostly self-built, one-room structures in wood (often driftwood), stone and grass turf. By the standards of contemporary Danish houses, they were considered to be unhygienic, and as the 1948 Doctors’ Expedition (Lægeekspeditionen) reported, they were often overcrowded.36 The G-50 report made housing a key priority of a modernized Greenlandic society. The report suggested a construction programme of 6,000 new dwellings to replace the entire housing stock over twenty years. To achieve this goal, architects with the Directorate for Greenland and later the GTO designed several standard house types for specific purposes (e.g. for health workers, public officials or technicians). In some cases, specific house types were designed for particular locations according to local conditions, leading to thirty to forty designs in these early years of the construction boom.37 The first new homes constructed under the housing programme were kit houses, shipped from Denmark and assembled by the occupants and other unskilled workers. As land in Greenland was not privately owned, the location of dwellings was largely left up to the builders, as long as fire regulations were observed. Views and access to resources often decided the location of homes, resulting in scattered urban patterns that can still be found in many Greenlandic towns. In general, these early, post-war houses lacked modern amenities, such as running water and sewage, and electricity was only available in larger towns. The houses were small one- or two-storey wooden buildings with steep-pitched, felt-clad roofs and steel or masonry chimneys. The style of these 1950s homes was reminiscent of the dominant Danish house trends of the period. During the 1960s, new materials, such as plywood cladding, gradually entered widespread use in single-family houses. During the 1950s, housing production increased dramatically, and 2,950 houses had been built by 1962.38 In 1953, the government introduced a

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programme offering heavily subsidized mortgages to support house building.39 The programme linked subsidies to specific quality requirements in house construction, and consequently, in the late 1950s, professional builders gained a dominant role in home construction. In 1957, the GTO reduced the number of house types eligible for subsidies to eight. These models had dedicated kitchens and toilets and replaced older, smaller types. The GTO designed these homes using standardized components to simplify and rationalize construction.40 Initially, GTO employees did most of the construction work, but over time, local private contractors emerged, and local GTO workshops gradually closed down. During the large-scale housing construction of over the 1950s–70s, public investment in housing was based on economic and demographic projections made in five-year plans developed and approved by the Ministry of Greenland in Copenhagen. In the 1950s, Greenland’s population expanded rapidly due, in part, to the modernized health sector, and centralization

FIGURE 6.6 Gunnar P. Rosendahl. Chief engineer, from 1956 director of the Greenland Technical Organization. Connie Eriksen (photograph).

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policies encouraged urbanization in the key open-water towns. In addition, the influx of Danish builders contributed to the existing housing shortage in these locations.41 In the 1960s, the combination of these factors led to the general introduction of public, rental housing in the form of low- to midrise apartment buildings. These multi-unit houses, which became a feature in all Greenlandic towns, used modern construction technology, such as prefabricated, concrete panels. Such modular systems were often the same as used in Denmark and were seen as an export asset by the Danish construction industry and government.42 The departure from the traditional single-family house to large numbers of modular apartment blocks was driven by the need for faster construction, the lack of suitable and buildable land, and the reduced infrastructure costs for such concentrated housing forms. The short summer construction season also favoured the use of components that could be assembled rapidly and allow buildings to be closed off and completed inside when weather hampered outdoor work. These apartment complexes, initially built for Danish workers, had high technical and service standards, which eventually led GTO to introduce a new series of single-family houses with similar technical standards in 1967.43 Langkilde, the head of the GTO advisory board, noted that house styles in Greenlandic settlements closely mirrored dominant housing trends in Denmark at the time, and that no real effort was made to develop a particular architecture adapted to local needs.44 The architecture that emerged in Greenland around 1970 nevertheless responded to some of the inhabitants’ criticisms of earlier modernist buildings.45 In 1967, the GTO conducted a housing residents’ survey, and in 1970, the Radiofjeldet housing district in Nuuk was the first development that based the apartment layouts on observations and occupancy studies. In 1972, the GTO published a paper entitled ‘Housing Construction in Greenland in the 1970s’, which aligned with then-mainstream Danish architectural trends and proposed that new housing in Greenland should be ‘colourful, robust, [and] dense but low’.46 According to Rosendahl, this paper set the tone for the housing development of the 1970s and 1980s, which favoured low-rise apartment houses, terraced houses and the low-rise, high-density housing typology known in Danish as tæt-lav-bebyggelse. In 1972, subsidies for self-builders in peripheral settlements were reintroduced. The GTO designed new kit houses for this purpose, and from the early 1970s, private designs were allowed under the housing mortgage programme.47 Housing construction rose steadily and peaked in the mid1980s. In 1991, a few years after the Home Rule administration took over housing policy and administration, renters were allowed to buy their flats, which decreased the number of housing units under government and municipal ownership.48 Nevertheless, in 2011, around 80 per cent of all housing was publicly owned.49 With the gradual dismantling of the GTO in later decades, a wider variety of housing types emerged, including tower

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FIGURE 6.7   Around 500 EN2/Type 16 one-family houses were built (Design: Einar Nielsen, 1953).

blocks and various forms of row houses, linked houses and other clustered, low-rise, high-density urban designs.

A learning organization Early in Greenland’s post-war development, the Danish government acknowledged the need to look elsewhere for inspiration. Even before the GTO was founded, the Greenland Commission based its estimate of the duration of the physical construction of housing, infrastructure, institutions and industry on the Norwegian post-war urban reconstruction programme, which was largely terminated in 1952.50 Norwegian redevelopment concentrated facilities for industrial fishing in selected locations along its western and northern coast, and this policy was used as a reference for the Greenlandic centralization strategy.51 The 1950 Planning Expedition report indicated a need for further research on appropriate construction methods for the climate of Greenland.52 At

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the commencement of the New Order, little knowledge of advanced Arctic construction was available in Denmark and Greenland, and many technical fields lacked the necessary expertise.53 For example, there was a significant scarcity of sufficient knowledge in construction methods for permafrost soils.54 The consolidation of the GTO as a unified organization in 1950 was based on the understanding that existing technical knowledge was not sufficient to tackle the challenges encountered in Greenland. By uniting what in other places would be several public agencies and private utility providers and contractors, the GTO could achieve synergy in knowledge accumulation and distribution. Consequently, the GTO systematically collected and documented lessons and inspiration from plans, government programmes and practical experience abroad. Development and urbanization in other Arctic regions, such as Alaska, Canada, northern Scandinavia and Siberia, happened at roughly the same time as the New Order programme in Greenland, and various organizations systematized technical knowledge in these countries. These knowledgeand experience-gathering efforts mostly happened parallel to each other, and experience with construction under Arctic conditions was acquired independently in various parts of the Arctic as architects and engineers adapted southern methods and arrived at similar results.55 Rosendahl, the GTO director from 1956 to 1989, noted that systematic sharing of technological knowledge among Arctic countries only started in 1978, with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’ (UNECE) Symposium on Human Settlements Planning and Development in the Arctic, held in Nuuk and attended by representatives from the United States, Canada, Denmark, Greenland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and the Soviet Union.56 The GTO, in attendance, declared that at the time, ‘no Greenland town building or house building traditions existed which might form the basis of reasonable and expedient physical planning and which might meet the demands of the anticipated tremendous future development of society’.57 GTO representatives attended several subsequent knowledge dissemination events, including conferences in Anchorage, Alaska (1978), on the experiences from the recently completed Trans-Alaska Pipeline; in Edmonton, Canada (1982), on cold-climate sanitation; and in Fairbanks, Alaska (1985), on cold-regions environmental engineering.58 As the GTO director and an engineer with practical experience, Rosendahl and other senior GTO staff also conducted a number of trips to study urban and housing development in the Soviet Union, Alaska, Canada and even China between 1975 and 1980. These travels were documented in reports to ensure internal learning in the GTO.59 The first of these visits was to the Soviet Union. A delegation from the State Committee for Construction in the Soviet Union had visited Greenland in 1976. In return, a Danish delegation was invited to visit the LenZNIIEP planning research institute in Leningrad, as well as Yakutsk in Siberia.60 This visit took place in 1977 and was organized through an agreement between

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FIGURE 6.8   The Radiofjeldet development in Nuuk from 1970 combined grand views with a coherent urban space. (1972–7). © Peter Hemmersam.

the Danish Ministry of Housing and the State Committee on Science and Technology under the Soviet Council of Ministers. Overall, the Danish officials were horrified by the quality of the buildings they saw. However, they were impressed by the fact that construction work was carried out by a local workforce rather than imported builders, as in Greenland. Based on observations in Siberia, the Greenlandic officials speculated that the technical standards of Greenlandic construction could be lowered somewhat, instead of being improved as they had otherwise anticipated. They reasoned that simplified methods would reduce the chances of construction errors and that buildings should be robust enough to handle poor maintenance. This speculation seemed to respond to the political desire in Greenland and Denmark to activate the local workforce, but there is no evidence that such ideas were implemented at that time. In 1978, Rosendahl visited Alaska with Hans Ølgaard, vice director of GTO, and Georg Lind Pedersen, a senior engineer, where they found striking contrasts between the state’s big cities and the smaller settlements dominated by the Indigenous population.61 The GTO representatives were surprised to find modern, well-designed, wooden buildings in Anchorage, something they had otherwise considered unique to Greenland. Of particular interest to the GTO were various foundation solutions for permafrost conditions,

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including forms of active cooling, and the advanced sewage and service system buried in permafrost soil in Barrow (Utqiaġvik) in northern Alaska. Conversely, while visiting the Iñupiat settlement of Kotzebue (Kikiktagruk), the Greenlandic officials observed planning, infrastructural and housing developments that seemed to lag behind Greenland. They noted that there was little public investment in local industries and that the overall policy seemed to encourage migration to established industrial centres for work. This, the authors speculated, reflected a government attitude that ‘despite all respect for national or ethnic distinctive character … it would be wrong – or even impossible – to restrict a population’s development towards a higher standard of living – just for these distinctive characteristics’.62 The Alaska Native Claims Settlement of 1971 had provided new opportunities for the Indigenous population, engendering a new selfconsciousness and fostering the growth of cooperative enterprises. One such enterprise, the non-profit Mauneluk Association, had experimented with prefabricated modular houses in Kotzebue at the time of the visit. Regardless, the GTO team found that the government’s relative lack of interest in housing demonstrated a stark contrast to the central planning perspectives of the GTO, the Danish government and the Greenlandic Home Rule administration. In 1979 and 1980, visits to the Northwest Territories (NWT) in Canada provided a contrast to the experiences in Alaska.63 The GTO officials visited the administrative capital of Yellowknife, southern areas around Fort Simpson, oil-extraction regions along the Mackenzie River, the Inuvik area by the Beaufort Sea, Resolute in the Far North and finally Frobisher Bay. Overall, the GTO officials were impressed by the scale and scope of development that they felt rivalled that in Greenland. In particular, they found the development of infrastructure, such as roads and airports, to be ahead of Greenland. While the GTO officials viewed the housing they observed to be good, they nevertheless remarked that the dwellings in Greenland were of overall higher quality and more durable. The GTO observers took particular note of the architectural design experimentation that took place in homes and public buildings, but concluded that the NWT’s fragmented government and planning system meant that lessons from these experiments were not sufficiently documented and applied elsewhere. This fragmentation, the GTO experts suggested, was also evident in the urban planning of settlements, which they found to be inferior to practices in Greenland.

An unresponsive organization The GTO was, at its core, a technical organization that approached the development of Greenland as an expert matter that, according to Per

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Skjelbo, did not require local involvement and perspectives.64 Moreover, the GTO staff and other officials held the general view that time was of the essence, which did not allow for elaborate, local participative processes. From 1955 to 1963, the Ministry of Greenland’s strategic steering committee, which directed urban development, received little political oversight.65 Unlike in Denmark, municipal councils in Greenland did not have the technical and administrative capacities that would have enabled them to question the GTO’s development plans, effectively rendering the councils powerless.66 The GTO conducted planning in Greenland and was, at the same time, the dominant property developer. The organization asked the local councils for building permissions according to the plans it had developed.67 The GTO thus represented the Danish state at the same time it was supposed to support democratic decision-making in local councils. This double role only gradually abated when local authorities started employing their own technical staff in the 1970s. Attitudes towards local involvement reflected lingering colonial attitudes among Danish officials. For instance, urban planner Poul Lyager described Eske Bruun, the former governor and later secretary of state for Greenland (Departmentschef), as displaying a ‘patronizing colonial master mentality’.68 Despite such general attitudes, individuals involved in the execution of the New Order did see citizen involvement as positive. As one author of the 1950 Planning Expedition’s report, Lyager, acknowledged, ‘we … held meetings with the population, [even though they were] more thought of as a gesture, a symbolic act’.69 The GTO planners and administrators were not unaware of the criticism that such approaches and attitudes would eventually raise. In 1974, vice director Hans Ølgaard acknowledged that the ‘GTO was accused of doing things behind the backs of the population’.70 Gunnar P. Rosenberg also recognized that the GTO was seen as not listening to Greenlanders, which had created a lasting impression of it being a complacent organization.71 At the height of the development programme in the 1960s, frustration with the GTO was also evident among Danish architects, who felt that the organization was unresponsive to professionals’ questioning of whether the chosen solutions were, in fact, the best ones.72 According to Lyager, the problems of harmonizing modernization with the desires and expectations of the local population were due not only to deficient democratic processes but also to a lack of ‘knowledge of the Greenlandic world of imagination, traditions, family life and habits. We have a clear impression that they live in a world different from ours, but what the differences are, we can only imagine.’73 To remedy this situation, Lyager called for extended studies of the population and its conditions. He complained that while ‘a lot of scientific research is being carried out in Greenland – geology, flora, fauna, climate and glaciology – … nobody seems to be interested in the people on who all future development must be based’.74

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A changing society Poul Lyager’s 1950 call for studies of the population to inform urban planning was answered decades later when public, political and academic criticism of the urban planning and Modernist architectural solutions realized in Greenland was articulated in full. This criticism was directed at the multi-storey, concrete apartment blocks that were erected in Greenland by the GTO after 1961 and made up two-thirds of all housing construction by 1966.75 Also, the urban centralization policy became increasingly controversial in Greenlandic politics during the 1970s, where it was viewed as evidence of Danish indifference to the country’s original identity. Urban living was seen as opposed to an authentic Greenlandic way of life and the concentration policy and the apartment blocks were blamed for the growing social problems plaguing the rapidly transforming Greenlandic society, which fuelled a desire for greater political autonomy.76

Inuit in the city For years, planning and building in Greenland was the domain of Danish architects and planners. The 1960s was a golden age of Danish architecture, and there was broad public appreciation for the importance of good design. However, architects and the public mainly considered the largescale Modernist housing projects in Greenland of the 1960s to be a failure. Langkilde, chairman of the GTO advisory board, voiced concerns about the suitability of Modernist apartment blocks, particularly the open, singleloaded corridor access used in many buildings and the low quality of the urban spaces produced in homogenous housing areas.77 However lofty Modernist planning ideas were, the resulting cityscape was a disappointment. In the small hastily-built towns of Greenland, the poor results were starkly more visually evident than in Denmark, where similar developments were also constructed. The poor quality of urban spaces was a concern raised by the Arkitekten journal editor Poul Erik Skriver, who argued that the park-like quality of green spaces between housing blocks, which was a core quality in Danish Modernist housing designs, was not possible in the Arctic climate of Greenland.78 In 1970, Skriver wrote: ‘A strange and hostile world [was] being built. One has not thought of adapting the city and the homes to the special Greenlandic conditions or the wishes of Greenlanders. On the contrary, it is quite openly stated that it is the Greenlanders who need to adapt to the new surroundings.’79 While the construction boom of the 1960s alleviated an acute housing shortage and made indisputable technical and hygienic improvements from previous conditions, it was becoming increasingly clear to politicians, planners and architects that other, unforeseen problems arose when people moved into these new houses. Eventually, the GTO planners also acknowledged

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and articulated the dispute over Modernist architecture.80 The set of design criteria behind the housing blocks did not seem to completely match the expectations and lifestyles of the inhabitants of this fast-changing society. The rising concern with the unintended consequences of rapid urbanization and mass housing reflected the Danish and international mainstream critique of Modernism that was also prevalent at the time.81 The growing unease with the social engineering of functionalist, Modernist architecture was raised in the Danish report to the 1978 Economic Council of Europe symposium held in Nuuk. The report’s authors argued that it was ‘an insoluble task solely on a rigorous, logical path to motivate or to determine the physical planning philosophy and the future, physical and psychological impact on the city’s inhabitants. To try this would be self-defeating, for life itself is forever changeable.’82 According to the report, sociologists pointed out that housing such as that erected in Greenland had fostered a ‘mentality of violence’ and led to estrangement among the inhabitants. In Greenland, rates of alcoholism and violence were increasing, and the issue of alienation resonated with emerging cultural and political sentiments that Greenlandic Indigenous culture was threatened by urbanization and modernization.83 Through the height of city-building, research on Greenlandic culture and society had primarily studied non-urban communities and traditional living. However, in the following decades, emerging literature focused on the failure of acculturation, which it attributed to the city and its architecture.84 This literature portrayed urban living as a source of alienation.85 Modernist urban designs thus became discredited and were increasingly perceived as slums in Greenlandic towns such as Nuuk.86 Such perceptions lingered for decades, as evidenced by the demolition of the country’s largest Modernist housing block – Blok P – in Nuuk in 2012. The public rationale for demolition was the mounting costs of maintenance and rehabilitation of the ageing building, but the removal was also a symbolic farewell to the G-60 policy by the newly established Self-rule government.87

Reform and autonomy The rapid urban and societal development of Greenland started with the 1953 referendum on the Danish constitution, which changed the legal status of Greenland. No referendum was conducted in Greenland, but despite this lack of consultation, the change ultimately resulted in the United Nations recognizing Greenland’s colonial status as abolished. As a Danish county, Greenland became subject to the full extent of Danish law and gained permanent representation in the parliament in Copenhagen. The National Council (Landsrådet) was given limited budgetary discretion but largely functioned as a consultative body. The New Order programme for economic and social development reflected a widely shared sense of urgency in the Danish public and political milieu that was intensified by media coverage of

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living conditions in Greenland. Despite support from the National Council, though, the degree to which various components of the programme had backing from the wider population is less clear.88 After 1953, substantial investments were made in various welfare-state institutions, housing and associated infrastructure. The political sense of urgency remained strong for decades. However, in 1978, the Danish government reported that: It is becoming increasingly evident that a conflict exists between the demand for rapid improvement in the standards of living and social conditions in Greenland and the desire to have the Greenland population itself participate actively in the process of development. … An important problem in today’s Greenland is rather to have the people involved in the development without slowing down the reform work appreciably.89 The modernization of Greenland was controlled from Copenhagen. Achieving this goal required a substantial import of civil servants, teachers, doctors and experts in various fields. Eventually, the large number of guest workers with higher salaries than locals and preferential treatment when it came to housing created resentment in the Greenlandic population and fuelled the independence movement.90 This effort coincided with the international, anti-authoritarian youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the associated anti-colonial sentiment led to the formation of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in 1977. This organization connected Arctic peoples who had, in different ways, experienced tensions with central governments and European culture. In the 1970s, the question of independence from Denmark became a dominant theme in Greenlandic politics.91 While Greenlandic politicians initially supported urbanization and centralization, the mood gradually turned more sceptical, and these policies increasingly came to be seen as ‘Danish’.92 In 1970, the Holsteinborg Resolution was proclaimed by a group of Greenlandic politicians and activists. They demanded that centralization policies, including de-investment in social and industrial infrastructure in peripheral settlements, be slowed or even ceased. Urbanization thus became a key triggering factor in the emergence of the Greenlandic independence movement. In the following decades, this led to the formation of distinct Greenlandic political perspectives and debates on development, economy, language and cultural identity.93 In 1973, Greenland followed Denmark into the European Economic Community before withdrawing in 1985 after a referendum. A primary reason for pulling out of the EEC was the fear of losing control over Greenland’s fisheries, which was central to the economy. After extended political negotiations, increased self-government was initiated in 1979, with the introduction of Home Rule (Hjemmestyre). Home Rule established a national parliament and government with legislative and budgetary

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powers. At the same time, Denmark retained control over areas such as monetary and foreign policy, defence, police and the judicial system. After the introduction of Home Rule, policies shifted towards softening urban centralization and maintaining the dispersed settlement pattern. Supporting smaller communities was intended to preserve traditional hunting as part of the economy while maintaining and ‘re-connecting’ with an authentic Greenlandic identity in places less exposed to Danish modernization policies.94 In 2009, political autonomy was further expanded with the introduction of Self-rule (Selvstyre), which recognized the Greenlandic people’s right to self-determination. At the same time, municipalities were strengthened and reorganized, greatly enhancing their capacity and mandate for urban planning.

Urbanism in Greenland Settlements in Greenland face the sea, and most houses have a water view. The sea is vital for transportation, hunting and fishing. Navigating a Greenlandic town is easy. The health clinic is painted yellow, the technical and industrial buildings are blue, the shops and buildings belonging to the trading conglomerate Kalaallit Niuerfiat (KNI) are red, the police station is black, and the facilities of the telecom company are green. Infrastructure is conspicuous in the treeless landscape, and roads, over-ground water grids, harbours, dogs, dog-sled infrastructures, solar panels and exposed rubbish dumps proliferate the urban landscape.95 Modernist, concrete housing blocks dominate the cityscape in many places. Still, single-family, wooden houses constructed after 1950 are also a significant feature, along with the low-rise, high-density housing that emerged in the 1970s. In recent decades, the urban landscape has been supplemented with a much greater variety of contemporary residential types, such as mid-rise towers.

Problems of the cityscape The first impression of a Greenlandic settlement, whether arriving by plane, boat or helicopter, is of brightly coloured houses dotting a dramatic landscape. The use of colour is a tradition that dates from before the New Order programme, which the 1950 Planning Expedition suggested retaining as a characteristic feature. Moreover, the expedition report stated that ‘the overall image of cities must … be a visible expression of the division of functions and order necessary for the city to function effectively. … The main communal institutions should be conspicuous in the cityscape as an architectural core.’96 Later commentary on planning and architecture in Greenland repeated the appeal for a harmonious, overall city image to which individual buildings should be adapted.97

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Despite broad professional agreement about the need for visual order and harmony, planners and architects continued to find Greenland’s cityscapes messy and disorderly. Skriver wrote in 1970 that ‘it is characteristic in several of the smaller towns that the apartment buildings appear to be located for reasons that are not evident or otherwise understandable’.98 Langkilde declared that the result of the 1960s urban boom presented a ‘grotesque contrast’ to the unique landscape settings of Greenland.99 Even Gunnar P. Rosendahl conceded that ‘a special challenge lies in the fact that the houses stand on the bare terrain with nothing to soften the effect. The milieu – the feeling that the town is worth living in – must be created by the buildings alone.’100 Vegetation does not soften the appearance of the urban scenery in Greenland, and the 1950 Planning Expedition suggested that infrastructure should be designed as ‘characteristic and beautiful features in the urban landscape’.101 Specifically, the report authors mentioned an omnipresent feature of Arctic cities – the insulated above-ground conduits for district heating, water, sewage and power – and advised burying these unsightly features of the urban landscape underground. Another visual feature of the Greenlandic cityscape is what Professor Langkilde described as the ‘towering in-situ cast [concrete] foundations’ that anchor the standard, wooden houses to the dramatic topography of Greenland.102 While the colourful houses are a desirable feature of Greenlandic settlements, the technical infrastructure and over-sized concrete foundations are visual reminders of the significant differences between settlements in Denmark and the Arctic. They illustrate Danish architects’ and planners’ sense of a struggle between visual order and the realities of city-building in the Arctic.

A political urban landscape Despite this apparent lack of visual order, a number of underlying structural factors nevertheless formed towns in ways particular to Greenlandic society as it evolved under Danish direction during the formative decades after 1950. The investment in city-building during this period was so extensive that the contemporary urban fabric of towns is largely derived from this critical period in the country’s history. Fundamental to the G-50 and G-60 policies was the idea that urban development consisted of devising infrastructure and technical systems according to predetermined performance targets, and GTO planning reflected the belief that city-building was a ‘neutral’ implementation of technology by experts.103 This form of planning-as-problem-solving was characteristic of the post-war reconstruction of European cities.104 Thus, during the post-war decades, Greenland was a ‘planners’ paradise’, with generous government funding, widespread consensus on targets and policies, and minimal expectations and requirements for local input and consent. In the early days of the New Order, according to professor Langkilde, ‘plans

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[were] immediately transformed into three-dimensional reality without the mutilation, which most often accompanies the constant adjustments of the slow-grinding procedure’.105 Urban development was incredibly swift as, until the late 1970s, Greenland had no legal framework for planning, leaving it primarily up to architects and planners to decide where to locate functions and infrastructure. This situation was made possible as all land in Greenland was (and still is) public and almost all construction was carried out by government agencies.106 Consequently, a significant feature of urban planning in Greenland is that since the 1950s, it has mainly been driven by public policy and administrative decisions, with little input from commercial actors and private initiatives.107 The New Order development was initially intended to be a short-term, intense construction of a complete welfare society, and the designs employed represented a particular set of ideas that reflected their contemporary political and economic contexts. The strategic directions and decisions taken by Greenlandic and Danish politicians and articulated by experts indicated an instrumental understanding of the role of architecture and urban planning in social engineering.108 The physical form of Greenlandic towns reflected political concerns of the period, particularly the transformation of Greenland into a modern welfare state through industrialization and urbanization. Ideas about economic efficiency motivated the centralization policy, and urbanization served as a means to solve the social problems and poor living conditions in smaller, more traditional communities.109 The welfare planning of Greenland’s towns resembled the mass housing programmes undertaken in Western Europe, North America and even the Soviet Bloc during the 1950s and 1960s. In many Western welfare societies, accommodations in ‘new towns’ or ‘projects’ were made available to people who were excluded from the regular housing market, resulting in the concentration of poverty in Modernist urban districts. In Greenland, however, the government housing programme accommodated all – locals and Danish guest workers alike. Commenting on urban development, Langkilde explained that ‘overall, the cities are manipulated structures. They do not always tell what people in Greenland wanted, but far more about what one wanted with people in Greenland.’110 Because of such attitudes, urbanization became increasingly politically controversial over time, and ‘the town became the symbolic as well as a concrete manifestation of Danish cultural and political dominance and the arena for assimilation of Greenlanders into a Danish way of thinking and behaving’.111 While the Modernist planning footprint still dominates Greenland’s towns, cultural actors in the public debate are increasingly renegotiating the legacy of the urbanization and centralization policies. Recently, there has been less focus on the unproductive opposition between urbanization and cultural belonging, ‘Danish’ versus ‘Greenlandic’, and a more complex

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discourse on the role of cities in developing contemporary Greenlandic identities has emerged.112 Reducing this opposition could lead to recognition of a hybrid urban landscape in which new interventions and encounters with what is there happen within a frame that does not exclusively refer to the colonial relationship to Denmark.

A hybrid urban design In the early phases of modernization and urban development under the New Order programme, Danish architects and planners, unaccustomed to the topography and climate of Greenland, sought to create sheltered urban spaces. Urban design proposals grouped buildings together to generate sheltered microclimates.113 However, many Greenlanders accustomed to building their own houses preferred views of the sea over shelter from the wind. They were largely free to locate individual houses as desired, with little regard for overall plans. Single-family houses had ample outdoor space for practical use, and broad areas between wooden houses reduced the risk of fires spreading. The contrasting urban concentration was a consequence of the relatively limited amount of buildable land in most urban areas in Greenland. In addition, planners saw a compact urban form as necessary to reduce the distances between buildings and thus the costs of infrastructure. The conflicting logics of the planners and architects who desired a compact city form and the individuals who located houses with no reference to overall structure resulted in seemingly incoherent urban structures when seen from conventional urban planning and architectural perspectives.114 Nevertheless, by accommodating both logics in the development of urban form, architect Kirsten Birk argued, the GTO eventually settled on a planning compromise between closed and open urban forms as an appropriate model for Greenlandic towns.115 According to Birk, the Radiofjeldet development in Nuuk from 1970 was the first example of a combination of these perspectives. The idea of this compromise urban design model was supported by the 1978 Danish report to the UNECE Symposium on Human Settlements Planning and Development in the Arctic. Discussing dimensions of urban planning in Greenland, the report authors explained that due to topography, the realized urban form represented an assortment of open-plan systems. These include ‘scattered-plans’, ‘thunder-plans’ and ‘finger plans’ that maintained intimate urban spaces while connecting them to the surrounding landscape.116 These examples of open-form planning systems were also found in entirely different regions of the world. The report authors claimed that while the Arctic climate significantly impacted the architectural principles of individual buildings (e.g. in snow management, internal layout and insulation), the Arctic climate was, in fact, not a deciding influence on urban plans in Greenland.117

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Greenlandic architecture The physical development of Greenland has attracted intense interest from Danish architects over the years.118 Many high-profile architects have designed buildings in Greenland, and recent accounts reflect a sense of pride in past achievements.119 According to Kirsten Birk, who has studied this legacy of Danish architects in Greenland, the goal of the politicians, planners and architects involved in the New Order development of Greenland ‘was not to create a Greenlandic architecture but rather to adapt Danish experiences and technology to a Greenlandic context’.120 In the early decades of the programme, there was reluctance to kick-start a Greenlandic building and construction sector, and instead, the GTO imported Danish builders. According to Skriver, the adaption of industrialized prefabricated concrete construction in the 1960s further hindered the development of a local building industry and the possibility for the emergence of a distinct, unique Greenlandic architecture.121 Nevertheless, Danish architects continuously articulated ideas about a particular Greenlandic architecture throughout the construction boom.122 Rosendahl and Ølgaard claimed in 1977 that the architecture ‘after some initial difficulties, got its distinctive Greenlandic character’.123 According to GTO architect Per Koch, this character entailed a sturdy simplicity in the overall form and details combined with a robust use of materials.124 This distinct GTO architecture developed by Danish architects emerged before an independent architectural scene in Greenland arose amid the declining power of the organization. Lamenting the loss of this design style, Kjell Vindum, editor of Arkitektur, reported in 2012 that ‘most of the newer architecture, not least in Nuuk, that has appeared after the GTO era is so much poorer. … There seems to be less of an interest in discovering Greenlandic characteristics and values in architecture than before the implementation of Greenland self-government.’125 However, questions about the ‘Greenlandicness’ of the GTO architecture were voiced already in 1970 by architect Henning Jensen, who suggested that ‘the Greenlander base[d his or her] desires on a Danish model, not on the architect’s imagined conceptions of the Greenlander’s housing needs. Even if the Greenlanders’ own elected representatives were to plan and determine everything from A to Z, they would still draw on outside ideals – just as the Danes have done for centuries.’126 As the concrete architecture of the G-60 period fell into disrepute, popular appreciation of Greenlandic architecture and urbanism increasingly centred on the 1950s single-family houses painted in bright colours and scattered across the topography. However, in recent years, the general public has embraced a number of contemporary architectural works. Some of these buildings in Nuuk rely, as argued by Adam Grydehøj, heavily on landscape metaphors, such as the cultural palace, the ‘monumental Katuaq (designed to resemble the aura borealis), Malik (designed to resemble waves on the

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sea), and Ilimmarfik buildings [that] are all popularly praised for their Greenlandicness’.127 These buildings were designed by both Danish and Greenlandic architectural practices and belong to a Danish design tradition. Their ‘Greenlandicness (like the purported paramount Greenlandicness of Greenland’s settlements) is a form of Greenlandicness that has been invented and designed in association with Denmark’.128 Significant features that differentiate them from the institutional architecture of the GTO era are the gestures towards the dramatic settings of Greenlandic life. The context of public perceptions of these buildings is also very different. The contemporary environment of political self-determination and cultural empowerment is a contrast to the cultural upheaval and alienation that accompanied the institutional architecture of the G-60-era. These newer iconic buildings are also public institutions, but they represent local and national pride. They are symbols of the emerging state, and the capital’s civic buildings, like the Ilimmarfik university complex and the Katuaq cultural centre, celebrate Greenlandic culture, language and national autonomy.

City Image: Nuuk The contemporary architecture of Greenland co-exists with buildings from other periods in Nuuk’s nearly 300 years of history. No longer a colony, Nuuk is a dynamic urban setting where traces of past undertakings and visions are still evident amid more recent construction.

Encountering Nuuk

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earching for photo opportunities before the sun sets on this early winter day, I move freely between houses. I continuously have to remind myself that land is public, and I wonder how close to someone’s living room windows it is acceptable to walk. Within minutes of venturing into the urban landscape, I find myself on top of a hill with a view that captures most of the city. The small, wooden houses contrast with the new, large-scale commercial, civic and residential architecture. There is a lot of construction going on, and cranes and high-rise buildings dot the skyline. What is left of the 1960s housing blocks that used to dominate the city centre is in poor condition and looks surprisingly small scale and old-fashioned compared to the newer, taller developments nearby. The demolished Blok P has left an open space in the middle of the city. Other apartment buildings from the colonial era appear to be empty, and some have been decorated with images of animals and people. Down the hill from the city’s art museum, I encounter a towering image of a woman with a traditional hair-knot.

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This strong, forceful portrait painted on the stern housing block where she lives reminds me that the concrete living machine is also a dwellingplace. She is accompanied by a polar bear that looks out over the blue fence encircling the ground floor of the building. Her hands rest on the bear’s head – either to cuddle or control it.129 This odd pair on an otherwise blank end wall of a housing block is the first view visitors see upon arriving in the city centre from the airport, and powerfully comments on identities, conflicts and power relations of both the past and the present. The 1960s Q, R and S housing blocks along Tuapannguit, on the other side of the city centre, have made way for a row of residential towers, and the low-rise apartment buildings in the Tuujuk area are being replaced with new perimeter blocks with open courtyards, reminiscent of recent projects I have seen elsewhere. I am happy to see the renovation of the monumental apartment buildings of the Radiofjellet development from 1970 perched on the rocks by the sea. Modernism seems like an endangered species in this fast-transforming city, and I ask myself whether these buildings will eventually become recognized as part of the city’s cultural heritage – like the self-built houses of the 1950s and 1960s – or if they will be erased entirely from the city image.

FIGURE 6.9   Blok 10. Painting by Stéfan Baldursson. © Peter Hemmersam.

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Components of the city image Nuuk is bounded by mountains and the sea surrounding the peninsula upon which it is located. The city consists of distinct districts, such as the historic colonial harbour with its wooden architecture facing the sea, and the central area that occupies the flat terrain at the end of the peninsula. Further along the peninsula is Nuussuaq, a suburb of low-rise, high-density housing developments from the 1970s and 1980s, and even further, concluding the linear movement that starts at the old harbour, is Qinngorput, with its new residential towers. Within these city districts, landmarks function as reference points. The cathedral and the statue of Hans Egede by the old harbour, and the high-rise government headquarters in the central area, are particularly eye-catching. In the suburbs, the Malik (Wave) swimming pool and the university are visual landmarks, and Sermitsiaq Mountain to the north is ever-present on Nuuk’s skyline. The most significant urban spaces through which people pass every day include the corner outside the Brugseni department store, the nearby pedestrian street of Imaneq and the Nuuk Center shopping complex. The roundabouts of Nuussuaq and the sub-centre with shops, school and bus stop in Qinngorput are nodes of daily life in the suburbs. Other significant nodes in the town are the public buildings that people

FIGURE 6.10   The Imaneq pedestrian street, Nuuk. © Peter Hemmersam.

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enter on certain occasions, such as the Katuaq Cultural Centre and the sports halls. Some of these features were planned as significant elements of the urban landscape, while others emerged or persisted despite the best efforts of planners. One example is the Imaneq pedestrian street, which runs diagonally through the city centre and which formed the backbone of the early urban development in the 1950s. In the 1960s, planners deliberately tried to abolish this historical road in favour of a rectangular urban grid, resulting in a geometrically complex urban structure of overlapping movement patterns.130

Future images of the past Today’s Nuuk is the result of sixty-five years of urban planning. Its growth was envisioned in the 1950s and 1960s, but it has become much larger than the far-sighted planners projected. It has also acquired entirely new roles, such as becoming the seat of a national government. In this respect, Nuuk recalls the role Alfred Råvad envisioned for his proposed Greenlandic capital, Erikshavn. Råvad’s vision for Greenland saw its population initially growing to 50,000 and a hundred years after Råvad’s proposal, Greenland’s population is at 56,000. Råvad envisioned his city as a node on new shipping routes across the Atlantic, which would expose it to international trade and culture. Similarly, Nuuk is speculating about strategic options relating to new trade routes along the Northwest Passage.131 Danes and Icelanders populated Råvad’s city, and today’s Nuuk is also an immigrant city. However, most new residents come from other parts of the island, and the number of Danes is steadily declining. Rather than a Danish capital of Greenland and the driver of the Danish ‘nationalization of Greenland’, modern Nuuk is an Inuit city with Greenlandic faces, flags and language everywhere.132 It is no longer a trading and missionary colony but a welfare city with a distinct urban culture. Modern Nuuk echoes Råvad’s belief that versions of European urbanity will play roles in transforming Greenland’s culture and society. As Råvad envisioned in Erikshavn, art plays a crucial role in Nuuk’s identity and cultural life. The cultural scene is vibrant, and street and public art abound in the city. Artists from elsewhere helped to develop Greenlandic art, but today, homegrown artists increasingly dominate the national art scene. In contrast to Råvad’s beautiful city, Nuuk’s urban image is partly the product of the rational Modernist planning of the 1950s and 1960s and partly a contemporary, ad-hoc city landscape representing shifting planning ideologies and more immediate concerns over the decades. The buildings of the city vary according to changing architectural trends but, as suggested by Råvad, they are mostly Danish types adjusted to local conditions. This is still the case today as many Danish and Danish-trained Greenlandic architects give form to the city and its buildings.

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Nuuk attracts tourists, just as Råvad envisioned Erikshavn would, and the central Hotel Hans Egede serves as a hub for this activity. Råvad’s suggestion for a specialized Greenlandic university has also been realized in Nuuk, although with a much broader curriculum than he envisioned. In Nuuk, a bus system links the urban districts together instead of the tram line Råvad envisaged connecting Erikshavn and its hinterland. A version of Råvad’s monumental government quarter has been realized in the tallest building in Nuuk, which houses various ministries. However, unlike Råvad’s separation of administrative quarters and the commercial city, Greenlands’s government offices rise eight storeys directly above the Nuuk Center, a downtown shopping destination. Overall, fragments of Råvad’s more-than-a-century-old utopian image of a city and metropolitan life in Greenland have been realized in Nuuk. The former colonial trading post has become a capital of culture, art and knowledge, but the political and cultural framing of Nuuk as the symbol of the most prominent Indigenous country in the Polar region differs radically from Råvad’s Danish ‘Queen of the Polar Lands’. There are both continuity and discontinuity between Råvad’s colonial urban vision and contemporary Nuuk. Nevertheless, his proposal that city planning supporting the urban culture of a capital city would be a major force in societal development in Greenland is an accurate description of Nuuk’s nation-building role today.

Changing images of the future: From Danish to Greenlandic to Arctic capital Nuuk was founded as a colonial trading post after the Danish arrival in the early eighteenth century and became the administrative centre for all of Greenland during the Second World War. After the war, the Greenland Commission suggested that administration be moved permanently from Copenhagen to Greenland but expressed doubt whether Nuuk was a suitable location.133 However, the 1950 Planning Expedition made it clear that Nuuk did have the necessary harbour facilities, available land for construction and access to fishing grounds, sheep pastures and drinking water. The expedition’s plan for what was, in reality, an entirely new city has been materialized in the functional separation of residential and industrial zones and the urban grid on the relatively flat terrain between the historical colonial administrative centre and the larger, industrial harbour on the eastern side of the peninsula.134 The expedition report predicted that urban growth would result in a city ‘many times larger’ after thirty years, with a population of up to 9,000 and a variety of industries, large institutional buildings and extensive technical facilities.135 Over the years, Nuuk has become increasingly important as an administrative city, and today, it houses the national government, main

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hospital and university, in addition to being the principal city of the Municipality of Sermersooq. Nuuk’s first suburb, Nuussuaq, was developed in the late 1970s, the most recent urban expansion is Oinngorput, and current plans include further urban growth along the eastwards urban axis through a tunnel to an entirely new district called Siorarsiofik. According to anthropologist Bo Wagner Sørensen, many Greenlanders outside the capital have long considered Nuuk to be a ‘Danish’ city. Danes built it, it had a sizeable Danish population, and few residents engaged in traditional Greenlandic activities, such as hunting. Thus, its citizens were frequently regarded as somewhat less Greenlandic than residents of other towns and smaller settlements.136 However, these perceptions are changing, and Nuuk is transforming from a culturally ambivalent place into a more genuinely Greenlandic city. The colonial-era apartment buildings that symbolized cultural alienation are being demolished or refurbished, Danes are becoming fewer, and the Danish language is steadily becoming less evident in the public sphere. In the 2016 Capital Strategy, Semersooq predicts that Nuuk will grow to 25,000 inhabitants by 2030.137 The strategy proposes that to ensure economic growth, Greenland’s small economy needs to be integrated with global flows, and Nuuk is the place where this is possible. A new container harbour has been developed in recent years to facilitate trade. The airport is being expanded to accommodate large passenger jets, which would revolutionize both Greenland’s internal and Nuuk’s international

FIGURE 6.11   The Nuussuaq and Quinngorput districts of Nuuk. © Peter Hemmersam.

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connectivity. As Greenland’s gateway to the world, Nuuk will capitalize on the increasing global interest in the Arctic. The local government views Nuuk as well-positioned as a location for international businesses and a meeting place for politicians and scientists from across the Polar world. Becoming an arena for international politics and business would, Semersooq municipality argue, make Nuuk a ‘Capital of the Arctic’.138

Greenland’s urban futures Greenland’s population is overwhelmingly urban, with over 80 per cent of residents living in the seventeen largest towns. Although small, the towns are urban in the sense that they offer a variety of services and industries that enable them to function independently and support smaller, nearby settlements.139 The towns are primarily connected to their hinterlands by sea, while intercity connectivity is by helicopter, plane and larger boats. The absence of land-based transport means that regional planning practices established elsewhere cannot regulate urban economic and employment imbalances in Greenland.140 Kåre Hendriksen described Greenlandic towns as a series of ‘microstate island economics’ with no regional connectivity, little internal competition and clear limitations in terms of available skills and workforce. Despite what may seem to be disadvantages in terms of efficiency and scale, Hendriksen argued that there ‘are reasons for questioning whether a less decentralized settlement pattern or even a collection of people at select settlements will significantly change the economic challenges of island operations’.141 Even more centralized settlements in Greenland would still be too small to significantly improve functional market conditions and internal operational competition. Centralization would not necessarily be economically beneficial as the country would have to increase imports if traditional subsistence hunting was reduced by hunters moving to towns. Further, Hendriksen claims, centralization would bring few economic benefits as ‘at present there is nowhere the residents could move to contribute to Greenland’s exports because all of the Greenland island operation communities face similar challenges’.142 In addition, the widespread housing shortage means that no housing is available for people in the larger communities.143 The housing shortage in the bigger towns is exacerbated by the need to renovate the 1960s and 1970s Modernist housing stock, which diverts resources from new construction and, in some cases, might require temporary or permanent resettlement of inhabitants. These considerations signal a significant shift from an urban construction and expansion phase of Greenland’s towns to urban policy and planning focused on transformation and renovation. Many towns in Greenland must find new roles in the national economy. Some have lost the initial roles they were intended to play in the G-50 and G-60 urbanization plans, such as being administrative hubs, as these

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functions are concentrated in fewer places.144 Fishing, the dominant industry, has also changed significantly since the urban industrial infrastructure was first rolled out in the 1960s. New species and fishing grounds are exploited, while others have decreased in importance. Consequently, some harbours and processing facilities are no longer ideally located. Hendriksen predicts that Greenland’s future development will involve attempts to diversify the national economy through tourism and mining. Tourism has increased in Greenland in recent years, and the expansion of airports in several towns is expected to increase accessibility and reduce costs for visitors. The government anticipates further tourism growth from the new visitor centre at the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Ilulissat.145 Since the closing of the coal-mining community of Qullissat in 1972, no town has been directly dependent on mining, but this might change with several planned, albeit highly uncertain, mineral and petrochemical prospecting and extraction operations. Although such endeavours may be economically significant, the direct urban impacts are much less certain as internationally, mining increasingly takes the form of fly-in-fly-out operations.146 In Greenland, as elsewhere, increased attention is paid to the development of human resources instead of relying on than traditional models for industrialization. This focus on education runs parallel to a growing recognition that large-scale resource exploitation, such as mining and oil drilling, might not be sufficient to secure significant development of the national economy.147 Amid this uncertain future for the economy and settlements of Greenland, the expanding skillsets of an increasingly well-educated population will influence urban culture and economy in the major towns that are likely to play dominant roles in the future of Greenland. At the same time, the landscape features of Greenland will also continue to shape the future of its towns. The rugged topography, scarce buildable land, scattered population and challenging weather and climate mean that shipping and inter-city transport will continue to be costly in the future, and urban regionalization will remain a limited option in the foreseeable future.

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PART THREE

Constructing the Arctic city

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Defining Arctic urbanism

While there are significant differences between Arctic states and territories, a set of common issues nevertheless materialize in particular notions about urbanism. Central to the construction of the Arctic City has been the idea that northern communities were not modern and should be developed according to contemporary urban models. The urban development of the Soviet Arctic started several decades before governments elsewhere pursued similar policies. In the Soviet Union, industrialization and city-building were crucial components in the economic development and modernization of the Far North. As suggested by McCannon, ‘the USSR stood out for the lengths it was willing to go to exploit its northern resources’.1 In Canada, northern development reflected a national sentiment of ‘northernness’, but a laissez-faire approach to private enterprise meant that northern urban development was slow and fragmented. Norbert Schoenauer, the architect behind Fermont, lists five generations of Canadian Arctic urbanism.2 The first was the ‘temporary and periodic settlements inhabited by Indigenous people’. The second generation consisted of ‘haphazard and make-shift settlements built by the pioneers of natural resource developments’. The third was ‘“new towns” built by large mining companies for their employees’, while the fourth generation was the suburban model that included climate-controlled shopping malls, but which did not otherwise respond to the climatic conditions of the North. Fermont, Schoenauer argued, was a compact fifth-generation Subarctic settlement, with both enclosed social spaces and protected exterior urban areas. In contrast to the Soviet Union and Canada, the ideas of a ‘northwards destiny’ played a very marginal role in Denmark, where the government portrayed the mid-century urban development in Greenland as a remedy for the poor social conditions of the island’s population. From the outset, the government’s programme for the development of Greenland was intended

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to industrialize its society, and towns and settlements were constructed from the ground-up according to rational Modernist urban design schemes.

Five generations of Arctic urbanism The stages and politics of urban development in the different Arctic territories vary significantly. Nevertheless, by combining the three urban planning and development histories presented in part two of this book, it is possible to summarize a history of Arctic urban development and planning in five generations. These five generations are not identical to Schoenauer’s genealogy, but represent an evolving set of ways in which politicians, planners and architects have envisioned the interaction between individuals, cities and the environment. They reflect the rapid evolution of the social and economic conditions in these northern territories over the last century. Each generation also addresses the technical and economic challenges of northern city-building in different ways, while at the same time referring to various trends within the international urbanism and architecture discourse. 1. ‘Paradise’ in the North The first generation of urbanism in the Arctic was inspired by the aesthetically oriented City Beautiful movement in the early decades of the twentieth century and continued well into the 1950s. Alfred Råvad’s project for a capital in Greenland is an example of how planners and architects applied the movement’s design strategies around the world, including in various European colonial cities. Still, the most significant urban plans of this generation are the Stalinist cities that celebrated socialism’s conquest of the adversarial North. This generation of cities was designed from scratch to inspire civic pride and embody grand statements of state ideology. Urban designers embraced a classical European urban vocabulary of boulevards, parks and large representational buildings. Multi-storey apartment buildings provided residences for the socialist elite in cities like Murmansk, which also benefitted from the ornamental planting scenes developed by the PolarAlpine Botanical Garden. The large-scale Soviet Arctic urbanism of this period depended on the use of forced Gulag labour. Also, the planning of these cities exhibited little concern for Indigenous peoples of the Far North, who were considered to have little use for cities. 2. Technocratic urbanism The second generation of Arctic urbanism arose from the technical research on infrastructure development and military construction methods under northern conditions during the Second World War and the ensuing Cold War. Governments established research institutes to develop technology as well as sociological knowledge about new urban communities in the North. Powerful technocratic state organizations in the Soviet Union, Greenland,

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Canada and Norway implemented large-scale programmes that included urban development and industrialization. During this period, governments became increasingly concerned with the welfare of Indigenous populations and their integration into modern society. The dominant models of urban planning and architecture followed international Modernist principles of industrialized mass-housing, and architects and planners published utopian high-tech proposals for Arctic cities of the future. 3. Softening the North The Arctic urbanism of the 1970s and 1980s responded to the rapid industrialization, urban development and modernization of people in the North that had taken place in the preceding decades. In the West, this response reflected growing anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial sentiments, Indigenous political empowerment as well as a stirring environmental movement. Planners and architects gradually abandoned the instrumental functionalism of Modernism. In the Soviet North, the abandonment of the Gulag system led planners to focus on the liveability of northern cities to attract a volunteer industrial workforce. It was during this period that the idea of a particular Arctic urbanism was formulated and tested in places like Resolute Bay, Fermont and Udachny. These projects were all concerned with ‘softening’ the North for southern immigrants moving into new extractive and administrative settlements. Researchers and architects at the LenZNIIEP and other institutions in the Soviet Union published various proposals for liveable Arctic cities. Still, the most celebrated proponent of this generation of Arctic urbanism in both the East and the West was Ralph Erskine. 4. Climatic cities The next, and closely related, stage of Arctic urbanism concerns the proliferation of Arctic planning and design concepts to cities outside the region during the 1980s and 1990s. Within urban planning, increased attention to individual well-being, democracy and the right to the city for marginal groups resulted in a shift towards processual and participative approaches. For architects associated with the international ‘critical regionalism’ movement, northern communities outside the modern metropolitan regions of the West functioned as experimental spaces for renegotiation and differentiating Modernist urban planning and design. Danish architect Jan Gehl and the authors of the Winter Cities movement, including Norman Pressman, were concerned with urban liveability. They became the principal proponents of strategies for the ‘climatic city’, which entered urban policies and plans for winter cities outside the Arctic.3 5. Place-specific urbanism Abandoning the benefit of a historical perspective on urban design and development, the resolution of a fifth and most contemporary generation of Arctic urbanism is less clear. Today, Arctic cities are more and more like cities

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elsewhere, and politicians and urban planners subscribe to the mainstream international discourse on urban branding, liveability and the mobility of businesses and people. At the same time, Arctic settlements are affected by rapid globalization and a changing global climate. New imbalances replace colonial power structures, such as increased tensions between thriving larger cities and struggling smaller communities. Also, the arrival of new low-wage immigrants to northern communities upends established social hierarchies. In recent years, southern urbanists have projected urban forms of international capitalism and globalized flows of people and goods onto the Arctic. At the same time, designers working closely with, or from within the region, have identified and mobilized Indigenous knowledge and regional cultures in new architectural expressions. This Arctic vernacular is not necessarily a ‘hard’ architecture or urbanism that specifies technical standards or solutions, but rather a materialization of the hybrid cultures of modern societies in the North.

Dimensions of Arctic urbanism There are few comprehensive accounts of urbanism in the history of urban development across the circumpolar North. One prominent exception was an attempt to provide a set of technical and architectural recommendations, which took place at the 1978 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) symposium on ‘Human Settlements in the Arctic’ in Nuuk.4 The report from this event details engineering challenges associated with northern city-building such as permafrost construction and functional sewage systems. While the report suggests that ‘there can be no standardized approach to ensure optimum location and planning of settlements in Arctic regions’, it nevertheless proceeds to summarize design trends and planning strategies within ‘community planning’ with a focus on ‘settlement form’.5 According to the report, planners across the different Arctic territories were concerned with: 1. a problematic general tendency to copy southern architecture and building standards, 2. a wish to open up settlements towards nature and the need for outdoor recreation, 3. the potential for clustering buildings to create a milder outdoor microclimate, 4. compact urban forms that provided a sense of protection, identity and community, 5. the need for indoor social and commercial spaces (‘climate-controlled shopping malls’),

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6. the need to make harsh northern towns attractive to southerners that contribute to local and national economies, 7. the need for wind-clearance of snow, 8. the use of colour instead of vegetation to improve the visual appearance of settlements, and 9. innovative and robust energy supply and distribution systems. This list summarizes urban planning and design in the circumpolar North in the 1970s. Still, the government planners at the symposium omitted divisive issues that reflected the political, economic and cultural divides between countries. These divisive issues include questions of private versus public land ownership, the role of corporations versus governments in citybuilding, the rights and concerns of Indigenous communities, environmental concerns and the place of democratic involvement in planning. Based on the accounts of urban development and design in Canada, Greenland and the Soviet Union in part two of this book, the recommendations of the UNECE symposium are extended in this chapter in the formulation of a broader set of dimensions of Arctic urbanism. These dimensions are constituted through the political and economic processes of urbanization in the region, the utopian architectural visions of architects, as well as practical planning undertakings. This formulation of Arctic urbanism does not only reflect existing northern urban planning and urban space. It also includes a broader set of ideas and representations relating to cities and settlements that guide the actions of decision-makers and designers and the public perception of the role and design of cities in the North. These dimensions reflect a gradually developing international discourse on the Arctic City over the past one hundred years. They are thus historical in the sense that they identify recurring issues, but they are also contemporary and address current challenges and perceptions that guide urban development. These dimensions of Arctic urbanism unfold in five parallel and interacting ideas of the Arctic City:

The utopian city Throughout the history of city-building in the Arctic, powerful metanarratives of under-development and anti-modernity have prompted architects and planners to perform dramatic leaps of imagination in terms of form, technology and society. Such leaps have manifested themselves as theoretical and utopian architectural models for Arctic cities and as radical technocratic development and urbanization programmes that included large-scale social engineering. The industrialized architecture of government modernization programmes and the urban design models of Modernist planners

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proliferated across the Arctic in the mid-twentieth century, exemplified by the Soviet microrayon. After the demise of high Modernism, utopian urbanism increasingly detached itself from pragmatic urban planning, which resulted in a tension between theoretical models and architectural visions on one side, and the practice of day-to-day urban development in political and economic contexts on the other. Ultimately, architects were able to build very few of their visionary and widely publicized urban megastructures. Exceptions, such as Le Mur-Écran in Fermont, came about as a result of the particular political and economic context of Quebec in the 1970s. Most of the inhabited Arctic has gradually become less ‘nordic’ over time, according to Hamelin’s model, due to the spread of infrastructure and communications, political devolution and diversifying economies. As such, cities in the Arctic have become more ordinary, and utopian models for city-building have become increasingly rare.

The postcolonial city Accounts of urbanism in the Arctic revolve around an opposition between a combination of state and corporate interests on one side, and local interests, Indigenous rights, culture and politics on the other. Mark Nuttall and Klaus Dodds suggest that ‘for indigenous peoples, … the “Arctic” is more often than not associated with the colonial practices that brought designs for permanent settlements’.6 City-building in the North was for decades a component of southern government’s programmes for development, modernization and social engineering. The Arctic postcolonial discourse surfaced in the national, public and academic consciousness in Canada, Alaska and Scandinavia in the 1970s. The spatial instrumentality of government urban planning was discredited, and the surviving architectural designs from the period became symbols of paternalistic social engineering. The demolition of Blok P in Nuuk is emblematic of the rejection of colonial policies and its architectural expression by an empowered local polity. Recent debates about the relationship between governments, multinational corporations and local communities are the result of new political and corporate interests in the Arctic. This attention is triggered by the increased availability of resources and transportation links that are a consequence of global climate change and receding sea ice. Resultingly, a debate has been reignited about whether northern cities are necessary prerequisites to, or undesired byproducts of, industrialization. Governments in the Arctic, like authorities elsewhere, compete for skills and talents, and cities advertise their distinct culture, unique nature and high degree of liveability. This trend is evident in the number of cities that brand themselves as the ‘Capital of the Arctic’ in order to attract investment and businesses. These globalized Arctic cities are contrasted by the many smaller communities that experience the negative sides of deindustrialization and

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decontextualized capital of globalization. While the larger cities in the region are becoming increasingly central, these settlements are becoming even more peripheral.

The provisional city The history of Arctic urban development is one of simultaneous urbanization and de-urbanization. Settlements have been built, re-built, moved and closed down throughout the twentieth century as a result of corporations’ and governments’ economic calculations or strategic decisions. Towns that were planned components of national industrial systems have turned out to have a shorter and less stable lifetime than otherwise imagined as a result of fluctuations in the global commodities market, or the transforming geopolitics of the region. While some settlements were built to serve temporary purposes and subsequently closed down, other provisional outposts evolved into permanent settlements as a result of deliberate government policies, such as the establishment of colonial and territorial administrative centres. In these locations, attracting and catering to the needs of skilled southern experts and administrators has been a reoccurring policy and urban design concern. Today, this concern extends to maintaining a sustainable population in small communities with limited choices of jobs and opportunities for women and young people. Abandoned settlements are a common feature across the Arctic.7 Messaure in northern Sweden was deserted in 1962 when workers for the hydropower development of the Lule River moved to other construction sites. The town’s street network is still visible in the forest, but not a single building remains. In Greenland, the government moved 1,400 people from Qullissat in 1972, after it found that the town’s coal mine was no longer profitable.8 Uranium City in Saskatchewan and Gagnon in Quebec were both mostly abandoned in 1982, with the latter being completely dismantled soon thereafter.9 In Svalbard, the Soviet mining town of Pyramiden was evacuated on short notice in 1998, leaving buildings and industrial equipment behind. Small populations, costly and intermittent infrastructural connections and limited alternative economic livelihoods mean that many postindustrial settlements remain unoccupied. A curious case is Kangilinnguit in Greenland where the Grønnedal naval base was abandoned in 2014, leaving a number of still-inhabitable houses behind. Other settlements, however, mutate into a second phase of urban life among remnants of abandoned houses and industrial complexes. The presence of industrial ruins in these communities underlines that they belonged to outdated economic modes of production, a factor that reinforces people’s experience of marginalization. While many communities have seen significant deindustrialization, industrial activities have also resulted in migrating settlements. The centre of Longyearbyen in Svalbard has been relocated four times over a century as

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new mine heads were established, and in northern Sweden, expanding mines at Kiruna and Malmberget have resulted in the relocation of entire towns. Another form of impermanence that affects communities in the North is high population turnover. The accelerated hunt for hydrocarbons and minerals results in the construction of temporary camps for a fly-in-fly-out workforce that moves in and out on regular schedules. In Longyearbyen, the average residency is three to four years. Sixty-one per cent of Alaska’s population was born outside the state, and Anchorage has a steady replacement of its non-Indigenous population.10 Today, the changing global climate yet again threatens the existence of settlements in the Arctic. Communities will have to relocate as erosion imperils coastal settlements, and entire cities built on permafrost are in jeopardy.

The experimental city Over the last century, Arctic cities have been sites of social and technical experimentation. Ken Coates suggests that ‘governments have tended to use Northern jurisdiction for national experimentation. Because of their constitutional authority or the weakened structure of regional governments, national authorities can and have treated the North like a tabula rasa for government action.’11 Some of the most dramatic experiments with social engineering in the Arctic were the Soviet collectivization of Indigenous groups, the Canadian government’s experiments with forced relocation and acclimatization of Inuit, and the Danish relocation and urbanization schemes that were intended to modernize Greenlandic society and transform individuals into economically productive wage labourers.12 In the Soviet Union, the designs of modern industrial cities in the Far North evolved through a ‘trial and error’ method.13 As a result of the political determination for rapid development, practical experimentation with cold climate architecture and urban form took place in the form of actual city-building where problems were solved ad hoc as they appeared. Similarly, the modernization of Greenland evolved through experimentation with practical urban design and construction.14 The planners at the 1978 international UNECE symposium in Nuuk acknowledged that the development of ‘general principles concerning town planning in arctic latitudes [was] still at a very early and indefinite stage’. They established that planning should follow practical ‘experience rather than applying general principles’.15 No universally applicable models for the planning and design of northern communities ever emerged. However, some cities, such as Norilsk in the Soviet Union and Inuvik in Canada, were planned and functioned as experimental laboratories where technical and

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design solutions were tested and refined. They were also locations where health and social scientists studied northern life in such rapidly changing communities.

The ecological city Nuttall and Dodds remind us that the representation of the Arctic in the media and general public discourse subscribes to an imaginary of an untouched landscape.16 While theories of territorial urbanization elsewhere have evolved to encompass landscape-city hybrids in the form of regional metropolises and peri-urban landscapes, a sharp urban-nature dichotomy remains firmly entrenched in the concept of the Arctic.17 Popular perceptions of endangered ecosystems reinforce the idea that human activities should be concentrated and separated from the surrounding landscapes to avoid negative effects on the environment. At the same time, cities and industries have had a lasting detrimental impact on Arctic landscapes and ecosystems. Ecological awareness surfaced on the international urban planning agenda in the 1970s, and environmental concerns became increasingly prominent when the deindustrialization of Western cities accelerated in the 1980s. Today, environmental practices and policies in many parts of the Arctic lag behind standards in developed countries, and governments continue to consider environmentally questionable resource extraction to be central to the development of Arctic societies. Adding to concerns of ecological sustainability in the Arctic, there is growth in international tourism to these fragile territories where visitors flock to witness megafauna and melting glaciers. The dominant international urban design model for environmental sustainability is the ‘compact city’, which reduces car-use, increases walkability and conserves energy.18 The urban development history of the Arctic has resulted in urban features that correspond well to the compact city model, such as the relative absence of car-reliant regional urban systems and the attention to building integrated and self-sufficient communities. Despite this historical advantage, the political focus on the environmental sustainability of Arctic cities has so far been limited. Instead, international environmental concerns have materialized as narratives about the Arctic as a recipient of harmful emissions from elsewhere. These concerns sustain a picture of the Arctic as a passive victim of climate change and potentially deemphasize the agency of local communities and governments in the pursuit of sustainable urban policies and planning.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The architects of the Arctic city

Throughout the history of Arctic urban development, there has been a tension between colonial and local perspectives on city-building. There has also been a dialectical relationship between incrementalist approaches to urban development and the tradition of utopian thinking in northern urban planning and design. Architects and planners have imported planning theories and design concepts to the Arctic, and ideas of urban design have moved between territories in the region. This exchange of ideas has concerned the practical and engineering challenges of northern construction, models of regional development as well as visions of urban futures. Early architectural visions of cities in the Arctic include Alfred Råvad’s proposal for a capital of Greenland from 1914 and Egli’s plan for ‘the unborn city’ published in 1945 and 1951. The differences between these urban proposals illustrate considerable changes in the discourse of urban planning and design in the first half of the twentieth century. Råvad speculated that urbanization in the North would be enabled by technology that would make shipping and agricultural production in Greenland possible. In terms of urban planning, he fundamentally transferred contemporary international avant-garde thinking – the City Beautiful paradigm – to the North. Inspired by architectural precedent and contemporary Northern European housing schemes, Råvad suggested that interconnected buildings could create a sheltered microclimate for play and gardening. However, his overriding concern with city-building in the North was the symbolic application of southern urban culture to an ‘underdeveloped’ land. In contrast to Råvad’s ideas, Egli’s radical proposal for cities in Arctic conditions three decades later was based on an idea of distilling the essence of the environmental condition of a given region as the basis for architectural design. His revolutionary Modernist architecture and urban design avoided references to traditional architectural imagery and insisted that the unique climate of the Arctic required an exceptional and unprecedented architectural response.

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Råvad’s symbolic design and Egli’s radical architecture were precursors to later visionary projects for cities in the Arctic. As reviewed in part two of this book, the development of Arctic cities happened along parallel but also diverging and intersecting political and cultural developmental trajectories. Architects and planners articulated these trajectories in both imaginary and realized architectural and urban projects. A prominent articulation of the Arctic City in the evolving international discourse on northern city-building was Ralph Erskine’s project for the ‘Subarctic habitat’, which came to dominate architects’ approach to northern urban design and architecture in the second half of the twentieth century.

Form follows climate In 1959, Ralph Erskine presented the project for a Subarctic Habitat at the tenth Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in Otterlo in the Netherlands. This event gathered an international group of architects who were critical of the Modernist abstraction of the pre-war CIAM movement. Erskine became loosely associated with the group organizing the congress. Team X, as the group would later be called, became prominent in the international architecture and urbanism scene in the decades that followed.1 While never realized in its totality, the project Erskine presented at this event became fundamental to his international fame. During his studies in London, Erskine became acquainted with his contemporary, Gordon Cullen, the author of the influential 1961 book The Concise Townscape.2 This book was a response to Modernism in urban planning and advocated for a much more experiential and contextual approach to city-building.3 Motivated by similar ideas, Erskine continued his studies in Sweden, where he acquired commissions in the north of the country. He eventually became an influential representative of Swedish postwar architecture. His designs echoed the softening and ‘humanization’ of the abstract forms of Modernist architecture in the UK and Sweden that was labelled the ‘new empiricism’ in the Architectural Review in the late 1940s.4 Reflecting the thinking of the Townscape movement and the abandonment of the international style of CIAM by Team X, his work towards identifying Subarctic regional architectural characteristics made him a precursor to the critical regionalism of the 1980s.5 Through a series of widely published architectural and urban planning projects in northern Sweden and Canada, as well as numerous presentations and publications where he laid out his thinking behind the architectural and urban design in the Subarctic, Erskine eventually became the preeminent ‘Arctic architect’ of Modernism.6 He was an eloquent communicator, whose writings, striking visualizations and designs earned him international publicity. American architect, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, who was present at the 1959 CIAM meeting, later wrote that Erskine’s ‘advocacy of a design

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approach which combines protection from the elements with a positive experience of the natural environment and which skilfully balances the demands of community and privacy, has universal applicability as a principle for northern towns’.7 Erskine called this approach to Arctic architecture a ‘grammar for the high north’.8 His overall argument was that designs should optimize the northern climate for human habitation, and the primary urban design principle for achieving this was the densification of settlements. Densification created sheltered spaces, which enabled social interaction and active community life. Promoting social interaction, he argued, was critical to counteracting the isolation that residents in northern settlements and landscapes experienced. Erskine’s ‘grammar for the high north’ also dealt with wind and snow and the contrast between light and darkness. In the North, the sun is low or absent during winter and perpetual in summer, and Erskine suggests that ‘houses and towns [should] open like flowers to the sun of spring and summer but, also like flowers, turn their backs on the shadows and the cold northern winds’.9 He concluded that ‘only by such methods can arise a personal and Indigenous Alaskan, Canadian, Scandinavian or North Russian tradition’.10 Erskine’s writing reveals that he, as suggested by Michelangelo Sabatino and Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, ‘was imbued with the social idealism and environmental responsibility present in Modernist theory as well

FIGURE 8.1   Ralph Erskine: ‘Arctic City’ (1958). Photo: Matti Östling, the ArkDes Collection/ARKM.1986-17-0349.

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as its confidence in technological advantage’.11 His design logic followed Modernist principles, as evidenced by his declaration that ‘forms result directly from climate and function’.12 According to Modernist architectural logic, the physical context and climate of the North could be mapped and analysed by experts, and the same was the case with social structures. While promoting this approach, he was sceptical towards the high-tech and science fiction-like structures proposed by avant-garde architects at the time. He argued that space station-like enclosed installations would be unlikely to satisfy the psychological need of inhabitants to experience the surrounding landscapes.13 Despite his professional eminence, Erskine was not without critics. For instance, the prominent British member of Team X, Peter Smithson, accused him of ‘Mickey Mouse styling’, exemplified by the compact rounded forms and dark colours of his buildings.14 Also, despite his apparent passion for engaging local communities, later authors have questioned whether Erskine’s concern for Arctic living actually addressed local needs.15 According to this line of criticism, his reading of northern conditions and his proposed solutions were primarily the results of a Modernist framing of social, ecological, cultural and physiological issues. Liscombe suggests that Erskine’s schemes ‘mobilized the utopic sublimity within the “modern movement” and the placeless spatiality embodied in Modernist design ideology’.16 In his 1968 article ‘Architecture and Town Planning in the North’, Erskine dismisses ‘the culture of Lapps or Eskimos, which [is] excellently adapted for the life of a northern huntsman, [but] degenerate and finally collapse as these native people also feel the drag and fascination of the new ways of the southern cities’.17 Further, he asserts the role of experts and argues that a modern ‘northern community culture of the industrial age must be newly invented, and social scientists, artists and architects must help’.18 Thus, Farish and Lackenbauer suggest, Erskine’s Canadian work may be considered part of the high Modernist modernization project that ‘did not diminish impressions of the region as a hostile environment. Instead, modernization projects affirmed this hostility while seeking ways to overcome it.’19

The hub and the wall Erskine’s ‘Subarctic habitat’ became a global urban design prototype. Even today, Matthew Jull suggests, the model is a ‘starting point for developing new approaches’.20 While Erskine initially developed his design grammar in response to the Subarctic conditions that he faced in northern Sweden, he considered the approach to be universal and equally appropriate to the high Arctic condition of Resolute Bay in Canada. His writings and project work thus echoed Modernism’s globalizing discourse and claim of universal relevance.

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In the report from the 1989 UNECE research colloquium on ‘Planning Housing and Construction Problems of Human Settlements in Harsh Living Conditions’, Jouko Mähönen distinguishes between the ‘Børvean way’ versus the ‘Pressmanian way’ of dealing with climatic challenges in architecture.21 Inspired by Erskine, Norwegian architect Anne Brit Børve studied local climatic effects, such as snow accumulation, of traditional rural building clusters as a model for contemporary urban design.22 Suggesting an architectural alternative to this approach, Norman Pressman, who was also inspired by Erskine, presented examples of entirely interiorized urban spaces protected from Arctic conditions.23 These design strategies were both pursued by Erskine, often in conjunction, and constitute connected but distinct dimensions of his Arctic architectural legacy. Erskine’s enclosed city centre project for Luleå in northern Sweden, simply entitled ‘Shopping’, opened in 1955. It was among the first fully enclosed modern shopping centres in the world. He envisioned the multipurpose and multilevel interior, complete with streets and a plaza, to be an all-yearround public space that was protected from winter conditions. Erskine’s later designs for Subarctic habitats include similar interior communal and commercial spaces, and Shopping became a widely used reference for northern city centre development among architects and planners in countries like Canada and the Soviet Union.24 The other design principle, which was later extensively explored by Børve, was the design for improving outdoor microclimates. For Erskine, this strategy resulted in the ‘climate wall’ – a long multi-storey building that housed public and commercial spaces and protected outdoor urban areas from winds and snowdrift. These continuous buildings had several Modernist predecessors including Le Corbusier’s highway housing projects from the 1920s and 1930s and the pre-war Siedlungs (housing districts) in Germany. Also, the wall reflected a modern town planning tradition of sheltered interior courtyards, as exemplified by Alfred Råvad’s 1914 Greenland project, and the design of the winding street pattern that reduced wind speeds in Kiruna in northern Sweden from the same period.25 Soviet architects and planners had also discussed wind-breaking urban designs for the Arctic in the 1930s. In Norilsk, the construction of the first closed-perimeter microrayon (Block 29) took place in 1954. In 1959, architects at LenZNIIEP suggested the development of a ‘settlement with moderated natural climate for regions with frequent winter winds’, and in 1961 the closed-contour principle was adopted in the Norilsk General Plan.26 According to Andrew Bond, the ‘formulation of the principle did not represent a sudden flash of individual insight, but rather was the culmination of long years of trial-by-error experimentation with the placement of buildings’.27 Erskine built a part of his ‘Subarctic habitat’ in the mining community of Svappavaara in northern Sweden between 1963 and 1965. The wallbuilding faced south and had a distinct aerofoil that disrupted northerly

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FIGURE 8.2   Indoor communal space in ‘Shopping’ by Ralph Erskine (Luleå, 1955). Photo: Sune Sundahl/Arkitektur-och designcentrum.

winds and created a south-facing protected space. He only succeeded in erecting a 200-metre section of the wall with eighty-eight flats, and the structure was partly demolished in 2010. The Luleå Shopping complex also failed to become the attractive social hub that Erskine anticipated. Its proprietor later extensively modified it in a way that eliminated most of the public interior space of the original project. Despite such failings, these widely published Swedish projects nevertheless attracted international attention. The government of the Northwest Territories solicited Erskine to build a new city at Resolute Bay in the high Arctic in the early 1970s. His

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overall design for this commission included a horseshoe-shaped building that would shelter inhabitants from the northern winds. At the same time, the compact, enclosed social space of the wall was intended to promote a socially integrated community.28 While only able to realize fragments of his habitat model in the Arctic, Erskine later built a substantial urban project with a protective wall in Newcastle, UK. Building on Erskine’s work, however, architects in northern countries have constructed various versions of his protective wall scheme. The most prominent example is Desnoyers and Schoenauer’s design of Le Mur-Écran in Fermont. This project is the closest realized approximation to Erskine’s original concept. In Norway, architects Astrup and Hellern designed another variation of the prototype at 70 degrees north in Hammerfest. Hesteskoblokka (the Horse Shoe Block) from 1965 housed workers from the local fish-processing plant. It was unsuccessful in creating a beneficial outdoor microclimate and has since undergone substantial renovation. Also in Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands, two urban districts called Millum Gilja and Inni á Gøtu from the 1980s feature continuous two-storey wall-buildings that shelter clusters of individual houses from the North Atlantic winds.29 While Erskine was never able to realize the conceptual complexity of his Arctic urban design model in full, the placemaking suggested by his striking visualizations of sheltering mega-buildings continues to attract the attention of the international architectural community. Sheppard and White suggest that urban proposals for the Canadian North exhibit ‘a recurrent theme of overcoming the northern environment via active urban forms, and an attempt to define a sense of place by delimiting “inside” and “outside” (literally or experientially) against the endless exterior landscape’.30 However, interior communal urban space, the other fundamental component of his model, has gradually receded from the architects’ attention and the idea of the Arctic City.

Winter Cities The development of architectural and urban approaches to Arctic and Subarctic conditions has also had consequences further south. The Winter Cities movement and its chief protagonist, Norman Pressman, formulated design strategies based on Arctic experiences for liveable urban environments in the 1980s and 1990s, which have influenced urban planning and policies for cities in the wider North. The concept of ‘Winter Cities’ represents a continuation but also an evolution of the Subarctic habitat proposed by Erskine. While microclimate alleviation is fundamental in the Winter Cities discourse, the attention expands to a broader set of issues relating to urban liveability and making

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urban living enjoyable in winter conditions. Erskine was interested in the interaction between people and the environment in the Arctic and the Subarctic, but the Winter Cities movement expanded the geographical reach of the discourse well beyond remote northern settlements. The Winter Cities literature expanded the criticism of southern urban models in the North, espoused by Erskine and others, to encompass the dominant suburban development mode in the United States, Canada and Europe after the 1950s.31 While Erskine was concerned with the design of new communities, the Winter Cities agenda primarily addresses the physiological and psychological liveability of existing towns that experience extended winters. In the 1970s and 1980s, many North American cities experienced deindustrialization and declining economic situations, which led planners to focus attention on the quality of urban living and town centre renewal projects.32 The Winter Cities movement was inspired by Danish architect Jan Gehl, whose Life between the Buildings from 1971 had become a central reference within the urban design field. Advocates of the movement approached urban liveability through Gehl’s strategies for promoting public urban life.33 Thus, urban liveability is primarily translated as corresponding to welcoming, lively and inclusive cities.34 The prolific Winter Cities literature suggested festivals that celebrate snow and winter conditions, and there was a general focus on outdoor recreational activities. Advocates of the movement were also concerned with changing peoples’ attitudes to winter – from being an urban problem to becoming an asset for urban life. Underlying this suggestion was an insistence that a ‘northern urban culture’ is yet to be developed to replace imported southern models of urbanism. In this way, the movement was an expression of the international professional and public criticism of the universality of Modernist urban planning in the 1970s and 1980s that largely ignored local contexts.35

Norman Pressman’s ‘winter grammar’ The Winter Cities movement emerged in the mid-1970s as a result of Professor William C. Rogers’ advocacy to change the urban planning agenda in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the coldest metropolitan area of the contiguous United States.36 The first Livable Winter Cities conference took place in Minneapolis in 1978, and in 1983, Norman Pressman, John C. Royle and others formed the Livable Winter Cities Association (WCA).37 The organization promoted knowledge and awareness of winter-related issues and solutions in urban policy and design through the dissemination of best practice cases. Like other members of the movement, Pressman was inspired by Ralph Erskine, and noted that ‘climate must be seen as a significant modifier of urban spatial form’.38 He was also critical of the generic urbanism of the northern cities of Canada where he found that

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planners uncritically replicated southern forms of urbanism.39 He suggested that it was essential to focus on the experience of the city, and that ‘design and policy decisions should be related to the behavioural sciences’.40 In his writings, Pressman repeatedly discussed the design of indoor pedestrianized spaces as a solution to the climate of the North. This was a response to specific proposals and projects for northern settlements, but also a critique of the climatized urban spaces and ‘gallerias’ that emerged in many Canadian communities in the 1970s and 1980s. These privately owned pedestrian domains eventually extended across entire districts of cities like Toronto and Montreal. Madeleine Stout et al. claim that Pressman and the Winter Cities literature overlooked the potential negative social consequences of the privatization of public urban spaces represented by these ‘gallerias’.41 However, while Pressman acknowledged the relevance of such projects in remote northern locations such as Fermont, he was sceptical to the privatization of public space. He argued that in many locations ‘it may not be advisable to overprotect urban dwellers from the cold, since provision of too many “artificial” indoor spaces would prove economically

FIGURE 8.3   The initiator of the Winter Cities Movement, William C. Rogers, mentions the Minneapolis skyways as an example of ‘architectural design that has been adapted to the northern climate’. William C. Rogers and Jeanne K. Hanson, The Winter City Book: A Survival Guide for the Frost Belt (Edina, MN: Dorn Books, 1980): 58. Minneapolis Skyways. In the Skyway near the IDS Center c. 1980. CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/. Image © City of Minneapolis Skyways.

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unfeasible and perhaps even socially undesirable’.42 Pressman proposed that both exterior and interior urban spaces should be available in Winter Cities, which provides choice and balances the needs of various individuals and groups.43 Patrick Coleman, former president of WCA, reports that Pressman and other Winter Cities proponents gradually abandoned interiorized spaces in favour of models of design and management of pedestrian outdoor urban space under the influence of Gehl.44 According to Pressman, there are three significant components in Winter City policies: (1) a tolerable microclimate, (2) winter-adapted infrastructure for all city inhabitants, and (3) programmes for public outreach and education concerning the use and enjoyment of the winter environment.45 Similar to Erskine’s ‘grammar for the high north’, Pressman suggests a ‘winter grammar’ for cities. Summaries of this grammar appear in various versions in his writings. In a 1989 presentation to the UNECE research colloquium on ‘Planning Housing and Construction Problems of Human Settlements in Harsh Living Conditions’, entitled ‘The Search for Northern Settlement Form: Dilemmas and Directions’, he outlines ten critical design and policy priorities46: 1. A compact urban form that provides shelter from ‘inhospitable surroundings’. 2. Footpaths, streets and dwellings that are oriented to avoid wind and maximize sun exposure. 3. ‘Enclosed residential courtyard concept[s]’ that provide wind protection. 4. Climatic simulation modelling that optimizes wind, snow and sun conditions. 5. ‘Energy-efficient principles’ of planning that reduces automobile dependency and promotes the environment. 6. ‘High-order community services’ that benefits social well-being. 7. Plans for ‘either total or partial climate-protection’ that provides choice and enhances community life. 8. ‘Understand[ing] the social determinants of design’ that ensures responsive urban and architectural form. 9. An ‘aesthetic for the north’ that ensures relevance to the specific cultural and landscape contexts. 10. The testing of ideas for community design attuned to the climate that allows for ‘progressive innovation in the social and physical realms’. The Winter Cities movement emerged as a critique of generic post-war Modernist urban planning of cities and communities in cold climates and attempted to define unique northern traits of city-building attuned to local

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conditions and culture. Today, the movement has been reinvigorated as a consequence of international trends within urban policy and planning towards urban liveability and the production of lively, multi-use, pedestrian and bike-friendly sustainable cities.47

The Arctic urban nucleus In the twentieth century, planners and policy-makers gave form to the urban Arctic through development programmes and urban plans. At the same time, architects explored and published visionary proposals such as the grand domed designs of the 1950s and 1960s. Over time, there has been a dynamic interaction between pragmatic approaches and utopian schemes. Abstract ideas have informed planning in the North, while practical problems have inspired visionary thinking about the future potential for cities. This dynamic has evolved around an ‘Arctic urban nucleus’. This schema evolved gradually on the background of comparable urban development agendas, related environmental challenges, as well as knowledge exchange and inspiration across architectural communities in the North. The Arctic urban nucleus reflects a continuous dispute between external projections of modern society and abstract urban form on one side, and the potential for an Indigenous architecture reflective of local culture and empowerment on the other. It balances the tension between the architecturally spectacular and the mundane, unique versus prototypical, and utopian versus pragmatic. The domed city and the climate wall are prominent expressions of the evolution of the Arctic urban nucleus as a continuous renegotiation of the relationship between outdoor living and indoor social space. The development of the nucleus can be understood as the interaction between two urban design models: the ‘climatic urban cluster’ and the ‘great indoors’.

The climatic urban cluster Planners introduced the Modernist microrayon across the Soviet Union with little regard for local climate, topography and culture. In the Far North, however, planners increased the density of the model. The adjusted microrayon that evolved in places like Norilsk, as well as Erskine’s Subarctic habitat, both insisted on urban density for several reasons. First, a compact structure limited the need for complicated groundwork and expensive infrastructure. Second, Erskine and the Soviet planners assumed that physical proximity and the shared use of space and facilities would facilitate the development of a social neighbourhood community. Third, clustering buildings had the potential for improving outdoor microclimates by deflecting wind.

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While many communities in the North are small and of relative lowdensity, the ‘climatic urban cluster’ has been a feature of urban planning for most of the urban history of the Arctic. For instance, Danish planners considered introducing compact urban units in Greenland in the 1960s to reduce infrastructure costs and create sheltered urban spaces.48 It turned out that the Greenlanders had little interest in these effects. Still, during the 1970s and 1980s, architects introduced versions of the low-rise, highdensity urban design models that had become popular in Scandinavia as a reaction to the anonymity and social segregation of Modernist housing estates. The climatic urban cluster is a prominent feature of the Winter Cities strategy. William Rogers explains that clustering is the natural approach to winter conditions, and Frederick Gutheim also suggests that ‘the winter city will be relatively dense and compact. It could increase face-to-face contact and promote social cohesion’.49 Adding new dimensions to this idea of the climatic urban cluster is the ‘compact city’, which rose to prominence within the international discourse on design and planning of sustainable cities in the 1990s. It corresponds well with the focus on pedestrians and cyclists in the Winter Cities literature. Reducing the energy consumption and ecological footprint of cities by limiting outward expansion, the promotion of selfsustaining communities and an increased focus on the sharing of spaces and resources are also critical dimensions of this model.

The great indoors During the Second World War, Whittier in Alaska became a strategic ice-free deep-water harbour with a rail connection to Anchorage. In 1953, the US military completed the Buckner Building, a bomb-proof ‘city under one roof’ for 1,000 military personnel. It was six stories tall, totalled around 25,000 square metres and housed a variety of functions such as a hospital, theatre, bowling alley, church, library, radio station and a bakery. Decommissioned in 1966, The Buckner Building was probably the first city under one roof in the Arctic. Today, the civilian population of Whittier resides in the similarly monolithic Begich Towers with 196 condo units, which also houses most of the public services of the town. In the post-war decades, Canadian planners and architects criticized the low density of the suburban model that companies and government agencies reproduced across the North. In 1953, Gerald Ridge proposed that subarctic towns should have a compact ‘central business district, developed along the lines of a shopping centre’.50 Erskine’s indoor cultural and commercial complex in Luleå and his subsequent designs for Arctic wallbuildings ‘stuffed’ with communal functions and interior urban spaces were the predecessors of the projects that Irving Jensen calls the ‘great indoors’, glass-covered climatized urban spaces that proliferated across the Arctic.51

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FIGURE 8.4   ‘City under one roof’ for 1,000 people. The Buckner Building at Whittier, Alaska (approx. 1955). Christing McClain papers, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage. U.S. Army Photograph. Approved for release. U.S. Army Engineer District Alaska. Corps of Engineers. P.O. Box 7002, Anchorage, Alaska.

In 1968, Adrian Wilson Associates designed an entirely enclosed city for 40,000 people called Seward’s Success just outside Anchorage in Alaska.52 In 1972, Edwin Crittenden of CCC Architects & Planners produced a plan for the City of Lost River for 2,000 people that featured an enclosed mall for climate protection.53 In the Soviet Union, several ‘great indoors’ were designed by architects at LenZNIIEP and other institutes during the 1960s and 1970s. The most complete example of a realized urban project is the Udachny microdistrict in Siberia, where climatized corridors connect residential buildings to a social service hub.54 In Canada, projects like the multipurpose wall-building in Fermont, the enclosed city centre of Radisson, Quebec and the central complex in Leaf Rapids, Manitoba were all built during the same decade. Danish planners visiting the Northwest Territories in 1979 and 1980 noticed several examples of the enclosed ‘omni building’, such as the Astro Hill community centre in Frobisher Bay that included a shopping arcade, a hotel, a cinema, a bowling alley, flats and offices.55

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FIGURE 8.5   ‘On a rocky knoll in Frobisher Bay, a multi-purpose house has been erected, which includes contains hotel, cinema, shops, offices, apartments etc. It is agreed that the experiment: the closed Arctic house, which holds all the functions under one roof, in this case has failed.’ Gunnar Lind Pedersen, Gunnar P. Rosendahl, and Hans Ølgaard, Rejse til The Northwest Territories, juni 1979 og juni 1980 [Travel to the Northwest Territories, June 1979 and June 1980] (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1980), p. 33.

Planners from the NWT government referred to the strategy of combining functions as ‘complexing’, and it was used to provide economic and recognizable central public nodes in settlements of different sizes.56 Despite such intentions, the Danish architects concluded that the Frobisher Bay project was a social failure and noted that the omni-buildings appeared to be geared towards the needs of southern immigrants, rather than providing for northern populations.57 While the shopping centre-model for urban space proliferated across the Arctic, architects repeatedly proposed another architectural prototype: the domed city. In the 1950s, architects and engineers experimented with light-weight structures and synthetic materials, and the American architect Buckminster Fuller popularized the geodesic dome at the Expo ‘67 in Montreal. His rigid stay and cable structure in combination with translucent membranes suggested domes that could eventually span entire cities. The 1958 Frobisher Bay project by the Department of Public Works for a city for up to 4,500 people and a central domed space received widespread

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attention.58 Soviet architects also suggested various urban domes, such as the 1960 design by M. B. Tsimbal at LenZNIIEP for a generic city in the Far North for up to 18,000 inhabitants.59 A few years later, Pershin and Y. Pivovarov proposed a smaller glass-covered prototype for 500 inhabitants, and in 1968 P. P. Budnikov proposed an idea for a city covered by a pneumatic structure called Polar Venice.60 In 1970, German engineer and architect Frei Otto, in collaboration with Ewald Bubner, Kenzo Tange and Ove Arup, published a project for a dome with a two-kilometre diameter covering a city of 40,000 people. Rather than a rigid structure, the dome was an inflated pneumatic structure of plastic and polyester fibre.61 This speculative and site-less project was intended to stretch the boundaries of technological imagination and demonstrated the 1960s and 1970s architectural avant-garde’s fascination with utopian megastructures. These super-large and infinitely expandable buildings were, according to Reyner Banham, intended to be ‘whole human environment[s]’.62 Domes were, however, largely rejected as practical solutions. Erskine acknowledged that while the dome is indeed ‘one of the most exciting ideas which come to mind when first presented with these problems’, he concluded that ‘the greatest difficulties would probably be of social and psychological nature since such a town could easily be institutional and introverted’.63 Danish architects and planners also dismissed the climate-sheltered habitats for southern immigrants as irrelevant for the Greenlanders, and Soviet and Canadian planners repeated reservations about isolating inhabitants of northern communities from the landscape.64 Domes were too costly, and further, heated domes would compromise permafrost stability. NWT planners eventually abandoned large domes and argued that ‘the concept provides for reliance on a single large system which presents the potential for a complete breakdown’.65 The most publicized example of a dome in polar conditions is probably the United States’ South Pole base from the early 1970s. The unheated geodesic dome was fifty metres in diameter. It was covered with aluminium panels, contained individual climatized units and was located directly on the glacier. However, it was gradually covered by snow and eventually demolished in 2009. Domed cities remain the most iconic archetype of the modern architectural utopia of the Arctic. Despite the pragmatic reservations of engineers and planners, and despite the facts that no large domes were ever erected in the Arctic, Kalemeneva argues that without these utopian suggestions, later Soviet progress in climate-adapted urbanism in the North would not have taken place.66 While the domed cities remain utopian visions, the ‘great indoors’ continue to proliferate, and shopping centres are commonplace in settlements across the Arctic. One recent example is the 2012 ‘Nuuk Center’ designed by KHR Architects, and which is the largest building in Greenland. It has the country’s first underground public car park and an internal plaza. In addition, the eight-storey office tower on top of the centre is home to the central administration of the Greenlandic government.

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The architecture of climate utopia The ‘compact urban cluster’ and the ‘great indoors’ are significant components of the Arctic urban nucleus. They were both proposed as visionary and experimental ideas, and architects explored their use in the urban and architectural development of settlements in the North. Both models played a part in projecting ideas of modernity and a new urbanism into an ‘unknown’ region that had little previous association with cities. They thus illustrate what literary scholar Johan Schimanski suggests: that the Arctic is ‘empty, thus it is a space to be filled with colonial fantasies of utopian settlements’.67 In recent years, the ‘extreme’ landscapes of the Arctic have attracted attention from students and educators of architecture and landscape architecture, as well as practising designers involved in northern commissions. Fascinated by the ‘extreme’ environment of the Arctic, these designers have been preoccupied with developing a radical and visually charged architecture.68 This approach represents continuity with Erskine’s proposal for an ‘indigenous’ design grammar for the Subarctic and Arctic. However, where Erskine was concerned for the well-being of local communities, recent ‘parametric design’ practices largely ignore such considerations in favour of exploring the form-generating potential of the dynamic Arctic landscape. A prominent representative of this architectural logic is the widely published 2006 Svalbard Science Center in Longyearbyen by Norwegian architectural office Jarmund/Vigsnæs.69 The design of this sculptural building incorporates extensive knowledge about wind and snow dynamics. The exterior form of the building accelerates wind to avoid snow accumulation, which ignores the kind of potential microclimatic benefits a large structure could provide a town centre as Erskine proposed. The complex recalls the futuristic capsular architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the designs by Papineau Gérin-Lajoie Le Blanc for Frobisher Bay and the Northwest Territories. These sculptural buildings represent a lateModernist architectural approach that elevates technological solutions to environmental and construction challenges to becoming the primary visual expression of the architecture. Their capsular logic resists the contextual imperative of postmodern architectural culture and avoids any traditional architectural expressions. Collectively, they serve as an example of the way architects have exploited the otherness of the Arctic as an opportunity to generate entirely new and revolutionary architectural languages. In this way, they represent a continuation of the utopian thinking that has been a continuous dimension of the international architectural community’s engagement with the design of settlements and houses in the Arctic.

CHAPTER NINE

Learning from the Arctic city

The historical and ongoing construction of the Arctic as a unique region suggests the absence of, or only marginal presence of, modern urban society. As Sheppard and White clarify, Hamelin’s influential indexing of ‘nordicity’ established an opposition between urban and Arctic.1 Further, while the contemporary Arctic is highly urbanized, the isolated and peripheral communities of the North do not resemble the global metropolises of economic accumulation elsewhere. Urbanity and urban life are often ‘invisible’ in the Arctic, and closeness to nature is an essential part of northern living. At the same time, as Schweitzer et al. suggest, urbanity is also very visible as northern residents ‘rely on high-tech tools, facilities and infrastructures in order to live “close to nature”’.2 Because of the limited size of Arctic settlements, their remoteness and the ‘invisibility’ of their urbanity, they have yet to be comprehensibly approached by urban scholars as varied urban complexities. However, instead of considering urbanity to be antithetical to the Arctic, we might ask, with Susanne Dybbroe et al., how does ‘the context of the North shape processes of urbanization in unique way[s]’?3 The Arctic is a fast-evolving region where globalization and rapid climate change have genuine and direct consequences for communities. As such, Arctic cities are ‘global laboratories’ of urban transformation. The towns and settlements of the Arctic are unlike anywhere else. They are peripheral, ephemeral and unconventional, and the analysis of the history, design and appearance of Arctic cities presented in this book confronts dominant city-centric global models of urbanism and growth dynamics reflective of the ‘urban age’ paradigm. In this paradigm, metropolitan urbanity is assumed to be an everyday experience for the vast majority of the world’s population.4 Contemporary literature on global urbanization proposes that boundaries between the city and the countryside have eroded. Ash Amin

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and Nigel Thrift suggest that the ‘footprint of the city’ is evident everywhere in the form of ‘city commuters, tourists, teleworking, the media, and the urbanization of lifestyles’.5 Niel Brenner also makes clear that the urban has long since become a global phenomenon that no longer depends on localized morphologies of the city.6 Brenner is concerned that mainstream urban theory still considers the traditional city to be the locus of worldwide social, cultural, demographic and economic dynamics, and proposes that urban theory should evolve without an ‘outside’. This new urban theory expands definitions to include the peripheral, the suburban and the rural in the analysis of destructive and creative global capitalist dynamics and the production of urbanized terrain. Amin and Thrift contend that proximity is no longer a prerequisite for urbanity. Torill Nyseth suggests that ‘Arctic cities can be seen as an urban paradox, challenging what we know and think about what urbanity means’.7 Along similar lines, Brenner argues that ‘an architecturally grounded exploration of the world’s non-city spaces [could] help animate the project of developing new analyses, visualizations and designs of our emergent planetary urban fabric’.8 Description and analysis purely from an outside perspective are not sufficient to identify and appreciate the urbanity of Arctic urban space. That means that the exploration of Arctic cities in the context of global urbanization requires research on the creation and destruction of cities that extend beyond colonial-style ‘birds-eye’ mapping, development timelines and physical inventories of settlements. New Arctic city narratives could reflect and incorporate the everyday lived experience of urbanization and its historical interconnection with culture, politics and economy. Such accounts should be complemented with street-level descriptions that capture experiential dimensions of the complex assemblages of cities in the Arctic.9 It is the multi-faceted exploration of exceptional cases of urbanism in the Arctic that is this book’s contribution to the global discourse on the ‘urban age’. It advances new perspectives on cities of relevance both within and outside the Arctic.

Travelling urbanism The history of Arctic urban development illustrates how theories and models of urbanism travel, not only from the South to the North, but also between countries in the Arctic, and even beyond the region. Urban and architectural models have historically been projected onto Arctic territories by southern architects and planners, and dominant international planning and design trends of the twentieth century dominate northern settlements. Architectural theorist Jill Traganou proposes that while the ‘fixed meaning of places’ was preeminent in Modernist architectural theory and design

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practice, architecture should be considered ‘multisited’.10 This means that while the architecture is located (in the Arctic), it references ideas and reflects ‘multiple subjectivities’ that exceed ‘fixed geocultural definitions’.11 The critical regionalism of the 1980s and 1990s considered traditional and regional architecture to be a form of resistance to globalizing trends. Architects based design representations on essentialized interpretations of the regional environment. However, the experience of urban and architectural development history of the region demonstrates the misconception of this line of architectural thinking. The architecture of the Arctic region does, for the most part, not reference local traditions and cultural forms, despite the visually striking urban settings in the dramatic landscapes of the Arctic that suggest the need for exceptional approaches. While local uses of space and patterns of everyday life have been studied and incorporated into architectural and urban design approaches in many places, the architectural language and iconography of northern settlement architecture are still decidedly southern and reflect ideals within the dominant international design culture. Architects nevertheless engage in a continued reproduction of conceptual frameworks of Arctic uniqueness and continue to travel to the Arctic as a locus of phenomenological ‘place’ removed from globalizing trends of urban modernization. Edward Said reminds us that theories ‘travel’ and that they change as they are taken up by theorists or practitioners elsewhere.12 Patsy Healey further suggests that urban planning theory travels all the time. She cautions us that the transfer of planning ideas requires ‘recognition of contingency and complexity, which highlights the particular histories and challenges of localities in different parts of the world, and the damaging consequences when external ideas about planning and development are planted upon specific histories and geographies’.13 Healey warns against ‘over-generalizing’ planning theories, which is illustrated by the universal application of midcentury Modernist models of development. She also urges planners and theorists to avoid the danger of ‘over-localizing’, which makes it impossible to learn from elsewhere due to the perceived uniqueness of a given context. In the middle of the twentieth century, Arctic planning was a south-tonorth operation that relied on the universality of Modernist development models. The 1970s and 1980s saw a rising interest in learning from other parts of the circumpolar area or even extending learning beyond the region. In 1994, Ken Coates suggested that until then little had been expected from studies of the Canadian Arctic in terms of ‘understanding of broader trends and phenomena’.14 However, as we have seen, Arctic city-building expertise did not only travel from the South to the North, or remain within the Arctic. In the 1980s and 1990s, northern urban knowledge transcended the ‘natural’ borders of the region. The international urban liveability agenda expressed through the Winter Cities movement expanded the reach of the climatic city as a dimension of practical urban policy in other regions. The urban territory of the Arctic expanded to Subarctic territories and beyond.

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For instance, northern Scandinavian cities that had not traditionally been considered ‘Arctic’ became embedded in the regional Arctic discourse during the 1990s. Thus, while urban theory and models have been imported into the Arctic, components of an urbanism developed in the North, such as the climatic city, have also travelled to locations elsewhere in the global North and contributed to expanding the reach of the Arctic. There may also be, as will be discussed below, a benefit to presenting Arctic urbanism as a contribution to global theories on cities. The provisional urbanism in the Arctic, the simultaneous processes of spatially distributed city-building and abandonment, and the general ‘invisibility’ of urbanity point to the possibility of an Arctic ‘alter-urbanism’. This would stand in contrast to dominant ‘urban age’ growth-based assumptions of ever-expanding megacities as the natural progression of global urbanism.15 Settlements in the Arctic are not uncontrollably exploding metropolises. Rather than excluding the urban territory of the North from the analysis of the global urban dynamics due to its ‘uniqueness’, it should be included in this operation as a special case that informs the formation of theories of urbanization and urbanity. That is not to say that theories travel unimpeded in a globalized world and there are still, in Robinson’s words, ‘obstacles to overcome, historical ties and entrenched power relations that shape the directions of influence’.16 The Arctic City has historically been a projection of Western discourses on cities, and the urbanism of the region cannot be addressed without acknowledging such linkages and heritages. For instance, a tendency inherent in Western urban thinking is to explain peripheral settlements in terms of a linear response to the natural conditions of their respective territories.17 This tendency is accompanied by an underlying assumption that peripheral settlements are perpetually caught in an exploitative relationship with central metropolises.

The Global Arctic City The Arctic, which has long been considered ‘other’ in mainstream European and North American culture, is increasingly a component of a globalized society. Mark Nuttall and Klaus Dodds suggest that ‘the term “Global Arctic” has gained traction in recent years as a shorthand for a region in transition’.18 Geopolitics, environmental awareness and the impact of anthropogenic climate change in the Arctic are drivers of this shifting mindfulness of the region’s connectedness. The ‘Global Arctic’ replaces ideas about a ‘Canadian Arctic’ and a ‘Russian Arctic’ in a globalizing world. Similarly, the gradual rise of infra-regional knowledge exchange has facilitated the rise of the idea of the ‘Global’ Arctic City within the international architectural discourse. Also, while the urbanism of the region has been dominated by national priorities and planning cultures, Arctic urban governance increasingly

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follows international urban policies and planning strategies in order to be competitive in a globalized economy. Jennifer Robinson explains that urban theory has been constructed around the study of a few central ‘modern’ world-cities that all other aspiring and not-yet-modern cities appear to emulate. Robinson suggests that ‘global- and world-cities analyses … have, in fact, consigned a large number of cities around the world to theoretical irrelevance’.19 These other cities are, according to Robinson, subjected to an unconnected developmentalist analysis, which perpetuates the dichotomy between developed and underdeveloped cities. Ideas about the Arctic City evoke the literature on cities in other international regions, such as the ‘Arab City’ or the ‘African City’.20 For instance, Anthony O’Connor suggests that while cities in Africa are very different, a shared colonial past results in certain shared features and conceptual frameworks that make it legitimate to talk about an African City.21 The danger of such generalizations is that they potentially lead to the marginalization and ‘othering’ of cities of these regions, and singling out regional urban particularities implies that cities in these territories are potentially incompatible with urban settings elsewhere. However, generalizations across Arctic cities make it possible to compare the region with other global resource frontiers with a twentieth-century history of decolonization and large government development programmes.22 Michael Dear suggests that there is a need for such ‘comparative urbanism’ that does not rely on hegemonic urban models but works to counter universalizing perspectives.23 Thus, the formulation and investigation of the Arctic City can help overcome the problem that, according to Ananya Roy, ‘many of the theories of how cities function remain rooted in the developed world’.24

Remaking the Arctic City The Arctic urbanism of the twentieth century involved both visionary architectural statements and pragmatic and experimental city-building efforts. Central governments considered these northern territories to be economic frontiers and regions in need of social development, while some of the architects involved in the regional development programmes envisioned a futuristic and technologically advanced urban society in the North. However, the historical reading of the Arctic City in this book reveals that architects were unable to realize their grand visions for polar cities on the scale that they envisioned. In reality, planners and city-managers implemented readily available Modernist development schemes and designs for most towns and settlements in the North. Weak local voices and an over-riding narrative of development accelerated Modernist urban planning in the North. Over time, however, the Modernist architecture and planning that characterized the mid-century development

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boom have become increasingly criticized within northern societies. While these models had an enormous impact on the design of the Arctic City, Modernist planning struggled with the unforeseen contingencies of the Arctic. For instance, Andrew Bond observes that ‘Soviet literature on urban and regional development portrays socialist planning as a comprehensive, coordinated effort reflecting an a priori vision of the eventual form and function of the city. Historical evidence in the case of Norilsk, however, suggests that urban growth did not follow a pre-orchestrated, comprehensive plan.’25 The belief that planners could predict the social consequences of urban planning and manipulate communities towards desired outcomes has gradually dissipated. The epistemic shift expressed in postmodern urban planning culture that introduced questions of legitimacy, agency and facilitation of contesting views has had a late entry into the Arctic. Over time, southern models of urbanization became formative to the local perceptions and knowledge about urbanism that continue to frame the urban planning and design discourse in the region today. Despite varying degrees of local political empowerment across the different Arctic territories, a central metropolitan perspective on the role and form of cities still dominates. This framing extends, for instance, the inherited colonial structural perception of a hierarchical contrast between cities and the surrounding territories.26 Outside experts and consultants have so-far managed city building in the North, towns and settlements of the Arctic have often had limited resources and expertise when it comes to urban planning, and people have historically had little local agency in regards to planning and self-governance. In some parts of the Arctic, however, empowered Indigenous voices are increasingly influential in debates about urban futures, and a strengthened local democracy increases decision-making power. Within a postcolonial urbanism discourse, ‘local knowledge’ has become prominent.27 However, the research on Arctic city development that this book unfolds provides little evidence of the application of ‘local knowledge’ in urban planning and design in ways that differ significantly from participatory planning practices elsewhere. Overall, urban planning in the region still closely follows the frameworks of the dominant states that contain the Arctic territories. This alignment is a colonial legacy, but it also provides an opportunity to study and consider urban planning and design in the region in ways that transcend the trap of ‘Arctic exceptionalism’ that insists on the incompatibility of local cultural forms with global perspectives and models of urbanism. Arctic cities are changing. They are becoming less Arctic, the globe is warming, and globalization and southern lifestyles extend farther north. While settlements in the North are becoming more accessible, they also increasingly resemble cities elsewhere. In recent years, it has become clear that some cities in the North capitalize on a combination of increased connectivity and a mediated Arctic identity to become tourist destinations or political and Indigenous cultural hubs. These cities each position themselves as the ‘Capital of the Arctic’ and compete internationally for visitors as well

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as economic and cultural capital and talent. Growing cities in the wider Arctic region like Anchorage, Reykjavík and Tromsø are well-connected to the outside world, have diversified economies and are attractive places to visit and live. They have all transcended marginalization and profit from their remote and unique landscapes and locations. Paradoxically, exploiting this identity by attracting visitors also means that they could become less ‘Arctic’ by becoming more connected. Smaller towns like Nuuk, Longyearbyen and Iqaluit are also growing by exploiting their Arctic identity. This happens in contrast to marginalized and shrinking communities elsewhere in the region. These developments suggest that there is a need to reconfigure the Arctic City that planners, architects and decision-makers constructed in the twentieth century. Cities and towns in the Arctic are – and probably always were – more differentiated than allowed by exceptionalist notions of the region as an environment that requires unique solutions, approaches and designs. This idea, which remains operational inside as well as outside the region, constructs a global Arctic City that is ‘other’ – as a deterministic consequence of the territory within which it is embedded. Reconceptualizing Arctic urbanism involves extracting Arctic cities from the discourse of exceptionalism that architects, urbanists and urban theorists have contributed to reproducing. However, rather than returning to uncritical implementation of universal urban solutions inherent to Modernism, the remaking of the Arctic City involves transcending the development paradigm in ways that increase capacities for future local agency and urban resilience in the face of increasingly rapid change.

Arctic city futures The history of projecting Arctic futures is full of deterministic claims. Nina Wormbs suggests this history is ‘a great repository of projections about the future [that show] the process by which futures are made and argued for, why they get traction, how they are carried out in action or alternatively lose ground and get forgotten’.28 Past projections of ‘certain’ futures are abundantly evident in the chequered and discredited Modernist development programmes of the mid-twentieth century and serve as a warning not to take formulations of Arctic futures for granted. Nevertheless, the Arctic is a space where academics and decision-makers still make grand claims about the future. Recent literature on change and disruption in the Arctic is rife with anticipations and predictions that may influence Arctic urban policies and planning. One set of predictions concerns the social and economic potential of climate change and increased connectivity and accessibility, and envisions escalating industrialization and urbanization.29 Others, however, find it more likely that the Arctic will continue to be perceived as a ‘frontier’. Production costs will remain high, communities will be isolated and peripheral, and lifestyles of the North will continue to be intimately associated with the landscape.30

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In the discussion of Arctic urban futures, there is a danger of simply replacing an externally projected development discourse with deterministic projections of future climate change-enabled economic and geopolitical prominence. Michael Bravo offers a warning that considering the Arctic as being on the brink of a ‘state change’ has its own inherent dangers of neo-colonialism.31 Western-centric conceptions of the challenge of urban sustainability in a vulnerable Arctic risk extending past perceptions of underdeveloped northern settlements that rely on outside assistance. Also, current concerns in urbanism with resilience to climate change entail the danger of a new Modernism that responds deterministically to a projected future. Bravo argues that there is a need to ‘de-centre’ Western-centric narratives and perspectives on the Arctic. He suggests a ‘post-Arctic’ that rejects a Modernism build on ‘cliched and wrongheaded polarities of traditional/modern, local/global, nature/culture, human/animal [and that] these dichotomies grossly distort the fabric of our human and non-human ecologies’.32 Arctic cities, like cities in other peripheral and non-Western regions, have primarily been designed and analysed according to Euro-centric values and perspectives. Unlike other postcolonial urban contexts, however, the Arctic City has been subjected to limited critique. Jennifer Robinson suggests that instead of considering cities in the Global South to be underdeveloped or deficient as a consequence of theories of cities formed elsewhere, an urban analysis should refer to frameworks arising from their local contexts.33 Robinson suggests a new comprehensive approach that acknowledges the theoretical significance of all cities as ‘diverse, creative, modern and distinctive with the possibility to imagine (within the not-inconsiderable constraints of contestations and uneven power relations) their own futures and distinctive forms of cityness’.34 In this ‘ordinary’ contextual urbanism, policies, planning and theoretical perspectives that emerge in regions outside metropolitan Europe and North America travel, are taken up and reconstituted elsewhere – including within the West. Framing cities and settlements in the North as ‘ordinary’ would promote an urban theory from ‘within’ the Arctic City. Continuing Bravo’s concept, an urbanism that transcends marginalization – a ‘Post-Arctic City’ – would have the potential to overcome lingering perceptions among designers and decision-makers concerning the incompatibility of urbanity, vast landscapes, and Indigenous and local populations.35 Arctic urbanism is as diverse as urbanism elsewhere, and not inherently bound to assumptions of growth, uniform development or wholesale decline. Arctic cities are ‘ordinary’ and can internalize outside learning, but also potentially provide prototype plans, designs, policies and theoretical perspectives with relevance elsewhere. In this process, the conceptualization of an ‘ordinary’ Arctic urbanism has to balance Healey’s concerns for being overly specific and thus resistant to learning, and for being over-general by uncritically importing global urban models to the remarkable and variegated context of the Arctic. As the Arctic is made up of

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‘many Norths’, a reconstituted concept of the Arctic city is open to include a wide variety of different relations between people and the environment, and not be reduced to narrowly focusing on, for instance, local cultural expressions or climate adaptation. Place- and people-specific approaches to urbanism are vital to achieving sustainable, diverse and culturally vibrant towns and cities in the Arctic.

NOTES

Introduction 1

2 3

4 5 6 7

E.g. Laurence Smith, The New North: The World in 2050 (London: Profile, 2011); Charles Emmerson, The Future History of the Arctic (London: Bodley Head, 2010); Lassi Heininen and Chris Southcott, Globalization and the Circumpolar North (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2010). Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Friendly Arctic (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921). Carina Keskitalo, ‘“The North” – Is There Such a Thing?: Deconstructing/ Contesting Northern and Arctic Discourse’, in Cold Matters: Cultural Perceptions of Snow, Ice and Cold, ed. Heidi Hansson and Catherine Norberg (Umeå: Umeå University and the Royal Skyttean Society, 2009), 23–39; Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (Abingdon: Routledge, 1991); Douglas West, ‘Re-Searching the North: An Introduction to the Canadian Northern Discourse’ (PhD diss., Ottawa, Carleton University, 1990). Peter Arbo et al., ‘Arctic Futures: Conceptualizations and Images of a Changing Arctic’, Polar Geography 36, no. 3 (2013): 163–82. Carina Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic: The Construction of an International Region (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004). Heininen and Southcott, Globalization. Philip E. Steinberg et al., Contesting the Arctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015).

Chapter 1 1 2

Keskitalo, ‘The North’. Kenneth Coates, ‘The Rediscovery of the North: Towards a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Northern/Remote Regions’, Northern Review 12/13 (Summer 1993/Winter 1994). 3 Michael T. Bravo, ‘The Rhetoric of Scientific Practice in Nunavut’, Ecumene 7, no. 4 (2000); Michael T. Bravo and Sverker Sörlin, Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2002). 4 Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic. 5 S. V. Slavin, The Soviet North: Present Development and Prospects, trans. Don Danemanis (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972).

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6 Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic. 7 Terence E. Armstrong, Graham Rowley, and Georg William Rogers, The Circumpolar North: A Political and Economic Geography of the Arctic and Sub-Arctic (London: Wiley, 1978), 1. 8 Sarah Jaquette Ray and Kevin Maier, ‘Introduction’, in Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory, ed. Sarah Jaquette Ray and Kevin Maier (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2017), 5. 9 E.g. Alice Cooke, ‘North Takes Place in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada’, in Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, ed. Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014). 10 Shields, Places on the Margin; see also West, ‘Re-Searching the North’, 129; Lars Jensen, ‘Greenland, Arctic Orientalism and the Search for Definitions of a Contemporary Postcolonial Geography’, KULT – Postkolonial Temaserie, KULT – Postkolonial Temaserie, 12 (2015). 11 Daniel Chartier, ‘Towards a Grammar of the Idea of North: Nordicity, Winterity’, Nordlit 22, 2007; Anna Stammler-Gossmann, ‘Reshaping the North of Russia: Towards a Conception of Space’, Position paper for the 5th NRF open Assembly, 24–27 September 2008 (Nordic Research Forum, Anchorage, 2008), https://www.rha.is/static/files/NRF/OpenAssemblies/ Anchorage2008/stammlergrossman_5thnrf_position_paper_session4.pdf. 12 Louis-Edmond Hamelin, Canadian Nordicity : It’s Your North Too (Montreal: Harvest House, 1980). 13 Hamelin, Canadian Nordicity. 14 Hamelin, Canadian Nordicity, 4. 15 West, ‘Re-Searching the North’, 131; Keskitalo, ‘“The North”’. 16 E.g. Louis-Edmond Hamelin, ‘An Attempt to Regionalize the Canadian North (First Published in North, vol. 11 (4), 1964; 16–19)’, in Canada’s Changing North, ed. William C. Wonders (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 8–12. 17 Hamelin, ‘An Attempt to Regionalize the Canadian North’; Hamelin, Canadian Nordicity; Amanda Graham, ‘Indexing the Canadian North: Broadening the Definition’, The Northern Review 6 (1990): 21–37; StammlerGossmann, ‘Reshaping the North’. 18 Graham, ‘Indexing’. 19 West, ‘Re-Searching the North’, 139. 20 West, ‘Re-Searching the North’. 21 Gurston Dacks, A Choice of Futures: Politics in the Canadian North (Toronto: Methuen, 1981); Graham, ‘Indexing’; Keskitalo, ‘“The North”’, 29. 22 Shields, Places on the Margin, 171. 23 Lola Sheppard and Mason White, Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory (Barcelona: Actar, 2017), 15. 24 Kenneth J. Rea, The Political Economy of Northern Development (Ottawa: Science Council of Canada, 1976). 25 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 26 Rea, Political Economy. 27 Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic. 28 Steinberg et al., Contesting the Arctic. 29 Steinberg et al., Contesting the Arctic, 64.

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30 Michael T. Bravo, ‘The Postcolonial Arctic’, Moving Worlds 15, no. 2 (2015). 31 John Dryzek and Oran Young, Internal Colonialism in the Circumpolar North: The Case of Alaska, 1985: 136. 32 Peter Kulchyski, ‘Colonization of the Arctic’, in Encyclopedia of the Arctic, ed. Mark Nuttall (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 33 Ulrik Pram Gad, ‘Post-Colonial Identity in Greenland? When the Empire Dichotomizes Back – Bring Politics Back In’, Journal of Language and Politics 8, no. 1 (2008); Bravo, ‘The Postcolonial Arctic’. 34 Andy Richard Bruno, ‘Making Nature Modern: Economic Transformation and the Environment in the Soviet North’ (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011), 122. 35 Bruno, ‘Making Nature Modern’, 88. 36 John McCannon, A History of the Arctic: Nature, Exploration and Exploitation (London: Reaktion Books, 2012); Andrew R. Bond, ‘Noril’sk: Profile of a Soviet Arctic Development Project’ (PhD diss., Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1983), 34. 37 Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003). 38 E.g. Jessica K. Graybill and Megan Dixon, ‘Cities of Russia’, in Cities of the World : World Regional Urban Development (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 237–79; Timothy Heleniak, ‘Boom and Bust : Population Change in Russia’s Arctic Cities’ (Arctic Urban Sustainability Conference, Washington, DC, 2013); Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse; Timothy Heleniak, ‘Growth Poles and Ghost Towns in the Russian Far North’, in Russia and the North, ed. Elana Wilson Rowe (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2009). 39 Rea, Political Economy. 40 Lise Lyck, ‘Economic Development’, in Encyclopedia of the Arctic, ed. Mark Nuttall (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 41 Lee Huskey and Andrew Taylor, ‘The Dynamic History of Government Settlements at the Edge’, in Settlements at the Edge: Remote Human Settlements in Developed Nations, ed. Andrew Taylor et al. (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016). 42 Lyck, ‘Economic Development’. 43 Mark Nuttall, ‘Self-Determination’, in The Routledge Handbook of the Polar Regions, ed. Mark Nuttall, Torben R. Christensen and Martin J. Siegert (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 44 E.g. Keskitalo, ‘The North’.

Chapter 2 1 2

E.g. John R. Gold, Experience of Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City, 1928–53 (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2017). David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity : An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Scott, Seeing Like a State; Matthew Farish and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism in the Arctic: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik’, Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 3 (1 July 2009).

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3 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 2. 4 R. Peet and E. Hartwick, Theories of Development: Contentions, Arguments, Alternatives, 2nd edition (New York: Guilford Publications, 2009). 5 Scott, Seeing Like a State. 6 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 6. 7 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 92. 8 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 93. 9 E.g. Arturo Escobar, ‘Planning’, in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, ed. W. Sachs (London: Zed Books, 1992). 10 Peet and Hartwick, Theories of Development, 3. 11 Rea, Political Economy, 225. 12 Lyck, ‘Economic Development’; Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’, 523. 13 Scott, Seeing Like a State; Peter Schweitzer, Olga Povoroznyuk and Sigrid Schiesser, ‘Beyond Wilderness: Towards an Anthropology of Infrastructure and the Built Environment in the Russian North’, The Polar Journal, 2017. 14 Chris Southcott, ‘History of Globalisation in the Circumpolar World’, in Globalization and the Circumpolar North, ed. Chris Southcott and Lassi Heininen (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2010). 15 Rea, Political Economy, 176. 16 Andrey Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions in Discursive Space: An Examination of Socio-Economic Conditions, Development Paths and Spatial Differentiation in the Economic Systems of the Canadian and Russian North’ (PhD diss., Toronto, University of Toronto, 2008), 100. 17 Joan Nymand Larsen and Gail Fondahl, eds., Arctic Human Development Report: Regional Processes and Global Linkages, TemaNord 567 (Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2014). 18 Lyck, ‘Economic Development’. 19 Larsen and Fondahl, Arctic Human Development. 20 Larsen and Fondahl, Arctic Human Development. 21 Susanne Dybbroe, Jens Dahl and Ludger Müller-Wille, ‘Dynamics of Arctic Urbanization’, Acta Borealia 27, no. 2 (1 December 2010); Sheppard and White, Many Norths. 22 Susanne Dybbroe, ‘Is the Arctic Really Urbanizing?’, Etudes Inuit Studies 32, no. 1 (2008): 13–32; R. Geoff Ironside, ‘Canadian Northern Settlements: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Influences’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 82, no. 2 (2000). 23 Marlene Laruelle, ‘The Three Waves of Arctic Urbanisation: Drivers, Evolutions, Prospects’, Polar Record 55, no. 1 (2019). 24 Larsen and Fondahl, Arctic Human Development. 25 Leneisja Jungsberg et al., Atlas of Population, Society and Economy in the Arctic, Nordregio Working Paper (Stockholm: Nordregio, 2019), http:// norden.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1352410/FULLTEXT03.pdf. 26 Rasmus Ole Rasmussen, ed., Megatrends, vol. 527, TemaNord (Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2011). 27 Larsen and Fondahl, Arctic Human Development. 28 Laruelle, ‘Three Waves’. 29 Jungsberg et al., ‘Atlas’. 30 Jungsberg et al., ‘Atlas’; McCannon, History of the Arctic; Laruelle, ‘Three Waves’.

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31 Larsen and Fondahl, Arctic Human Development. 32 Ernst Arnold Egli, ‘Vom Regionalen Städtebau: Der Einfluss von Klima Und Landschaft Auf Die Wohn- Und Stadtform (On Regional Urban Planning: The Influence of Climate and Landscape on Residential and Urban Form)’, Das Werk: Architektur Und Kunst 32, no. 3 (1945); Ernst Arnold Egli, Die Neue Stadt in Landschaft Und Klima [Climate and Town Districts, Consequences and Demands], trans. Ch. Neuenschwander (Erlenbach-Zürich: Verlag für Architektur, 1951). 33 F. Gerald Ridge, ‘General Principles for the Planning of Subarctic Settlements’ (PhD diss., Montreal, McGill University, 1953); V. Litskevich et al., ‘Housing in a Severe Climate (Zhilishcha Dlia Raionov s Surovym Klimatom) Translated from Arkhltektura SSSR (1): 10–16, 1959’, Technical Translation, trans. D. A. Sinclair (Ottawa: National Research Council of Canada, 1964); John A. Havers and Robert M. Morgan, ‘Literature Survey of Cold-Weather Construction Practices’, Special Report (Hanover, NH: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, May 1973); Leo Zrudlo, ‘A Model for an Integrated Design Approach to Settlement Planning in the Arctic’ (PhD diss., Edinburgh, Edinburgh University, 1982); Michael Hebbert and Fionn MacKillop, ‘Urban Climatology Applied to Urban Planning: A Postwar Knowledge Circulation Failure’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 5 (2013); Michael Hebbert and Vladimir Jankovic, ‘Cities and Climate Change: The Precedents and Why They Matter’, Urban Studies 50, no. 7 (2013). 34 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements in the Arctic: An Account of the ECE Symposium on Human Settlements, Planning and Development in the Arctic, Godthab, Greenland, 18–25 August 1978. (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980). 35 Gunnar P. Rosendahl, Kalaallit Nunaat - uannit isigalugu: ulluinnarni inuuneq = Grønland – sådan set [Greenland – Like That] (Copenhagen: Nuna-Tek, 1989). 36 Nina Wormbs, ‘Introduction: Back to the Futures of an Uncertain Arctic’, in Competing Arctic Futures: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Nina Wormbs, 1st edition, 2018 edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic. 37 Peter Hemmersam, ‘Arctic Architectures’, Polar Record 52, no. 4 (2016). 38 Xiaoying Winston Yan and Marijane E. England, ‘Design Evaluation of an Arctic Research Station from a User Perspective’, Environment and Behavior 33, no. 3 (2001). 39 Craig Kielburger and Marc Kielburger, Building an Igloo? What Nunavut Children Learn in School, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/craig-and-marckielburger/nunavut-education_b_2279074.html. 40 Harry Gugger, Nancy Couling and Aurélie Blanchard, eds., Barents Lessons: Teaching and Research in Architecture (Zürich: Park Books, 2013).

Chapter 3 1 Laruelle, ‘Three Waves’. 2 Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic.

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Dybbroe, ‘Is the Arctic’; Rob Shields and Barret Weber, ‘Iqaluit – Growth of an Inuit Capital’, in Proceedings from the First International Conference on Urbanisation in the Arctic, ed. Klaus Georg Hansen, Rasmus Ole Rasmussen, and Ryan Weber, vol. 2013, Nordregio Working Paper (Stockholm: Nordregio, 2013). 4 Gitte Tróndheim, ‘Greenlandic Urbanization and Urban Life: Decline or Development?’, in Proceedings from the First International Conference on Urbanisation in the Arctic, ed. Klaus Georg Hansen, Rasmus Ole Rasmussen and Ryan Weber, vol. 2013, Nordregio Working Papers (Stockholm: Nordregio, 2013); Bo Wagner Sørensen and Søren Forchhammer, ‘Byen Og Bygden – Grønlandskhedens Landskaber [The City and the Hamlet : The Landscapes of Greenlandicness]’, Dansk Sociologi 25, no. 4 (2014); Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk and Schiesser, ‘Beyond Wilderness’, 62; Robert W. Orttung and Marlene Laruelle, Urban Sustainability in the Arctic: Visions, Contexts, and Challenges (Washington, DC: The George Washington University, 2017). 5 Frank Sejersen, ‘Urbanization, Landscape Appropriation and Climate Change in Greenland’, Acta Borealia Acta Borealia 27, no. 2 (2010). 6 Torill Nyseth, ‘Arctic Urbanization: Modernity without Cities’, in Arctic Environmental Modernities : From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene, ed. Lill-Ann Körber, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stensport (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Dybbroe, Dahl and MüllerWille, ‘Dynamics’; Laruelle, ‘Three Waves’. 7 Orttung and Laruelle, Urban Sustainability; Timothy Heleniak, ‘Boom and Bust: Population Change in Russia’s Arctic Cities’, in Sustaining Russia’s Arctic Cities: Resource Politics, Migration, and Climate Change, ed. Robert W Orttung (New York: Berghahn, 2017). 8 Torill Nyseth and Brynhild Granås, Place Reinvention in the North: Dynamics and Governance Perspectives (Stockholm: Nordregio, 2007); Andrey N. Petrov, ‘Talent in the Cold? Creative Capital and the Economic Future of the Canadian North’, Arctic 61, no. 2 (2008): 15; Kåre Hendriksen, ‘Grønlands Bostedsøkonomi: Er Bygderne Dyre? [The Settlement Economics of Greenland: Are the Hamlets Expensive?]’, Groenland (Charlottenlund), no. 1 (2014); Kåre Hendriksen and Birgitte Hoffmann, ‘Settlement Patterns’, in Perspectives on Skills : An Anthology on Informally Acquired Skills in Greenland, ed. Rebekka Knudsen (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 2016); Lee Huskey and Thomas A. Morehouse, ‘Development in Remote Regions: What Do We Know?’, Arctic 45, no. 2 (1992). 9 Terence Armstrong, Russian Settlement in the North, vol. 3, Special Publication (Scott Polar Research Institute) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); Andrew Bond, ‘Northern Settlement Family-Style: Labor Planning and Population Policy in Noril’sk’, Soviet Geography 26, no. 1 (1985); Frank Tester, ‘Transition and Assimilation. Interview by Lola Sheppard and Mason White’, in Many Norths: Spatial Practices in a Polar Territory, ed. Lola Sheppard and Mason White (Barcelona: Actar, 2017). 10 Ira M. Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns on Canada’s Resource Frontier’ (PhD diss., Chicago, University of Chicago, 1962); J. Fried, ‘Settlement Type and Community Organization in Northern Canada’, Arctic 16, no. 2 (1963). Sheila MacBain, ‘The Evolution of Frobisher Bay as a Major Settlement in the

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Canadian Eastern Arctic’ (Master’s thesis, McGill University, 1970), https:// core.ac.uk/display/41913400. E.g. Anthony Roberts, ‘Design for the North’, The Canadian Architect 1, no. 11 (1956): 20–2; Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns’; Jim Lotz, Northern Realities : The Future of Northern Development in Canada (Toronto: New Press, 1970). Poul Erik Skriver, ‘Grønland i Focus [Greenland in Focus]’, Arkitekten, no. 23 (1970): 540; Hans Erling Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer og boliger (The Cities and Dwellings of Greenland)’, in Grønland i går – i dag – i morgen (Greenland Yesterday – Today – Tomorrow), ed. Poul Erik Skriver (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1986); Kjeld Vindum, ‘Greenland Revisited’, Arkitektur DK, no. 4 (2012): 3. Per Koch, ‘Boligbyggeri i Grønland [Housing Construction in Greenland]’, Arkitektur, 1968; Andrew R. Bond, ‘Residential Construction in Northern USSR’, Cities, November (1983); Gregory D Andrusz, Housing and Urban Development in the USSR (Albany: State University of New York, 1984); Gabrielle Goliger, ‘Arctic Housing Update’, Habitat 24, no. 1 (1984); Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’; Robert Robson, ‘Housing in the Northwest Territories: The Post-War Vision’, Urban History Review 24, no. 1 (1995); Jens Christian Madsen, Grønlandske Boliger: Selvbyggeri og typehuse [Housing in Greenland: Self-Built and Catalogue Housing] (Nuuk: Atuagkat, 2000). Pavel Filin, Margarita Yemelina and Mikhail Savinov, Arktika Za Gran’yu Fantastiki [Arctic beyond Fiction] (Moscow: Paulsen, 2018); ‘Arctic Cities’, Architectural Design, no. 41, June (1971); Robert C. Fairfield, ‘New Towns in the Far North’, Journal of Canadian Studies 2, no. 2 (1967); Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns’. Michael Dear and Shirley Clark, ‘Planning a New Arctic Town at Resolute’, Canadian Geographic 97, no. 3 (December 1978); U. Conrads, ‘Wall-Buildings as a Concept of Urban Order: On Projects of Ralph Erskine’, Daidalos 1983, no. 7 (15 March 1983); Boris Culjat, ‘Climate and the Built Environment in the North’ (PhD diss., Stockholm, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, 1975); David Clunie, ‘Two New Northern Communities’, Contact 8 (August 1976); William O’Mahony, ‘Fermont: A Design for Subarctic Living’, Habitat 21, no. 3 (1978); ‘Arctic Cities’, 1971. Frederick Gutheim, ‘A Livable Winter City’, Architectural Record 116 (1979): 111–15; Anne Brit. Børve, ‘Hus Og Husgrupper i Klimautsatte, Kalde Strøk: Utforming Og Virkemåte [The Design and Function of Single Buildings and Building Clusters in Harsh, Cold Climates]’ (PhD diss., Oslo, The Oslo School of Architecture, 1989); Wayne K. D. Davies, ‘Winter Cities’, in Theme Cities: Solutions for Urban Problems, ed. Wayne K. D. Davies, GeoJournal Library 112 (Heidelberg: Springer, 2015); Norman Pressman and Xenia Zepic, Planning in Cold Climates: A Critical Overview of Canadian Settlement Patterns and Policies (Winnipeg: Institute of Urban Studies, 1986); Norman Pressman, Shaping Cities for Winter: Climatic Comfort and Sustainable Design (Prince George: Winter Cities Association, 2004); David Chapman, ‘Attractive Winter Cities: “Working” toward the Urban Design Principles’, Article on LinkdIn, 29 July 2014, https://www.linkedin.com/

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pulse/20140729123154-275789104-attractive-winter-cities-working-towardthe-urban-design-principles/. 17 Jessica Bridger, ‘Permafrost Urbanists’, Landscape Architecture, 2017; Nikolay I. Shiklomanov et al., ‘Conquering the Permafrost: Urban Infrastructure Development in Norilsk, Russia’, Polar Geography 40, no. 4 (2017). 18 Andrew Waldron, ‘Frobisher Bay Future: Megastructure in a Meta-Land’, Architecture and Ideas 8, no. 1 (2009); Vindum, ‘Greenland Revisited’; Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, ‘Modernist Ultimate Thule’, RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review 31, no. 1/2 (2006); Filin, Yemelina, and Savinov, Arktika. 19 Ekaterina Kalemeneva, ‘Goroda Pod Kupolom: Sovetskiye Arkhitektory i Osvoyeniye Kraynego Severa v 1950–1960-Ye Gody [Cities Under the Dome: Soviet Architects and the Development of the Far North in the 1950s–1960s]’, Bulletin Des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Moskau 13 (2013). Ekaterina Kalemeneva, ‘From New Socialist Cities to Thaw Experimentation in Arctic Townscapes: Leningrad Architects Attempt to Modernise the Soviet North’, Europe-Asia Studies 71, no. 3 (2019). 20 Matthew Jull, ‘Toward a Northern Architecture: The Microrayon as Arctic Urban Prototype’, Journal of Architectural Education 70, no. 2 (2016); Matthew Jull, ‘The Improbable City: Adaptations of an Arctic Metropolis’, Polar Geography 40, no. 4 (2017); Matthew Jull, ‘South Camp Inn’, Site, 6 November 2017. 21 Susan Jayne Carruth, ‘Place as Progressive Optic : Reflecting on Conceptualisations of Place through a Study of Greenlandic Infrastructures’, in Future North: The Changing Arctic Landscapes, ed. Peter Hemmersam and Janike Kampevold Larsen, 1st edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 186. 22 Carruth, ‘Place as Progressive Optic : Reflecting on Conceptualisations of Place through a Study of Greenlandic Infrastructures’; Susan Jayne Carruth, ‘Infrastructural Urbanism That Learns from Place: Operationalising Meta Material Practices to Guide Renewable Energy Planning in Greenland’ (PhD diss., Aarhus, Aarhus School of Architecture, 2015); See also Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk, and Schiesser, ‘Beyond Wilderness’. 23 Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk, and Schiesser, ‘Beyond Wilderness’, 78. 24 Espen Røyseland and Øystein Rø, eds., Northern Experiments: The Barents Urban Survey 2009 (Oslo: 0047 Press, 2009). 25 Sheppard and White, Many Norths. 26 Shields, Places on the Margin, 8. 27 Rea, Political Economy, 11. 28 Rea, Political Economy, 161. 29 Coates, ‘Rediscovery’. 30 Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin, ‘Introduction: Making the Action Visible. Making Environments in Northern Landscapes’, in Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, ed. Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), 4. 31 Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic. 32 Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic, 23. 33 Lyck, ‘Economic Development’. 34 Escobar, ‘Planning’. 35 Huskey and Morehouse, ‘Development’.

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36 Anthony D. King, ‘Postcolonial Cities, Postcolonial Critiques’, in Negotiating Urban Conflicts, Interaction, Space and Control, ed. Helmuth Berking et al. (Berlin: Transcript Verlag, 2015). 37 Dryzek and Young, Internal Colonialism, 125. 38 Pierre Gauthier and Jason Gilliland, ‘Mapping Urban Morphology: A Classification Scheme for Interpreting Contributions to the Study of Urban Form’, Urban Morphology 10, no. 1 (2006). 39 Amos Rapoport, ‘Spatial Organization and the Built Environment’, in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (Abingdon: Routledge, 1994), 462. 40 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 1. 41 Shields, Places on the Margin, 11. 42 Shields, Places on the Margin, 14. 43 Shields, Places on the Margin, 18. 44 E.g. Smith, The New North; Edward Struzik, Future Arctic – Field Notes from a World on the Edge (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2016). 45 Bo Wagner Sørensen, ‘Perceiving Landscapes in Greenland’, in Nordic Landscapes: Region and Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe, ed. Michael Jones and Kenneth R. Olwig (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 109. 46 Sørensen, ‘Perceiving Landscapes in Greenland’, 108. 47 Larsen and Fondahl, Arctic Human Development.

Chapter 4 1 2

Bond, ‘Noril’sk’. N. A. Avrorin, Chem Ozeleni͡atʹ Goroda i Poselki Murmanskoĭ Oblasti i Severnykh Raĭonov Karelo-Finskoĭ SSR [How to Green the Cities and Towns of the Murmansk Region and the Northern Districts of the Karelian–Finnish SSR], ed. V. P. Maleev (Kirovsk: Executive Committee of the Murmansk Regional Council of Workers’ Deputies, 1941). 3 P. I. Lapin, Botanicheskiye Sady SSSR [Botnical Gardens of the USSR] (Moscow: Kolos, 1984). 4 N. A. Avrorin et al., Peremeshcheniye Rasteniy Na Severnyy Polyarnyy [Relocation of Plants to the Polar North], ed. N. A. Avrorin (Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1964). 5 Joe R. McBride and Vladimir Douhovnikoff, ‘Characteristics of the Urban Forests in Arctic and Near-Arctic Cities’, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 11, no. 2 (2012). 6 Avrorin, Chem Ozeleni͡atʹ Goroda. 7 Avrorin, Chem Ozeleni͡atʹ Goroda. 8 Avrorin, Chem Ozeleni͡atʹ Goroda. 9 Avrorin, Chem Ozeleni͡atʹ Goroda; Bond, ‘Noril’sk’. 10 Vladimir Paperny, Architecture In the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 11 Andy Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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12 Bond, ‘Noril’sk’. 13 Lapin, Botanicheskiye Sady SSSR. 14 Достижения фиЗИки итехнки отнюъ не перечеркивают, но, наоборот, увели Оа ют вомного раз эффективnость творческих усилий ботаников и растениеводов, гак как обеспечивают возможность еограниченного использования искусственных сточников тепла и света для выращивания полезных красивых растений в любом уголке нашей планеты и на будущих космических станцияхю; Avrorin et al., Peremeshcheniye Rasteniy, 3. 15 Yuri Stepanovich Asafiev, ‘Design and Construction in Northern Regions of the Soviet Union’, Habitat International 13, no. 2 (1989). 16 Larsen and Fondahl, Arctic Human Development; Heleniak, ‘Boom and Bust’, 2013. 17 Helge Blakkisrud and Geir Hønneland, Tackling Space: Federal Politics and the Russian North (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006). 18 Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse. 19 Colin Reisser, ‘Russia’s Arctic Cities: Recent Evolution and Drivers of Change’, in Sustaining Russia’s Arctic Cities: Resource Politics, Migration, and Climate Change, ed. Robert W. Orttung (New York: Berghahn, 2017). 20 Armstrong, Russian Settlement. 21 Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse; Reisser, ‘Russia’s Arctic Cities’. 22 Ekaterina Kalemeneva, ‘Arctic Modernism: New Urbanisation for the Soviet Far North in the 1960s’, in Competing Arctic Futures : Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Nina Wormbs (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 23 Bruno, ‘Making Nature Modern’; John McCannon, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 24 Reisser, ‘Russia’s Arctic Cities’; Heleniak, ‘Growth Poles’, 151. 25 McCannon, Red Arctic. 26 Terence E. Armstrong, The Northern Sea Route: Soviet Exploitation of the North East Passage (Cambridge: The University Press, 1952). 27 McCannon, Red Arctic. 28 Andrey Petrov, ‘Re-Tracing Development Paths: Exploring the Origins and Nature of the 20th Century’s Northern Development Paradigms in Russia and Canada’, in Arctic Yearbook 2018, ed. Lassi Heininen and H. ExnerPirot (Akureyri: Northern Research Forum, 2018), https://arcticyearbook. com/images/yearbook/2018/Scholarly_Papers/1_AY2018_Petrov.pdf; Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’. 29 McCannon, History of the Arctic. 30 Evgenia Prokhorova, ‘Reinventing a Russian Mono Industrial Town: From a Socialist “Town of Miners” to a Post-Socialist “Border Town”’ (PhD diss., Joensuu, University of Eastern Finland, 2014); Bond, ‘Noril’sk’; Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse. 31 Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse, 88. 32 Emmerson, Future History, 50. 33 Helge Blakkisrud, ‘What’s to Be Done with the North?’, in Tackling Space: Federal Politics and the Russian North, ed. Helge Blakkisrud and Geir Hønneland (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006).

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34 Andrey Petrov, ‘Marginal Places in Discursive Space: Political Economies of Development and Urban Space Planning in the North, Conceptual Shifts’, in Proceedings from the First International Conference on Urbanisation in the Arctic, ed. Klaus Georg Hansen, Rasmus Ole Rasmussen and Ryan Weber, vol. 2013, Nordregio Working Paper (Stockholm: Nordregio, 2013). 35 Graybill and Dixon, ‘Cities of Russia’. 36 Emmerson, Future History. 37 Graybill and Dixon, ‘Cities of Russia’; Bruno, The Nature. 38 Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’. 39 Armstrong, Russian Settlement; Heleniak, ‘Growth Poles’. 40 McCannon, Red Arctic. 41 Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse. 42 Petrov, ‘Marginal Places’. 43 Kalemeneva, ‘Arctic Modernism’. 44 Kalemeneva, ‘Arctic Modernism’. 45 Heleniak, ‘Growth Poles’, 151; Kalemeneva, ‘From New Socialist Cities’. 46 Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk and Schiesser, ‘Beyond Wilderness’. 47 McCannon, Red Arctic, 8. 48 Peter P. Schweitzer, ‘Russian “Old Settlers”’, in Encyclopedia of the Arctic, ed. Mark Nuttall (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 49 Schweitzer, ‘Russian “Old Settlers”’. 50 Samuil V. Slavin, ‘Economic Premises for the Development of the National Economy of the North of the U.S.S.R.’, Problems of the North 6 (1963); McCannon, History of the Arctic. 51 Bond, ‘Noril’sk’, 34. 52 Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk and Schiesser, ‘Beyond Wilderness’; Nuttall, ‘SelfDetermination’. 53 Heleniak, ‘Boom and Bust’, 2013. 54 Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’; Nuttall, ‘Self-Determination’. 55 Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse. 56 Anna Bronovitskaya, ‘Open City: The Soviet Experiment’, Volume 21 (2009). 57 Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). 58 Paperny, Age of Stalin. 59 Smith, Property of Communists. 60 R. W. Davies and Melanie Ilič, ‘From Khrushchev (1935–6) to Khrushchev (1956–64): Construction Policy Compared’, PERSA Working Paper (Warwick: University of Warwick, Department of Economics, 21 April 2010), http:// go.warwick.ac.uk/persa. 61 Smith, Property of Communists. 62 Nikita Khrushchev, ‘On the Extensive Introduction of Industrial Methods, Improving the Quality and Reducing the Cost of Construction (Excerpts from a Speech by Khrushchev at the National Conference of Builders, Architects, Workers in the Construction Materials and Manufacture of Construction and Roads Machinery Industries, and Employees of Design and Research and Development Organizations on 7 December 1954)’, Volume, no. 21 (2009). 63 Bart Goldhoorn, ‘Comments on Kruschchev’s Speech of 7 December 1954’, Volume, no. 21 (2009): 36. 64 Davies and Ilič, ‘From Khrushchev’; Smith, Property of Communists.

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65 Smith, Property of Communists; Ekaterina Kalemeneva, ‘Mastering the Extreme North: Policies and Living Conditions in Arctic Cities under Khrushchev’s Time’, Quaestio Rossica 5, no. 1 (2017). 66 Smith, Property of Communists. 67 Smith, Property of Communists; Andrusz, Housing. 68 ‘Industrialized Building in the Soviet Union (A Report of the U.S. Delegation to the U.S.S.R.)’, Special Publications (Washington, DC: National Bureau of Standardization (U.S.), 1971), https://www.gpo.gov/…/GOVPUB-C13-7d84f 08cc44cb9903107dd699b9bfa39.pdf; Gunnar Rosendahl and Hans Ølgaard, Rejse Til Sibirien [Travel to Siberia] (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1977). 69 Davies and Ilič, ‘From Khrushchev’. 70 Smith, Property of Communists. 71 Davies and Ilič, ‘From Khrushchev’. 72 Smith, Property of Communists, 111. 73 Bronovitskaya, ‘Open City’. 74 Davies and Ilič, ‘From Khrushchev’. 75 ‘Industrialized Building’; Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse Til Sibirien; A. Assur, ‘Soviet Construction under Difficult Climatic Conditions’, in Kennan Institute Occasional Paper Series, vol. 86 (Soviet Construction and Urban Design, Washington, DC: Kennan Institute, 1978), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/ default/files/op86_soviet_construction_climatic_assur_1979.pdf. 76 Smith, Property of Communists. 77 Bart Goldhoorn and Alexander Sverdlov, ‘Microrayon – Transformations of the Soviet City under Capitalism’, Volume, no. 21 (2009). 78 Davies and Ilič, ‘From Khrushchev’. 79 Kalemeneva, ‘Mastering the Extreme’. 80 ‘Industrialized Building’, 32. 81 Andrusz, Housing. 82 Andrusz, Housing. 83 Andrusz, Housing. 84 Davies and Ilič, ‘From Khrushchev’. 85 Zigurds L. Zile, ‘Programs and Problems of City Planning in the Soviet Union’, Washington University Law Review 1963, no. 1 (1963). 86 Smith, Property of Communists. 87 Bronovitskaya, ‘Open City’; Smith, Property of Communists. 88 Bronovitskaya, ‘Open City’. 89 Andrusz, Housing. 90 Zile, ‘Programs and Problems’; Andrusz, Housing. 91 Smith, Property of Communists. 92 Smith, Property of Communists. 93 Reisser, ‘Russia’s Arctic Cities’. 94 Reisser, ‘Russia’s Arctic Cities’. 95 Walter Slipchenko and Larry Elkin, An Introduction to Town Planning and Related Matters in the Soviet North: Based upon Information Collected during the Exchange Visit by a Canadian Delegation to the Soviet Union, September 25th to October 7th, 1977 (Yellowknife: Government of the NWT, 1977); Stammler-Gossmann, ‘Reshaping the North’. 96 N. I. Shishkin, ‘On the Provision of Permanent Staffs in the Northern Areas of the Country’, Problems of the North 6 (1963).

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97 Armstrong, Russian Settlement. 98 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements; Armstrong, Russian Settlement. 99 Armstrong, Russian Settlement; Asafiev, ‘Design and Construction’; United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements. 100 Armstrong, Russian Settlement; Shishkin, ‘Provision of Permanent Staffs’. 101 Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse; Blakkisrud and Hønneland, Tackling Space; Keskitalo, ‘The North’; Stammler-Gossmann, ‘Reshaping the North’. 102 Slavin, Soviet North. 103 Prokhorova, ‘Reinventing’; Kalemeneva, ‘From New Socialist Cities’. 104 Ekaterina Kalemeneva, ‘Models of the Soviet North Development in the 1950s: The Case of Commission on Issues of the North’, Sibirskiye Istoricheskiye Issledovaniya [Siberian Historical Research] 2018, no. 2 (2018). 105 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, National Monograph Submitted by the Delegation of the USSR, Add. 3: Construction of Residential and Public Buildings in the Far North of the USSR (Geneva: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 1978); quoted in United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements. 106 Kalemeneva, ‘Arctic Modernism’; Kalemeneva, ‘From New Socialist Cities’. 107 B. V. Murav’ev and T. V. Rimskaya-Korsakova, ‘Town Construction and the Acclimatization of People in the Far North’, Problems of the North 6 (1963): 83–90; Kalemeneva, ‘Goroda’. 108 Armstrong, Russian Settlement. 109 Murav’ev and Rimskaya-Korsakova, ‘Town Construction’. 110 Kalemeneva, ‘Arctic Modernism’; Kalemeneva, ‘From New Socialist Cities’. 111 Shiklomanov et al., ‘Conquering the Permafrost’; Nikolay I. Shiklomanov and Marlene Laruelle, ‘A Truly Arctic City: An Introduction to the Special Issue on the City of Norilsk, Russia’, Polar Geography 40, no. 4 (2017); Simon Ertz, ‘Building Norilsk’, in The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag, ed. Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2013); Jull, ‘The Improbable City’. 112 V. S. Nepokoichitskii, ‘Characteristic Aspects of Urban Development in Noril’sk’, Problems of the North : A Translation of Проблемы Севера 10 (1966); Bond, ‘Noril’sk’, n.p. 113 Shiklomanov et al., ‘Conquering the Permafrost’; Bond, ‘Residential Construction’. 114 Ertz, ‘Building Norilsk’; Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse, 128; Armstrong, Russian Settlement. 115 Shiklomanov and Laruelle, ‘A Truly Arctic City’. 116 Nepokoichitskii, ‘Characteristic Aspects’. 117 Nepokoichitskii, ‘Characteristic Aspects’. 118 Filin, Yemelina and Savinov, Arktika. 119 ‘Projet D’urbanisation Du Quartier Sud-Ouest De Norilsk : Ville Nouvelle De Sibérie, URS’, Architecture D’aujourd’hui 134 (1967); Bond, ‘Noril’sk’. 120 Bond, ‘Noril’sk’; A. L. Yastrebov, ‘Development of the Far North and Problems of Construction’, Problems of the North : A Translation of Проблемы Севера 10 (1966). 121 Jull, ‘The Improbable City’. 122 Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk, and Schiesser, ‘Beyond Wilderness’, 76.

204

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123 Kalemeneva, ‘Goroda’. 124 V. S. Nemchinov, ‘General Problems of Acclimatization’, Problems of the North 6 (1963): 1. 125 Murav’ev and Rimskaya-Korsakova, ‘Town Construction’, 85; See also K. K. Krupitsa and B. V. Murav’ev, ‘Problems of Construction in the Far North’, Problems of the North : A Translation of Проблемы Севера 10 (1966). 126 T. V. Rimskaya-Korsakova, ‘Planning and Architecture of Towns in the Far North’, Problems of the North : A Translation of Проблемы Севера 10 (1966): 62. 127 S. P. Odnovalov and M. V. Tsimbal, ‘The Special Architectural Design Characteristics of Arctic Settlements with Artificial Microclimate’, Problems of the North: A Translation of Проблемы Севера 10 (1966). 128 Filin, Yemelina, and Savinov, Arktika. 129 Yastrebov, ‘Development’; Murav’ev and Rimskaya-Korsakova, ‘Town Construction’. 130 Yastrebov, ‘Development’; A. V. Makhrovskaya et al., ‘Urban Planning and Construction in the Kola North (Part II) (Planirovka i Zastroyka Gorodov Kol’skogo Severa)’, Polar Geography 1, no. 4 (1977). 131 P. P. Pozdnyakov, Zhilishche Novogo Tipa Dlya Severa [New Type of Dwelling for the North] (Leningrad: Stroyizdat, 1978). 132 Kalemeneva, ‘Arctic Modernism’. 133 Filin, Yemelina and Savinov, Arktika; Kalemeneva, ‘From New Socialist Cities’. 134 Andrusz, Housing. 135 Smith, Property of Communists. 136 Kalemeneva, ‘Goroda’. 137 Petrov, ‘Re-Tracing’; Julia Lajus, ‘In Search of Instructive Models: The Russian State at the Crossroads to Conquering the North’, in Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, ed. Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014). 138 Kalemeneva, ‘Arctic Modernism’. 139 Armstrong, Russian Settlement; Yastrebov, ‘Development’; Murav’ev and Rimskaya-Korsakova, ‘Town Construction’; L. P. Pal’tsevich, ‘The Problem of the Height of Residential Buildings in Far Northern Settlements’, Problems of the North : A Translation of Проблемы Севера 10 (1966); Filin, Yemelina and Savinov, Arktika; Kalemeneva, ‘Arctic Modernism’. 140 Slavin, ‘Economic Premises’; Slavin, Soviet North; Kalemeneva, ‘Models of the Soviet’; Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse Til Sibirien. 141 Odnovalov and Tsimbal, ‘Special Architectural Design’; Bond, ‘Noril’sk’; Filin, Yemelina and Savinov, Arktika; Lev Golubev, ‘Profitable Exchanges and Contacts between U.S.S.R. and Canada’, Arctic 18, no. 4 (1965); Kalemeneva, ‘Arctic Modernism’. 142 Costas Melakopides, Pragmatic Idealism: Canadian Foreign Policy, 1945– 1995 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998); Robert Doherty, ‘Social, Economic and Technical Links between Northern Regions of Canada and Russia’, in Management, Technology and Human Resources Policy in the Arctic (The North), ed. L. Lyck and V. I. Boyko (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1996); Bond, ‘Noril’sk’; McCannon, History of the Arctic, 270.

NOTES

205

143 E.g. United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements; Papers from the UN/ECE Research Colloquium on Planning Housing and Construction Problems of Human Settlements in Harsh Living Conditions, Habitat International 13, no. 2, 1989. 144 Andrusz, Housing; Konstantin B. Klokov and Mark Nuttall, ‘Economic Inventory of the (Soviet) Polar North, 1926/27’, in Encyclopedia of the Arctic (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); Graybill and Dixon, ‘Cities of Russia’. 145 Petrov, ‘Marginal Places’, 32. 146 Kalemeneva, ‘Goroda’. 147 Andrusz, Housing, 3. 148 E.g. Aleksandŭr Dedul, 6,000 Move In Every Day (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1979). 149 Peter Hemmersam, ‘Ruins and Monuments of the Kola Cities’, in Future North: The Changing Arctic Landscapes, ed. Janike Kampevold Larsen and Peter Hemmersam (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 56. 150 Heleniak, ‘Boom and Bust’, 2013. 151 Emmerson, Future History. 152 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2012). 153 Morgan Ip, ‘Hyperlandscape: The Norwegian-Russian Borderlands’, in Future North: The Changing Arctic Landscapes, ed. Janike Kampevold Larsen and Hemmersam, Peter, 1st edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 154 Emmerson, Future History. 155 Kalemeneva, ‘Arctic Modernism’. 156 Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk and Schiesser, ‘Beyond Wilderness’; Bruno, ‘Making Nature Modern’. 157 Asafiev, ‘Design and Construction’; United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements. 158 Nepokoichitskii, ‘Characteristic Aspects’; Bond, ‘Noril’sk’. 159 Jull, ‘Toward a Northern’. 160 Armstrong, Russian Settlement; Gennady P. Luzin, Michael Pretes and Vladimir V. Vasiliev’, ‘The Kola Peninsula: Geography, History and Resources’, Arctic 47, no. 1 (1994). 161 Luzin, Pretes and Vasiliev’, ‘Kola Peninsula’. 162 Kristjan Breidfjord Svavarsson, Ona Katrina Flindall and Ronald Van Schaik. 163 Reisser, ‘Russia’s Arctic Cities’, 12. 164 Marlene Laruelle, Sophie Hohmann and Alexandra Burtsveva, ‘Murmansk: A City’s Soviet Identity and Its Transforming Diversity’, in New Mobilities and Social Changes in Russia’s Arctic Regions, ed. Marlene Laruelle, Routledge Research in Polar Regions (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Nadir Kinossian, ‘Re-Colonising the Arctic: The Preparation of Spatial Planning Policy in Murmansk Oblast, Russia’, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 35, no. 2 (2017). 165 Kinossian, ‘Re-Colonising’. 166 Kinossian, ‘Re-Colonising’. 167 Kinossian, ‘Re-Colonising’. 168 Lyudmila Zalkind, ‘The Social and Economic Characteristic of Murmansk Region’, in Urbanization and the Role of Housing in the Present

206

169

170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182

183

184 185 186

187 188

NOTES Development Process in the Arctic, ed. Klaus Georg Hansen, Søren Bitsch and Lyudmila Zalkind, Nordregio Report 3 (Stockholm: Nordregio, 2013). Anna Trubkina, trans., ‘Extracts from the “Socio-Economic Strategy of Murmansk Region Till 2025”’ (Kirkenes/Murmansk: The Barents Observer, 2010), http://www.barentsinfo.org/loader.aspx?id=db2be5c2-8ef4-43da9b92-3c7a1c08655a. Trubkina, ‘Extracts from the “Socio-Economic Strategy of Murmansk Region Till 2025”’. Paul Fryer, ‘Kola Peninsula’, in Encyclopedia of the Arctic, ed. Mark Nuttall (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). Pavel V. Fedorov, ‘The European Far North of Russia and Its Territorial Constructions in the Sixteenth–Twenty-First Centuries’, Acta Borealia 28, no. 2 (2011). Trubkina, ‘Extracts’, 23. Kinossian, ‘Re-Colonising’. Trubkina, ‘Extracts’, 6. Trubkina, ‘Extracts’, 23. Trubkina, ‘Extracts’, 24. Petrov, ‘Re-Tracing’. United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, National Monograph, Add. 3, USSR; quoted in United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements, 79. Graybill and Dixon, ‘Cities of Russia’; Heleniak, ‘Boom and Bust’, 2013; Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse; Heleniak, ‘Growth Poles’. Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’. Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse; Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’, 131; Prokhorova, ‘Reinventing’; See also Stephen Crowley, ‘Monotowns, Economic Crisis, and the Politics of Industrial Restructuring in Russia’, in Urban Sustainability in the Arctic : Visions, Contexts, and Challenges, ed. Robert W. Orttung and Marlene Laruelle (Washington, DC: The George Washington University, 2017). Helge Blakkisrud and Geir Hønneland, ‘The Russian North – an Introduction’, in Tackling Space: Federal Politics and the Russian North, ed. Helge Blakkisrud and Geir Hønneland (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006). See also Heleniak, ‘Boom and Bust’, 2013. Reisser, ‘Russia’s Arctic Cities’; Heleniak, ‘Growth Poles’. Reisser, ‘Russia’s Arctic Cities’. Goldhoorn and Sverdlov, ‘Microrayon’. Peter Hemmersam, ‘Ruins and Monuments of the Kola Cities’, in Future North: The Changing Arctic Landscapes, ed. Janike Kampevold Larsen and Peter Hemmersam (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). Mariusz Czepczyński, Cultural Landscapes of Post-Socialist Cities: Representation of Powers and Needs (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 112. Barbara Engel, ‘Public Space in the “Blue Cities” of Russia’, in The PostSocialist City: Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe after Socialism, ed. Kiril Stanilov (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007); Konstantin Axenov, Isolde Brade and Evgenij Bondarchuk, The Transformation of Urban Space in Post-Soviet Russia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).

NOTES 189 190 191 192

207

Graybill and Dixon, ‘Cities of Russia’. Davies and Ilič, ‘From Khrushchev’; Bronovitskaya, ‘Open City’. Reisser, ‘Russia’s Arctic Cities’, 14. Laruelle, ‘Three Waves’.

Chapter 5 1

Statistics Canada, ‘Population and Dwelling Count Highlight Tables, 2016 Census’, 2019, https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/ hlt-fst/pd-pl/Table.cfm?Lang=Eng&T=101&S=50&O=A; Statistics Canada, ‘Aboriginal Peoples Highlight Tables, 2016 Census’, 2019, https://www12. statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/hlt-fst/abo-aut/Table.cfm?Lang =Eng&T=101&S=99&O=A. 2 Inuit Statistical Profile 2018 (Ottawa: Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, 2018), https:// www.itk.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Inuit-Statistical-Profile.pdf. 3 Kenneth Coates and William R. Morrison, The Forgotten North: A History of Canada’s Provincial Norths (Toronto: J. Lorimer, 1992). 4 David Malcolm, ‘Canada’, in Encyclopedia of the Arctic, ed. Mark Nuttall (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 5 Shields, Places on the Margin; See also Keskitalo, ‘The North’; Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic. 6 Shields, Places on the Margin, 163. 7 Coates, ‘Rediscovery’, 16. 8 Shields, Places on the Margin; Hamelin, Canadian Nordicity. 9 Petrov, ‘Marginal Places’. 10 Cooke, ‘North Takes Place’. 11 Ridge, ‘General Principles’, 510. 12 Alan Marcus, ‘Place with No Dawn: A Town’s Evolution and Erskine’s Arctic Utopia’, in Architecture and the Canadian Fabric, ed. Rhodri Windsor Liscombe (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011); Dear and Clark, ‘Planning a New’; Alan Rudolph Marcus, Relocating Eden: The Images and Politics of Inuit Exile in the Canadian Arctic (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1995).Carol Brice-Bennett, ‘Dispossessed : The Eviction of Inuit from Hebron, Labrador’, Isberg (Montreal: Université du Québec à Montréal, 2017); Shelagh Grant, ‘Errors Exposed: Inuit Relocations to the High Arctic, 1953–1960’, in Documents on Canadian Arctic Sovereignty and Security (Calgary: Arctic Institute of North America, 2016). 13 Edmund Searles, ‘Placing Identity: Town, Land, and Authenticity in Nunavut, Canada’, Acta Borealia 27, no. 2 (2010); Shields and Weber, ‘Iqaluit’; Marcus, Relocating Eden. 14 McCannon, History of the Arctic. 15 André Légaré, ‘Nunavut’, in Encyclopedia of the Arctic, ed. Mark Nuttall (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 16 E.g. Marcus, Relocating Eden; Andera Procter, ‘Uranium, Inuit Rights, and Emergent Neoliberalism in Labrador, 1956–2012’, in Mining and Communities in Northern Canada: History, Politics, and Memory, ed. Arn Keeling and John Sandlos (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2015).

208

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17 Ironside, ‘Canadian Northern Settlements’. 18 Dale R. Schmeichel, ‘Air Commuting in Northern Canada’, in Natural Resource Development and Social Impact in the North, ed. James S. Frideres and Joseph E. DiSanto (New York: Peter Lang, 1990). 19 Alan Gordon, Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016); Philip Isard, ‘Northern Vision: Northern Development during the Diefenbaker Era’ (Master’s thesis, Waterloo, ON, University of Waterloo, 2010), http://hdl. handle.net/10012/5032. 20 John Diefenbaker, ‘Opening Campaign Speech, Winnipeg, 12 February 1958’ (Speech, Winnipeg, 12 February 1958), https://www.usask.ca/diefenbaker/ documents/1957-1958-elections/campaign_speech_1958.pdf; Peter Charles Newman, Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973). 21 Cooke, ‘North Takes Place’; Gordon, Time Travel. 22 William E. Rees, ‘Development and Planning North of 60° : Past and Future’, in Northern Transitions. Volume II. Second National Workshop on People, Resources and the Environment North of 60°, ed. Robert F. Keith and Janet B. Wright (Ottawa: Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, 1978). 23 Rea, Political Economy. 24 Newman, Renegade; Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’. 25 Rea, Political Economy. 26 Isard, ‘Northern Vision’. 27 Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’. 28 Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’, 526. 29 Isard, ‘Northern Vision’. 30 Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’; Rea, Political Economy. 31 Rea, Political Economy. 32 Newman, Renegade; Isard, ‘Northern Vision’. 33 Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’. 34 Frances Abele, ‘Canadian Contradictions: Forty Years of Northern Political Development’, Arctic 40, no. 4 (1987). 35 Shields, Places on the Margin; Robert Page, Northern Development : The Canadian Dilemma (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986). 36 Gordon B. Pritchard, ‘Inuvik, Canada’s New Arctic Town’, Polar Record 11, no. 71 (1962); J. D. Hamilton, Arctic Revolution: Social Change in the Northwest Territories, 1935–1994 (Toronto: Dundurn, 1994). 37 E.g. Alexander M Ervin, New Northern Townsmen in Inuvik (Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1968); see also Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’, 540; Hamilton, Arctic Revolution. 38 Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’; Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, ‘New Towns in the North’, Contact 8 (August 1976). 39 Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’, 519. 40 Ervin, New Northern Townsmen. 41 Pritchard, ‘Inuvik’. 42 Scott Midgley, ‘Contesting Closure: Science, Politics, and Community Responses to Closing the Nanisivik Mine, Nunavut’, in Mining and Communities in Northern Canada: History, Politics, and Memory, ed. Arn

NOTES

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64

209

Keeling and John Sandlos (Calgary: University of Calgary, 2015); Arn Keeling and Patricia Boulter, ‘From Igloo to Mine Shaft: Inuit Labour and Memory at the Rankin Inlet Nickel Mine’, in Mining and Communities in Northern Canada: History, Politics, and Memory, ed. Arn Keeling and John Sandlos (Calgary: University of Calgary, 2015). Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns’. Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns’; Lucie K. Morisset, ‘From Town Building to Society-Making: Company Towns in Canada’, Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada 42, no. 1 (2017). Robson, ‘Housing’; Goliger, ‘Arctic Housing Update’. Sheppard and White, Many Norths. Robson, ‘Housing’. Government of the Northwest Territories, Town Planning in the Canadian Northwest Territories (Yellowknife: Government of the Northwest Territories, 1978), 53. http://nwthc.gov.nt.ca/node/8 Morisset, ‘From Town Building’. Morisset, ‘From Town Building’, 53; See also Coates, ‘Rediscovery’; Harold Strub, Bare Poles: Building Design for High Latitudes (Montréal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1996). Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns’; Petrov, ‘Marginal Places’. Morisset, ‘From Town Building’. Ridge, ‘General Principles’; See also L. D. McCann, ‘Planning in Resource Communities Principally Post-World War II’, in Little Communities and Big Industries: Studies in the Social Impact of Canadian Resource Extraction, ed. Roy T. Bowles (Toronto: Butterworths, 1982). See also Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns’. Norman Pressman and Kathleen Lauder, ‘Resource Towns as New Towns’, Urban History Review 78, no. 1 (1978); Government of the Northwest Territories, ‘Town Planning’, 19. E.g. Sherry R Arnstein, ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, no. 4 (1969). Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns’. O’Mahony, ‘Fermont’. Petrov, ‘Marginal Places’. Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns’; Andrejs Skaburskis, ‘Architectural “Gems” Versus “Vital Markets”: An Evaluation of New Town Centre Options for Remote New Towns’, Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 6, no. 2 (1989); Alain Fournier and Kirt Ejesiak, ‘Un-Planning in Iqaluit, Nunavut’, in Proceedings from the First International Conference on Urbanisation in the Arctic, vol. 6, Noregio Working Papers (The First International Conference on Urbanisation in the Arctic, Stockholm: Noregio, 2012). Government of the Northwest Territories, ‘Town Planning’, 51. Robert Robson, ‘Planning for Winter Livability in the Resource Sector’, in Winter Communities (Winnipeg: The Institute of Urban Studies, The University of Winnipeg, 1987). Morisset, ‘From Town Building’.

210

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Robson, ‘Planning for Winter’; Alison M. Gill, ‘Respecting Context in Northern Resource Town Planning: The Case of Tumbler Ridge’, Western Geography 12 (2002). 66 P. D. McTaggart-Cowan, ‘The Canadian North in the Next Hundred Years’, Arctic 20, no. 4 (1967): 262. 67 Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’. 68 Farish and Lackenbauer, 526; West, ‘Re-Searching the North’, 360–1. 69 Shields, Places on the Margin. 70 Liscombe, ‘Modernist Ultimate Thule’, 68; see also Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’. 71 Michelangelo Sabatino and Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, Canada: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 152. 72 Liscombe, ‘Modernist Ultimate Thule’; Isard, ‘Northern Vision’. 73 Diefenbaker, ‘Opening Campaign Speech’, 7. 74 Robert V. Eno, ‘Crystal Two: The Origin of Iqaluit’, Arctic 56, no. 1 (2003); Fairfield, ‘New Towns’. 75 Waldron, ‘Frobisher Bay’. 76 Isard, ‘Northern Vision’. 77 B. A. Gardner and William Edmund Fancott, Frobisher Bay: The Design of Accommodation for a Community of 4500 People (Ottawa: Department of Public Works, 1958), 3. 78 Waldron, ‘Frobisher Bay’. 79 Gardner and Fancott, ‘Frobisher Bay’, 9. 80 Gardner and Fancott, ‘Frobisher Bay’. 81 Gardner and Fancott, ‘Frobisher Bay’. 82 Gardner and Fancott, ‘Frobisher Bay’, 1. 83 Egli, Die Neue Stadt; See also Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns’. 84 MacBain, ‘The Evolution’, 248; Waldron, ‘Frobisher Bay’, 24. According to Waldron, the project was intended to be an internal ‘thinking’ project, which was leaked to the media in 1958. 85 Kalemeneva, ‘Goroda’; Peter Kenter, ‘Cold Comfort: 1958 Plan Proposed Concrete Dome over Iqaluit’, Daily Commercial News (blog), 27 March 2015, https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/ projects/2015/03/cold-comfort-1958-plan-proposed-concrete-domeover-iqaluit-1006748w. 86 ‘Similar to a Recently Announced Russian Project for an Arctic Community : A Canadian Plan for an Entirely Enclosed Town with an Artificial Climate’, Illustrated London News, 6 January 1962. 87 Kalemeneva, ‘Goroda’; Bond, ‘Noril’sk’; Filin, Yemelina, and Savinov, Arktika; Odnovalov and Tsimbal, ‘Special Architectural Design’, http:// antarctic.su/books/item/f00/s00/z0000037/st005.shtml 88 Peter Dickinson Associates in cooperation with Ruuthwaite & Fairfield 89 Fairfield, ‘New Towns’. 90 Isard, ‘Northern Vision’. 91 MacBain, ‘The Evolution’. 92 Fairfield, ‘New Towns’. 93 MacBain, ‘The Evolution’. 94 Sheppard and White, Many Norths. 65

NOTES 95

211

John Thompson, ‘Resolute Bay: Arctic City of the Future?’, Nunatsiaq News, 23 December 2005, https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/resolute_bay_arctic_ city_of_the_future/; Gunnar Lind Pedersen, Gunnar P. Rosendahl and Hans Ølgaard, Rejse til The Northwest Territories, juni 1979 og juni 1980 [Travel to the Northwest Territories, June 1979 and June 1980] (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1980). 96 Marie-Josée Therrien, ‘Built to Educate: The Architecture of Schools in the Arctic from 1950 to 2007’, Journal for the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada 40, no. 2 (2015). 97 Iqaluit – Consolidated General Plan October 2015. 98 Searles, ‘Placing Identity’, 159. 99 Shields and Weber, ‘Iqaluit’, 41. 100 E.g. Leo Zrudlo, ‘A Search for Cultural and Contextual Identity in Contemporary Arctic Architecture’, Polar Record 37, no. 200 (2001). 101 Searles, ‘Placing Identity’. 102 Marcus, Relocating Eden. 103 E.g. Ralph Erskine, ‘Building in the Arctic’, Architectural Design 5 (1960); Sabatino and Liscombe, Canada, 246; Kirsten Birk, ‘Arctic Architecture?’ Arkitektur DK, 4 (2012). 104 Culjat, ‘Climate’. 105 Dear and Clark, ‘Planning a New’, 51. 106 Culjat, ‘Climate’. 107 Marcus, ‘Place with No Dawn’. 108 King, ‘Postcolonial Cities’, 2015, 1. 109 Dear and Clark, ‘Planning a New’. 110 Marcus, ‘Place with No Dawn’. 111 Marcus, ‘Place with No Dawn’; Qikiqtani Inuit Association, Qikiqtani Truth Commission. Community Histories 1950–1975: Resolute Bay (Iqaluit: Qikiqtani Inuit Association, 2013). 112 van Ginkel, ‘New Towns’. 113 Culjat, ‘Climate’; Birk, ‘Arctic Architecture?’; See also Jérémie Michael McGowan, ‘Ralph Erskine, (Skiing) Architect’, Nordlit, no. 23 (2008); Marcus, Relocating Eden. 114 E.g. Jull, ‘South Camp Inn’. 115 Hamelin, ‘An Attempt to Regionalize’. 116 Rea, Political Economy. 117 O’Mahony, ‘Fermont’; Adrian Sheppard, Fermont: The Making of a New Town in the Canadian Sub-Arctic (McGill University, 2012), https://www. mcgill.ca/architecture/files/architecture/fermont-nov_2011-rev.pdf. 118 O’Mahony, ‘Fermont’. 119 O’Mahony, ‘Fermont’. 120 Norbert Schoenauer, ‘Fermont: A New Version of the Company Town’, Journal of Architectural Education 29, no. 3 (1976): 10–11; Ted S Vinson, ed., Proceedings of the Specialty Conference on the Northern Community: A Search for a Quality Environment (New York: American Society of Civil Engineers, 1981), 87. 121 Schoenauer, ‘Fermont’, 11; See also Clunie, ‘Two New Northern’. 122 Bernadette Blanc, ‘Technological Innovation in Town-Planning and Conditions of Life, the Case of an Isolated, Nordic and One-Industry Town (Fermont, New Quebec)’, in Natural Resource Development and Social

212

123 124

125 126 127 128

129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

145 146 147 148

NOTES Impact in the North, ed. James S. Frideres and Joseph E. DiSanto (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); See also Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’. Blanc, ‘Technological Innovation’, 61. Keith Storey, ‘From “New Town” to “No Town” to “Source,” “Host” and “Hub” Communities: The Evolution of the Resource Community in an Era of Increased Labour Mobility’, Journal of Rural and Community Development 13, no. 3 (18 September 2018), https://journals.brandonu.ca/ jrcd/article/view/1576; Alessandra Ponte, Stephan Kowal and Jane Hutton, ‘“Making the North”: Mines and Towns of the Labrador Trough’, in Material Culture, Landscript 5 (Berlin: jovis Verlag, 2018). Adrian Sheppard in ‘Mur-Écran: The Windscreen’, Ideas (CBC/RadioCanada, 15 April 2013), http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2379668509/. Adrian, ‘Mur-Écran’. Robson, ‘Planning for Winter’, 37. Martin Simard and Carl Brisson, ‘L’Industrie Minière et Le Développement Urbain En Milieu Nordique: L’Exemple de Fermont Au Québec [The Mining Industry and Urban Development in the North: The Case of Fermont in Quebec]’, Cybergeo, 2013; Sheppard, ‘Fermont’, 12. Simard and Brisson, ‘L’Industrie Minière’. Schoenauer, ‘Fermont’; Sheppard, ‘Fermont’. Robson, ‘Planning for Winter’, 12; Adrian Sheppard cited in ‘Mur-Écran’. Sheppard, ‘Fermont’; Pressman and Zepic, Planning in Cold, 54. Sabatino and Liscombe, Canada. Sabatino and Liscombe, Canada, 247. Roy T. Bowles, ‘Introduction’, in Little Communities and Big Industries: Studies in the Social Impact of Canadian Resource Extraction, ed. Roy T. Bowles (Toronto: Butterworths, 1982), 4. E.g. Zrudlo, ‘Integrated Design Approach’. Roberts, ‘Design for the North’; e.g. Fried, ‘Settlement Type’; See also Coates, ‘Rediscovery’. E.g. Roberts, ‘Design for the North’; Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns’; Fried, ‘Settlement Type’. Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’. Sheppard and White, Many Norths. Zrudlo, ‘Cultural and Contextual Identity’. Pressman and Lauder, ‘Resource Towns’; Sheppard, ‘Fermont’. Government of the Northwest Territories, ‘Town Planning’, 53; Sheppard and White, Many Norths, 39. E.g. Norman Pressman and Annie Lüttgen, ‘Climatic Comfort in Northern Public Space’, in Design with the Environment, Proceedings of PLEA (Passive Low Energy Architecture) (Passive & Low Energy Architecture Conference, Passive and Low Energy Architecture, 2002). Ridge, ‘General Principles’, 561–2. Government of the Northwest Territories, ‘Town Planning’. van Ginkel, ‘New Towns’; See also Skaburskis, ‘Architectural “Gems”’. A report from 1985 indicates that there were around 400 such abandoned towns across Canada. Hal Quins, ‘The Lengthening Shadow of Ghost Towns’, Maclean’s, 21 January 1985; See also Morisset, ‘From Town Building’.

NOTES

213

149 Robinson, ‘New Industrial Towns’; Morisset, ‘From Town Building’. 150 Jean-Sébastien Boutet, ‘The Revival of Quebec’s Iron Ore Industry: Perspectives on Mining, Development, and History’, in Mining and Communities in Northern Canada: History, Politics, and Memory, ed. Arn Keeling and John Sandlos (Calgary: University of Calgary, 2015). 151 Goliger, ‘Arctic Housing Update’, 29. 152 Government of the Northwest Territories, ‘Town Planning’. 153 Ironside, ‘Canadian Northern Settlements’. 154 Liscombe, ‘Modernist Ultimate Thule’, s. 64. 155 Government of the Northwest Territories, ‘Town Planning’. 156 Government of the Northwest Territories, 21. 157 Pedersen, Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse til NWT. 158 Hamilton, Arctic Revolution. 159 Tester, ‘Transition and Assimilation’. 160 MacBain, ‘The Evolution’. 161 E.g. Armstrong, Russian Settlement; See also Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’; Hamilton, Arctic Revolution; Laruelle, ‘Three Waves’; van Ginkel, ‘New Towns’. 162 Jack Austin, ‘Downtown in the Arctic’, Maclean’s, 18 September 1965, 60; Laruelle, ‘Three Waves’; See also Golubev, ‘Profitable Exchanges’; Walter Slipchenko, Siberia 1971: A Report on the Visit of the Honourable Jean Chrétien, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and Official Delegation to the Soviet Union July–August 1971, DIAND Publication, QS-1179-000-EE-A-1 (Ottawa: Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1972). 163 Hamilton, Arctic Revolution. 164 Melakopides, Pragmatic Idealism; Doherty, ‘Social, Economic’. 165 Slipchenko and Elkin, An Introduction. 166 Kalemeneva, ‘Goroda’. 167 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements; Research Colloquium. 168 Waldron, ‘Frobisher Bay’, 35. 169 Fairfield, ‘New Towns’, 19. 170 McCann, ‘Planning’. 171 E.g. Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’. 172 Kenneth Coates, ‘The History and Historiography of Natural Resource Development in the Arctic: The State of the Literature’, (The History and Thunder Bay, ON: Resources and Sustainable Development in the Arctic, 2014), 9, http://yukonresearch.yukoncollege.yk.ca/resda/wp-content/uploads/ sites/2/2013/09/1-Ken-Coates-gap-analysis-final-report-2014.pdf#page=6&z oom=auto,-88,2. 173 Midgley, ‘Contesting Closure’. 174 Sheppard and White, Many Norths, 33. 175 McCann, ‘Planning’. 176 ‘Det er også vort indtryk, at man i NWT eksperimenterer betydeligt mere end vi gør, og at man bruger fantasien mere flittigt’. Pedersen, Rosendahl, and Ølgaard, Rejse til NWT, 2. 177 Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’, 8.

214

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178 E.g. Anja Jeffrey et al., Building a Resilient and Prosperous North: Centre for the North Five-Year Compendium Report (Ottawa: The Conference Board of Canada, 29 April 2015), https://www.conferenceboard.ca/e-Library/ document.aspx?did=6973; The Conference Board of Canada, The Future of Mining in Canada’s North (Ottawa: The Conference Board of Canada, January 2013), http://www.miningnorth.com/_rsc/site-content/library/ Final-13-201_FutureofMining_CFN.pdf; Canadian Polar Commission, ‘Economic Development in the Canadian North: Recent Advances and Remaining Knowledge Gaps and Research Opportunities’ (Canadian Polar Commission, 2014), http://www.polarcom.gc.ca/sites/default/files/economic_ development_summary.pdf. 179 Coates, ‘The History’; Arn Keeling and John Sandlos, ‘The Complex Legacy of Mining in Northern Canada’, in Mining and Communities in Northern Canada: History, Politics, and Memory, ed. Arn Keeling and John Sandlos (Calgary: University of Calgary, 2015). 180 Keeling and Sandlos, ‘The Complex Legacy’. 181 Canadian Polar Commission, ‘Economic Development’. 182 Canadian Polar Commission, ‘Economic Development’. 183 Petrov, ‘Talent’, 175. 184 Ironside, ‘Canadian Northern Settlements’. 185 Sheppard and White, Many Norths. 186 Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’; Liscombe, ‘Modernist Ultimate Thule’. 187 Petrov, ‘Marginal Regions’, 8. 188 McCannon, History of the Arctic; Coates, ‘The History’. 189 Sheppard and White, Many Norths.

Chapter 6 1

2

3

Hans Helge Madsen, Chicago – København, Alfred Råvads univers (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1990); ‘Alfred Råvad’, in Wikipedia, 28 June 2018, https://da.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alfred_R%C3%A5vad&old id=9586507. After returning to Denmark at the outset of the First World War, Råvad became an early proponent of function as a core concern in architecture and planning. He is credited as the originator of the famous Finger Plan for the Copenhagen region, adopted by the regional planning office in 1947; Mette Smed, ‘Alfred Råvad’, Den Store Danske, 16 November 2016, http:// denstoredanske.dk/Kunst_og_kultur/Arkitektur/Danmark/Alfred_Råvad. Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: I. Indledning [The Capital of Greenland: I: Introduction]’, Architekten 16, no. 20, 1914; Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: II. Beliggenheden [The Capital of Greenland: II: The Location]’, Architekten 16, no. 21, 1914; Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: III. Stedet [The Capital of Greenland: III: The Place]’, Architekten 16, no. 23, 1914; Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: IV. Den Æstetiske og Videnskabelige Side [The Capital of Greenland: IV: The Aesthetic and Scientific Aspect]’, Architekten 16, no. 26, 1914; Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Grønlands

NOTES

215

Hovedstad: V. “All Sorts and Conditions of Men” [The Capital of Greenland: V: “All Sorts and Conditions of Men”]’, Architekten 16, no. 28, 1914; Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: VI. Turist-Værdien [The Capital of Greenland: VI: The Tourist Value]’, Architekten 16, no. 30, 1914; Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: VII. Eskimo Problemet [The Capital of Greenland: VII: The Eskimo Problem]’, Architekten 16, no. 34, 1914; Alfred J. Råvad, ‘Architekten Som Sociolog: K. Store Bølger Og Små [The Architect as Sociologist: K. Large Waves and Small]’, Architekten 14, no. 6, 1911. 4 Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: VII’. 5 Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: VII’, 353. 6 Råvad, ‘Architekten Som Sociolog’. 7 ‘Polarlandenes dronning’ Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: IV’, 276. 8 In Danish, this is referred to as ‘Grønnegårdsideen’. 9 Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: IV’, 22. 10 ‘et helhedsbillede af Grønlands fremtid og drømmer om at støbe den i en ny form, hvis ideer er hentet i en vestlig, teknologisk højt udviklet civilisation’. Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’, 21. 11 Denmark, ‘Lov Om Styrelse Af Kolonierne i Grønland m.m. [Law on the Governance of the Colonies in Greenland Etc.]’, Pub. L. No. 139–1908 (1908). 12 Per Walsøe and Pernille Kløvedal Helweg, Goodbye Thule: The Compulsory Relocation in 1953 (Copenhagen: Tiderne skifter, 2003). 13 Mads Lidegaard, Grønlands historie [History of Greenland] (Copenhagen: Arnold Busck, 1991); Poul Lyager, Om byplan i Grønland: mellem præstestyre og hjemmestyre [On Urban Planning in Greenland – Between Clerical Rule and Home Rule], vol. 2002, Byplanhistoriske Noter 46 (Copenhagen: Dansk Byplanlaboratorium, 2002). 14 Per F. Skjelbo, Og så vender vi kajakken?: om bosætning, planlægning og arealforvaltning i Grønland [Turning the Kayak? On Settlement, Planning and Land Management in Greenland], Serie om Nordatlantiske forhold 12 (Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, 1995). 15 Axel Kjær Sørensen, Denmark-Greenland in the Twentieth Century, Monographs on Greenland, Meddelelser Om Grønland. 34 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2007). 16 Grønlandskommisionen, Grønlandskommissionens betænkning [Report from the Greenland Commission] (Copenhagen: Grønlandskommisionen, 1950). 17 Hugo Lund Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland, Narssaq, Sukkertoppen, Egedesminde, Godthaab [Proposed Urban Plans in Western Greenland, Narssaq, Sukkertoppen, Egedesminde, Godthaab] (Copenhagen: Grønlandsdepartementet, 1951). 18 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements, 39. 19 Kåre Hendriksen, ‘GTO Og Det Grønlandske Samfund [GTO and the Greenlandic Society]’, (Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation, 20 October 2015), https://knr.gl/da/radio/gto-og-det-gr%C3%B8nlandske-samfund2del-20102015. 20 Lidegaard, Grønlands historie; Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’; Hendriksen, ‘GTO Og Det Grønlandske Samfund’. 21 Mads Lidegaard, ‘Grønland 1950–1986 [Greenland 1950–1986]’, in Grønland – i går – i dag – i morgen [Greenland – Yesterday – Today – Tomorrow], ed.

216

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Poul Erik Skriver (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1986); Lidegaard, Grønlands historie. 22 Skjelbo, Og så vender. 23 Lidegaard, ‘Grønland 1950–1986’. 24 Hendriksen, ‘GTO Og Det Grønlandske Samfund’. 25 Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland; See also Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland. 26 ‘En grønlandsk by kan ikke få samme form og arkitektoniske udtryk som en dansk by.’ Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland, 37. 27 ‘Byplantradition’ Skjelbo, Og så vender; Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland. 28 Hans Erling Langkilde, ‘Grønland under Forvandling [Changing Greenland]’, Arkitektur, 1968; United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, National Monograph Submitted by the Delegation of Denmark, Add. 1: Den Fysiske Planlægning i Grønland [The Physical Planning in Greenland] (Geneva: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 1978). 29 Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’. 30 Hendriksen, ‘GTO Og Det Grønlandske Samfund’; Grønlandskommissionen, Grønlandskommissionens betænkning: 1, 1: Indledning; Placering og udformning af bebyggelser; Den fremtidige anlægsvirksomhed [Report from the Greenland Commission: 1, 1: Introduction; Placement and Design of Settlements; The Future Construction Programme], vol. 1, 1 (Copenhagen: Grønlandskommissionen, 1950). 31 Skjelbo, Og så vender. 32 Skjelbo, Og så vender. 33 Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland. 34 Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland. 35 Hendriksen, ‘GTO Og Det Grønlandske Samfund’. 36 Madsen, Grønlandske Boliger. 37 Madsen, Grønlandske Boliger. 38 Grønlandsudvalget, ‘Betænkning fra Grønlandsudvalget af 1960 [Report from the Greenland Committee of 1960]’ (Copenhagen: Ministeriet for Grønland, 1964). 39 Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’. 40 Madsen, Grønlandske Boliger. 41 Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’. 42 Skriver, ‘Grønland i Focus’. 43 Rosendahl, Kalaallit Nunaat. 44 Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’. 45 Skriver, ‘Grønland i Focus’; Grønlandsministeriet, Betænkning Vedrørende GTO’s Fremtid [Report on the Future of GTO] (Nuuk: Grønlandsministeriet, 1984), https://www.elov.dk/media/betaenkninger/Betaenkning_vedroerende_ gtos_fremtid.pdf. 46 ‘farverigt, robust, tæt, men lavt’ Rosendahl, Kalaallit Nunaat, 31; GTO, Grønlands Boligbyggeri i 1970’erne (Greenland’s Housing in the 1970s) (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1972). 47 Rosendahl, Kalaallit Nunaat. 48 Klaus Georg Hansen, ‘The Aluminium Smelter Project in Greenland – New Aspects of an Industrialisation Process?’, in Urbanization and the Role of Housing in the Present Development Process in the Arctic, ed. Klaus Georg

NOTES

217

Hansen, Søren Bitsch and Lyudmila Zalkind, vol. 2013, Nordregio Report 3 (Stockholm: Nordregio, 2013). 49 Hanne Holm Andersen and Birger Lilja Kristoffersen, ‘Planlægning i et Kæmpe Lille Land [Planning in a Giant Small Country]’, Byplan 63, no. 3, 2011. 50 Rosendahl, Kalaallit Nunaat; Kai Lemberg, ‘Investeringsplanlægning [Investment Planning]’, in 6 Foredrag Om Planlægningsspørgsmål [6 Lectures on the Issue of Planning] (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1958). 51 Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland. 52 Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland. 53 Grønlands Byggevæsen, ‘20 Års Jubilæum for Selvbyggerhuset [Twenty Year Anniversary of the Self-Build House]’, GB Information, 1993, http://www. byginfo.gl/media/1324/1993-nr-36-gb_information.pdf. 54 Hendriksen, ‘GTO Og Det Grønlandske Samfund’. 55 Gunnar Rosendahl, ‘Et teknisk udviklet samfund [A Technically Developed Society]’, in Grønland i går – i dag – i morgen, ed. Poul Erik Skriver (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1986). 56 Rosendahl, ‘Et teknisk udviklet samfund [A Technically Developed Society]’. 57 ‘Der fandtes således dengang ingen grønlandske bybygnings- eller husbygningstraditioner, der kunne danne grundlag for en rimelig og hensigtsmæssig fysisk planlægning, og som kunne tilgodese en forventet voldsom, fremtidig samfundsudvikling.’ United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, National Monograph Submitted by the Delegation of Denmark, Add. 1: Den Fysiske Planlægning i Grønland, 8. 58 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) conference: ‘Applied Techniques for Cold Environments’ in Anchorage. Georg Pedersen, Gunnar Rosendahl and Hans Ølgaard, Rejse Til Alaska [Travel to Alaska] (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, May 1978);Gunnar Rosendahl, ‘Alaska – 5 År Efter [Alaska – Five Years Later]’ (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1985). 59 Pedersen, Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse Til Alaska; Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse Til Sibirien; Pedersen, Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse til NWT; Gunnar P Rosendahl, Rejse til Kinas kolde egne; Rejse til Grønland: efteråret 1980 : et kinesisk genbesøg, efteråret 1981 (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1983); Rosendahl, ‘Alaska’; Pedersen, Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse Til Alaska; See also Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland. 60 Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse Til Sibirien, 1. 61 Pedersen, Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse Til Alaska; See also Rosendahl, ‘Alaska’. 62 ‘Hovedsynspunktet har været noget i retning af, at trods al respekt for nationale eller etniske særpræg (som dog ganske naturligt ikke er så udpræget hos mange amerikanere, der selv har måttet opgive deres nationalitet for at blive amerikanere) vil det være forkert – eller endog umuligt – at holde et folk tilbage i udvikling mod højere levefod – blot for disse særprægs skyld.’ Pedersen, Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse Til Alaska, 12. 63 Pedersen, Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse til NWT. 64 Skjelbo, Og så vender. 65 Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland.

218

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66 Rita Heilmann, ‘Lokale Impulser Til En Bedre Udvikling (Local Impulses for a Bette Development)’, Arkitekten, no. 20, 1970. 67 Skriver, ‘Grønland i Focus’; Finn Lynge, ‘Beslutningsprocessen i Det Grønlandske Byggeri [Decision Making in Greenlandic Construction]’, Arkitekten, no. 23, 1970. 68 ‘Patroniserende koloniherrementalitet’. Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland: 51. 69 ‘har vi holdt møder med befolkningen, mere tænkt som en gestus, en symbolsk handling’, Lyager (2002: 43). 70 ‘GTO fik som følge heraf ord for at ordne tingene henover hovedet på befolkningen’; Hans Ølgaard, ‘Det Tekniske Miljø i Grønland [The Technical Environment in Greenland]’, Tidsskriftet Grønland 24, no. 5, 1976: 154. 71 Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland. 72 Skriver, ‘Grønland i Focus’; Peter L Stephensen, ‘Pyramiden og Grønlænderne [The Pyramid and the Greenlanders]’, Arkitekten, no. 23, 1970. 73 ‘Vi savner kendskab til grønlændernes forestillingsverden, traditioner, familieliv og vaner. Vi får tydeligt indtryk af at de lever i en verden forskellig fra vores, men hvori forskellighederne består kan vi kun ane.’ Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland, 43. 74 ‘Der drives en mængde videnskabeligt undersøgelsesarbejde på Grønland, geologi, flora, fauna, klima og glaciologi, men ingen synes at interessere sig for de mennesker som al fremtidig udvikling må baseres på’, Lyager, Om byplan i Grønland, 43. 75 Grønlandsministeriet, Betænkning Vedrørende GTO. 76 Kirsten Birk, ‘Denmark in Greenland [Danmark in Grønland]’, Arkitektur DK, no. 4, 2012; Hendriksen, ‘GTO Og Det Grønlandske Samfund’. 77 Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’; Langkilde, ‘Grønland under Forvandling’; See also Birk, ‘Denmark in Greenland’; Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland. 78 Skriver, ‘Grønland i Focus’. 79 ‘Det er en fremmed og fjendsk verden, man bygger. Man har ikke drømt om at tilpasse byen og boligerne efter de særlige grønlandske vilkår eller grønlændernes ønsker. Man forlanger tværtimod ganske åbent, at det er grønlænderne, der skal tilpasse sig de nye omgivelser.’ Skriver, ‘Grønland i Focus’, 540. 80 Marie-Louise Deth Petersen, ‘The Impact of Public Planning on Ethnic Culture: Aspects of Danish Resettlement Policies in Greenland after World War II’, Arctic Anthropology 23, no 1, 1986; Ølgaard, ‘Det Tekniske Miljø’, 150. 81 E.g. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977). 82 ‘Det er en uløselig opgave udelukkende ad stringent, logisk vej at motivere eller at fastlægge den fysiske planlægningsfilosofi og bybygningens fremtidige, fysiske og psykiske virkninger på byens beboere. At forsøge herpå ville være menneskeligt selvfornægtende, for livet selv er evigt foranderligt.’ Economic Commission for Europe, National Monograph Submitted by the Delegation of Denmark, Add. 3: Boligbyggeri [Housing] (Geneva: Economic Commission for Europe, 1978), 5. 83 Sejersen, ‘Urbanization’. 84 Sejersen; Sørensen and Forchhammer, ‘Byen Og Bygden’; Dybbroe, ‘Is the Arctic’.

NOTES 85

219

Tróndheim, ‘Greenlandic Urbanization’; Bo Wagner Sørensen, Hans Lange and Hulda Zober Holm, ‘Nuuk: Fremmedgørelse i storbyen? [Nuuk: Alienation in the Big City?]’, Tidsskriftet Grønland 51, no 1, 2003. 86 Adam Grydehøj, ‘Constructing a Centre on the Periphery: Urbanization and Urban Design in the Island City of Nuuk, Greenland’, Island Studies Journal 9, no. 2 (2014): 205–22; Niels Bennetzen, ‘Block P – and the G60 Policy’, in Proceedings of the 10th Artek Event Urbanisation and Infrastructure in the Arctic Challenges to Sustainability (Sisimiut: Technical University of Denmark, 2014); Lone van Deurs, ‘Grønland – Historie – Isfjelde – Huse [Greenland – History – Icebergs – Houses]’, Landskab, no. 1–2, 2001. 87 Bennetzen, ‘Block P’. 88 Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland. 89 ‘Det bliver mere og mere klart, at der består en modsætning mellem kravene om en hurtig forbedring af levefoden og de sociale forhold i Grønland og ønsket om, at den grønlandske befolkning selv skal medvirke aktivt i udviklingsprocessen … Et væsentligt problem i dagens Grønland er i højere grad at få befolkningen engageret i udviklingen, uden at reformarbejdets tempo derved formindskes væsentligt.’ Economic Commission for Europe, National Monograph, Add. 1, Denmark, 13. 90 Sørensen, Denmark-Greenland. 91 Lidegaard, Grønlands historie. 92 Sørensen and Forchhammer, ‘Byen Og Bygden’. 93 Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland; Aksel Kjær Sørensen, ‘Grønland – historie (1500–1979) [Greenland – History (1500–1979)]’, Den Store Danske (Gyldendal), 21 October 2010, http://denstoredanske.dk/Geografi_og_ historie/Grønland/Grønlands_samfund,_kultur_og_historie/Grønland_ (Historie)/Grønland_(Historie_-_1500–1721). 94 Kåre Hendriksen, ‘Driving Forces in the Greenlandic Urbanization’, in Proceedings of the 10th Artek Event: Urbanisation and Infrastructure in the Arctic Challenges to Sustainability (Urbanisation and Infrastructure in the Arctic Challenges to Sustainability, Sisimiut: Technical University of Denmark, 2014), 127–43; Tom Greiffenberg, ‘Physical Planning in Greenland’, in Management, Technology and Human Resources Policy in the Arctic (The North) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996). 95 Carruth, ‘Place as Progressive Optic’. 96 ‘Helhedsbilledet af byerne må også være et synligt udtryk for den arbejdsdeling og orden, der er nødvendig, for at byen kan fungere effektivt. De vigtigste fællesinstitutioner bør gøre sig gældende I bybilledet som en arkitektonisk kerne.’ Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland, 38. 97 Vagn Laage, ‘De Grønlandske Byer [The Towns of Greenland]’, Arkitekten, no. 20, 1970; Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’. 98 ‘Det er karakteristisk i flere af de mindre byer, at etagehusbebyggelserne synes placeret ud fra hensyn, som ikke er synlige eller på anden måde forståelige.’ Skriver, ‘Grønland i Focus’, 540. 99 Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’, 35. 100 Gunnar P. Rosendahl, ‘The Technical Development’, in Greenland: Past and Present, ed. Knud Hertling et al. (Copenhagen: Edvard Henriksen, 1970), 342. 101 ‘karakteristiske og smukke træk i bybilledet’ Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland, 37.

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‘tårnhøje in situ støbte underetage’ Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’, 144. Birk, ‘Denmark in Greenland’. Hendriksen, ‘GTO Og Det Grønlandske Samfund’. ‘Planerne omsættes umiddelbart til tredimensional virkelighed uden den lemlæstelse, som oftest følger med en sendrægtig procedures evindelige justeringer.’ Langkilde, ‘Grønland under Forvandling’, 142. 106 Tom Greiffenberg, ‘Physical Planning’. 107 Hendriksen, ‘GTO Og Det Grønlandske Samfund’. 108 See Scott, Seeing Like a State. 109 Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland. 110 ‘byerne er i højere grad manipulerede strukturer. De fortæller ikke altid om, hvad folk i Grønland ville, men langt snarere om, hvad man ville med folk i Grønland.’ Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’, 19. 111 Sejersen, ‘Urbanization’, 171. 112 Tróndheim, ‘Greenlandic Urbanization’; Bo Wagner Sørensen, ‘Nuuk’, Tidsskriftet Antropologi 48, 2003. 113 Rosendahl, Kalaallit Nunaat. 114 E.g. Rosendahl; Tom Greiffenberg, ‘Physical Planning’. 115 Birk, ‘Denmark in Greenland’. 116 Economic Commission for Europe, National Monograph, Add. 1, Denmark. 117 See also Tom Greiffenberg, ‘Physical Planning’. 118 E.g. Koch, ‘Boligbyggeri i Grønland’; Skriver, ‘Grønland i Focus’. 119 E.g. Vindum, ‘Greenland Revisited’. 120 Birk, ‘Denmark in Greenland’, 9. 121 Birk, ‘Denmark in Greenland’. 122 E.g. Koch, ‘Boligbyggeri i Grønland’. 123 ‘Det nyere byggeri i Grønland afspejler nok de tanker, der hersker verden over, men efter nogle begyndervanskeligheder har det dog fået sit grønlandske særpræg.’ Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse Til Sibirien, s. 5; see also Gunnar P. Rosendahl, ‘The Technical Development Work in Greenland: An Overview’, in Proceedings of the Specialty Conference on the Northern Community: A Search for a Quality Environment, ed. Ted S. Vinson (New York: American Society of Civil Engineers, 1981), 38–53. 124 Koch, ‘Boligbyggeri i Grønland’. 125 Vindum, ‘Greenland Revisited’, 3. 126 Henning Jensen, ‘Man Gjorde et Barn Fortræd [A Child Was Hurt]’, Arkitekten, no. 15, 1970, 456. 127 Grydehøj, ‘Constructing a Centre’, 218. 128 Grydehøj, ‘Constructing a Centre’, 218. 129 https://sermitsiaq.ag/kl/node/171715. 130 Langkilde, ‘Grønlandske byer’. 131 Kommuneqarfik Sermersooq, ‘Nuuk – Arktisk Hovedstad: Hovedstadsstrategi for Nuuk’ (Nuuk: Kommuneqarfik Sermersooq, 2016), http://sermersooq2028.gl/download/hovedstadsstrategi/hovedstadstrategi_ dk.pdf. 132 Råvad, ‘Grønlands Hovedstad: I’. 133 Grønlandskommissionen, Betænkning. 134 Andersen et al., Byplanforslag i Vestgrønland; Flemming Teisen, ‘Den Lokale Planlægning [Local Planning]’, in 6 Foredrag Om Planlægningsspørgsmål 102 103 104 105

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[6 Lectures on the Issue of Planning] (Copenhagen: Grønlands Tekniske Organisation, 1958), 29–36. 135 Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland, 67. 136 Sørensen, ‘Perceiving Landscapes’. 137 Kommuneqarfik Sermersooq, ‘Nuuk – Arktisk Hovedstad’. 138 Kommuneqarfik Sermersooq, 9. 139 Sejersen, ‘Urbanization’. 140 Lyager, Om Byplan i Grønland. 141 Hendriksen, ‘Driving Forces’, 131. 142 Hendriksen and Hoffmann, ‘Settlement Patterns’, 188. 143 Økonomisk Råd/Aningaasaqarnermut Siunnersuisoqatigiit, ‘Demografi Og Boligbehov Frem Mod 2040 [Demography and Housing Need towards 2040]’ (Nuuk: Økonomisk Råd/Aningaasaqarnermut Siunnersuisoqatigiit, 2014). 144 Hendriksen, ‘Driving Forces’, 131. 145 Government of Greenland, ‘Turismeudvikling i Grønland – Hvad skal der til? : National Sektorplan for Turisme 2016–2020.’ (Nuuk: Naalakkersuisut/ Government of Greenland, 2016). 146 Hendriksen and Hoffmann, ‘Settlement Patterns’. 147 Hendriksen and Hoffmann, ‘Settlement Patterns’.

Chapter 7 1 McCannon, History of the Arctic, 207. 2 Schoenauer, ‘Fermont’, 10. 3 Jan Gehl, Livet Mellem Husene [Life between the Buildings], 1. udgave (Copenhagen: Arkitektens Forlag, 1971); Pressman and Zepic, Planning in Cold. 4 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements. 5 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements, 108. 6 Klaus Dodds and Mark Nuttall, The Arctic: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 42. 7 Hemmersam, ‘Ruins and Monuments’. 8 Carl Johan Ohsten, ‘Nedlæggelsen Af Kulminebyen Qutdligssat [The Closure of the Coal Mining Town Qutdligssat]’, Tidsskriftet Grønland 25, no. 6 (1977). 9 Quins, ‘The Lengthening Shadow’. 10 Larsen and Fondahl, Arctic Human Development. 11 Coates, ‘Rediscovery’, 25. 12 E.g. Grant, ‘Errors Exposed’. 13 Andrew Bond, ‘Urban Planning and Design in the Soviet North: The Noril’sk Experience’, in Cities Designed for Winter, ed. Jorma Mänty and Norman Pressman (Helsinki: Building Book, 1988); Bond; Gutheim, ‘A Livable’. 14 Rosendahl, ‘Technical Development Work’. 15 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Human Settlements, 70. 16 Dodds and Nuttall, The Arctic. 17 E.g. Charles Waldheim, Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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18 E.g. Mike Jenks, ‘From the Compact City to the Defragmented City’, in EcoUrbanity: Towards Well-Mannered Built Environments, ed. Darko Radovic (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).

Chapter 8 1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Gordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape (London: Architectural Press, 1961). Diane Rowntree, ‘Ralph Erskine (Obituary)’, The Guardian, 22 March 2005. J. M. Richards et al., ‘The New Empiricism, Sweden’s Latest Style’, Architectural Review 1947, no. 101 (June 1947). Kenneth Frampton, ‘Prospects for a Critical Regionalism’, Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 20 (1983); Elin Haugdal, ‘Boligblokker i Hardt Klima. Hesteskoblokka i Hammerfest Og Ormen Långe i Svappavaara [Housing Blocks in Harsh Weather. “The Horseshoe Block” in Hammerfest and “Ormen Långe” in Svappavaara]’, Nordlit, 10 December 2015. McGowan, ‘(Skiing) Architect’; Graeme Wynn, ‘“The True North Strong and Choked with Ice”? History, Nordicity and Environmental Change in Canada’, Zeitschrift Für Kanada-Studien 29, no. 9 (2009); Birk, ‘Arctic Architecture?’; Melissa Jane Kenny, ‘Urban Planning in the Arctic: Historic Uses & the Potential for a Resilient Urban Future’, in Arctic Yearbook 2017, ed. Lassi Heininen, H. Exner-Pirot and J. Plouffe (Akureyri: Northern Research Forum, 2017). van Ginkel, ‘New Towns’, 305. Ralph Erskine, ‘Subarktisk Elementarbok [Subarctic Book of Elements]’, Att Bo 2 (April 1963). Ralph Erskine, ‘Architecture and Town Planning in the North’, Polar Record 14, no. 89 (1968): 167. Erskine, ‘Architecture and Town Planning in the North’, 167. Sabatino and Liscombe, Canada, 153. Ralph Erskine, ‘The Sub-Arctic Habitat’, in CIAM ’59 in Otterlo: Arbeitsgruppe Für Die Gestaltung Soziologischer Und Visueller Zusammenhänge [CIAM ’59 in Otterlo: Working Group for the Formation of Sociological and Visual Interactions], ed. O. Newman (Stuttgart: Karl Krämer Verlag, 1961), 59. Erskine, ‘Architecture and Town Planning’. Mats Egelius, Ralph Erskine : The Humanist Architect, vol. 11–12, A.D. Profiles (London: Architectural Design, 1977), 792. McGowan, ‘(Skiing) Architect’; Birk, ‘Arctic Architecture?’; Liscombe, ‘Modernist Ultimate Thule’; Hemmersam, ‘Arctic Architectures’. Liscombe, ‘Modernist Ultimate Thule’, 78. Erskine, ‘Architecture and Town Planning’, 166. Erskine, ‘Architecture and Town Planning’, 166. Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’, 542. Jull, ‘South Camp Inn’. Jouko Mähönen, ‘Contradictions’, Habitat International 13, no. 2 (1989).

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22 Børve, ‘Hus Og Husgrupper’. 23 Norman Pressman, ‘The Search for Northern Settlement Form: Dilemmas and Directions’, Habitat International 13, no. 2 (1989). 24 Filin, Yemelina, and Savinov, Arktika. 25 Davies, ‘Winter Cities’. 26 Murav’ev and Rimskaya-Korsakova, ‘Town Construction’, 85; Nepokoichitskii, ‘Characteristic Aspects’; Bond, ‘Noril’sk’. 27 Bond, ‘Noril’sk’, 269; Litskevich et al., ‘Housing’. 28 Dear and Clark, ‘Planning a New’, 50. 29 Palle Dyreborg and Poul Jensen, ‘Nordatlantisk Arkitektur [North Atlantic Architecture]’, Arkitektur DK, no. 6/7 (1995): 408. 30 Sheppard and White, Many Norths, 37. 31 Pressman and Zepic, Planning in Cold. 32 Madeleine Stout et al., ‘Celebrated, Not Just Endured:” Rethinking Winter Cities’, Geography Compass 12, no. 8 (2018). 33 Gehl, Livet Mellem Husene; Gehl; Rhys Phillips, ‘Cold Comfort’, Building, 19 February 2016, https://building.ca/feature/cold-comfort/. 34 Pressman and Zepic, Planning in Cold. 35 Davies, ‘Winter Cities’. 36 William C. Rogers and Jeanne K. Hanson, The Winter City Book: A Survival Guide for the Frost Belt (Edina, MN: Dorn Books, 1980); Norman Pressman, ‘Images of the North: Cultural Interpretations of Winter’, in Winter Communities (Winnipeg: The Institute of Urban Studies, 1987). 37 In 2005, the WCA became the Winter Cities Institute (WCI), which continues its international urban advocacy work today. 38 Pressman and Zepic, Planning in Cold, 11. 39 Pressman and Lauder, ‘Resource Towns’; Pressman and Zepic, Planning in Cold. 40 Pressman and Zepic, Planning in Cold, 129. 41 Stout et al., ‘Celebrated’. 42 Pressman and Zepic, Planning in Cold, 13. 43 Pressman, ‘The Search’. 44 Phillips, ‘Cold Comfort’. 45 Norman Pressman, ‘The Idea of Winterness: Embracing Ice and Snow’, in Sense of the City: An Alternative Approach to Urbanism, ed. Mirko Zardini (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2006). 46 Pressman, ‘The Search’, 131–2. 47 Stout et al., ‘Celebrated’. 48 Rosendahl, Kalaallit Nunaat. 49 Rogers and Hanson, The Winter City Book; Gutheim, ‘A Livable’, 113. 50 Ridge, ‘General Principles’, 561–2. 51 Irving B. Jensen, ‘Arktisk Bybygning [Arctic City Building]’, Landskab 2001, no. 1–2 (2001): 25. 52 Jim Davies, ‘An Entire City under Glass’, Popular Science, March (1970). 53 Davies; Edwin B. Crittenden, ‘Design of the Built Environment in Cold Climates’, in The Northern Community: A Search for a Quality Environment, ed. Ted S. Vinson (New York: The American Society of Civil Engineers, 1981). 54 Slipchenko, Siberia 1971.

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55 Pedersen, Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse til NWT; See also Fournier and Ejesiak, ‘Un-Planning’; Waldron, ‘Frobisher Bay’, 30. 56 Government of the Northwest Territories, ‘Town Planning’. 57 Pedersen, Rosendahl and Ølgaard, Rejse til NWT. 58 E.g. ‘Recently Announced’. 59 Odnovalov and Tsimbal, ‘Special Architectural Design’. 60 Filin, Yemelina and Savinov, Arktika; Bond, ‘Noril’sk’. 61 ‘Arctic Cities’, Architectural Design 41 (June 1971). 62 Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 9. 63 Erskine, ‘Architecture and Town Planning’, 169. 64 Rosendahl, Kalaallit Nunaat; United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, National Monograph, Add. 1, Denmark, 11; Government of the Northwest Territories, ‘Town Planning’; Bond, ‘Noril’sk’. 65 Government of the Northwest Territories, ‘Town Planning’, 53. 66 Kalemeneva, ‘Goroda’. 67 Johan Schimanski, ‘Reading the Future North’, in Future North: The Changing Arctic Landscapes, ed. Peter Hemmersam and Janike Kampevold Larsen, 1 edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 17. 68 Hemmersam, ‘Arctic Architectures’; Jull, ‘Toward a Northern’; David A. Garcia and Thomas Chevalier Bøjstrup, Architecture and Extreme Environments/The Arctic/2015 (Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Design and Conservation, 2016). 69 E.g. ‘Svalbard Science Centre’, a+u: Architecture and Urbanism, no. 8 (2006).

Chapter 9 1 2 3 4

Sheppard and White, Many Norths. Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk and Schiesser, ‘Beyond Wilderness’, 78. Dybbroe, Dahl and Müller-Wille, ‘Dynamics’, 122. E.g. Richard Burdett et al., The Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society (London ; New York: Phaidon, 2007); Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, ‘The “Urban Age” in Question’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3 (2014). 5 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 1. 6 Neil Brenner and Nikos Katsikis, ‘Is the Mediterranean Urban?’, in Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, ed. Neil Brenner (Berlin: Jovis, 2014). 7 Amin and Thrift, Cities, 1; Nyseth, ‘Arctic Urbanization’, 59. 8 Neil Brenner, ‘The Hinterland, Urbanized?’, Architectural Design (July/August 2016): 125. 9 E.g. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Seeing Like a City (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). 10 Jilly Traganou, Travel, Space, Architecture, Design and the Built Environment Series (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 6. 11 Traganou, Travel, Space, Architecture, 6.

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12 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 13 Patsy Healey, ‘The Universal and the Contingent: Some Reflections on the Transnational Flow of Planning Ideas and Practices’, Planning Theory 11, no. 2 (1 May 2012): 188. 14 Coates, ‘Rediscovery’, 42. 15 Brenner, ‘Hinterland’. 16 Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 63. 17 Andrew Taylor, ‘Introduction: Settlements at the Edge’, in Settlements at the Edge : Remote Human Settlements in Developed Nations, ed. Andrew Taylor et al. (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016). 18 Dodds and Nuttall, The Arctic, 202; See also Kathrin Stephen, ‘Societal Impacts of a Rapidly Changing Arctic’, Current Climate Change Reports 4, no. 3 (2018). 19 Robinson, Ordinary Cities, 114; See also AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse, New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). 20 Amale Andraos and Nora Akawi, eds., The Arab City: Architecture and Representation (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016); Bill Freund, The African City: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); James van Alstine and William Davies, ‘Understanding Arcticness: Comparing Resource Frontier Narratives in the Arctic and East Africa’, in Arcticness Power and Voice from the North, ed. Ilan Kelman (London: UCL Press, 2017). 21 Anthony O’Connor, The African City (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). 22 Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism’; Lee E. Weissling, ‘Arctic Canada and Zambia: A Comparison of Development Processes in the Fourth and Third Worlds’, Arctic 42, no. 3 (1989); Bravo, ‘The Postcolonial Arctic’. 23 Michael Dear, ‘Comparative Urbanism’, Urban Geography 26, no. 3 (1 May 2005). 24 Ananya Roy, ‘Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning’, Journal of the American Planning Association 71, no. 2 (2005). 25 Bond, ‘Noril’sk’, 12. 26 E.g. Anthony D. King, ‘Postcolonial Cities’, in Online Elsevier Encyclopedia, 2009, http://booksite.elsevier.com/brochures/hugy/SampleContent/ Postcolonial-Cities.pdf. 27 E.g. Petrov, ‘Marginal Places’. 28 Wormbs, ‘Introduction’, 2. 29 Arbo et al., ‘Arctic Futures’; Smith, The New North. 30 Laruelle, ‘Three Waves’. 31 Bravo, ‘The Postcolonial Arctic’. 32 Bravo, ‘The Postcolonial Arctic’, 101. 33 Robinson, Ordinary Cities. 34 Robinson, Ordinary Cities, 110. 35 E.g. Nyseth, ‘Arctic Urbanization’; Bravo, ‘The Postcolonial Arctic’.

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INDEX

Aasiaat 124 Abele, Frances 89 Aikhal 112 Aklavik 96 Alaska geography 10 history 13–14, 48, 86 Indigenous 21–4 learning 134–6 postcolonial 162 provisional 64 research 31 urbanism 4, 112, 177 Alaska Highway 86, 94 Alaska Native Claims Settlement 16, 136 Anchorage 23, 134–5, 164, 177 Anlægsudvalget 129 anti-colonial sentiment 22, 140, 159 Apex Hill 95, 97 Arctic (Polar) Circle Canada 90, 107 circumpolar 10 Russia 15, 43, 46, 73, 77 Scandinavia 17 Arctic Council 10 Arctic Countries 10, 12, 21–2, 134 Arctic (Northern) Studies 11, 32 Arctic urban nucleus 176, 181 Arkhangelsk 48, 79 assimilation Canada 86, 89, 109 Greenland 143 Indigenous 21–2 Inuit 13, 113 Soviet Union 13, 52, 72 Astro Hill 97, 110, 178 Avrorin, Nikolai 43, 45

Baffin Island 90, 94–5 Barents Region 33 Barrow (Utqiaġvik) 136 Beaufort Sea 94, 136 Begich Towers 177 perimeter (closed-contour) block 62, 64, 69, 147, 170 Blok P 139, 146, 162 Bond, Andrew 45, 170, 187 boom-and-bust 16, 107, 114 Bravo, Michael 189 Brenner, Neil 183 Bruun, Eske 137 Buckner Building 177 Budnikov, P. P. 180 building communism 51 Burnham, Daniel 116, 119 Børve, Anne Brit 170 Camp Century 28, 67 Canadian North Arctic narrative 34 economy 15, 21, 114 geography 85 Hamelin 11 history 86 housing 112 urbanism 38, 83, 85, 100, 109–10, 112, 115, 172 Canol pipeline 86 Capital of the Arctic 79, 150–2, 162, 187 Capital of Greenland 116, 149, 166 Carina Keskitalo 3, 35 centralization Greenland 14, 131, 133, 138, 140–1, 143, 152 NWT 91 Russia 53, 78, 82

248

INDEX

Chrétien, Jean 67, 112 Chukchi 52 City Beautiful 119, 158, 166 city image. See also mental map Fermont 100, 103 Murmansk 73, 76 Nuuk, 146–8 uses of 36–7 climate change Arctic narrative 1, 3, 11, 182, 185, 188–9 politics 162, 165 threat 30, 68, 82, 115 urbanism 4, 33 climate wall (wall-building) Erskine 170, 177 Fermont 102–7, 178 Hammerfest 172 Norilsk 63 Resolute Bay 99–100 Svappavaara 170 Tórshavn 172 urban nucleus 176 climatized. See also enclosed city 4 pedestrian walkway 110, 178 public urban space 63, 72, 110, 174, 177 semi-climatized dome 95 units under dome 180 coal mining 49, 153, 163 Coates, Ken 34, 85, 113, 164, 184 Cold War military installations 87, 95 politics 2, 55, 123 regional development 13 research 24, 158 colony 14, 16, 118, 122, 146, 149 Commission on Acclimatization of the Population in the Far North 61 Commission on the Problems of the North 60 Committee for the Northern Sea Route (Komsevmorput) 49 comparative urbanism 186 Copenhagen 123–4, 126–7, 129, 131, 139–4, 150 Cornwallis Island 98 cryolite mining 122–3

Danish Planning Laboratory (Dansk Byplanlaboratorium) 125 Dawson City 85–7, 89 decolonization 2, 14, 39 186 Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) 21, 88, 97 Department of Northern Affairs and National Ressources 88 Department of Public Works 95–6, 179 Department of Urban Planning in the Far North 61 depopulation 68, 79–80, 125 devolution, political 115, 165 Diefenbaker, John 86–9, 94, 97 Directorate for Greenland (Grønlands Styrelse) 127, 130 Distant Early Warning (DEW) line 94–5, 112 dome Frobisher Bay 95, 179 geodesic 179, 180 pneumatic 180 typology 176 urban 65, 110, 112, 176, 180 Ecological Arctic town 98–9 Egli, Ernst 24, 33, 96, 166–7 enclosed. See also climatized community 61, 65, 169, 178 courtyard 120, 175 shopping mall 61, 67, 170, 178 social/urban space 73, 99, 157, 172 town centre 26, 93, 110, 178 Engels dictum 50 environmental challenge 33, 79, 83, 176, 181 environmental concern 3, 15, 21, 93, 161, 165 environmental degradation 22, 114 environmental protection 89, 115, 159, 165, 185 Erikshavn 118, 149–50 Eskimo Housing Loan programme 91 Evenk 52 exceptionalism, Arctic 14, 27, 35, 187–8 Experimental Residential House of Aluminum and Plastics 63

INDEX exploration, Arctic/Polar 2, 9, 13, 24, 32, 49, 52 extreme Arctic climate 1, 24, 58 conditions 61 environment 28 landscape 181 Fairbanks 134 Faroe Islands 12, 17, 172 Fermont 83, 100–7, 111, 157, 159, 162, 172, 174, 178 Finland 1, 10, 12, 17, 27, 33, 53, 67, 134 First Nations 83, 92, 111 Five Corners square 77 fly-in-fly-out 79, 81, 105–6, 153, 164 forced labour 13, 46, 51, 62, 158. See also Gulag Fort McMurray 111 Fort Simpson 136 Frobisher Bay. See Iqaluit Astro Hill 110, 178–9 development plan 4, 83, 94–8, 100, 110, 113, 179 GTO visit 136 schools 181 Frobisher Development Group Committee 97 frontier of civilization 28 of climate change 3 community 3, 51, 86–7 of development 3, 14, 113, 188 myth 14, 82, 85 resource 3, 13, 16, 78, 108–9, 186 G-50 (Grønlandskommissionen) 123–5, 127, 129–30, 142, 152 G-60 (Grønlandsudvalget) 124–5, 139, 142, 145–6, 152 Gagnon 111, 163 garage district 74–5, 77–8, 95 Gavrilin 63 Gehl, Jan 159, 173, 175 Global Arctic 185 globalization 1, 23, 30, 160, 163, 182, 187 gold mining 13, 15, 85, 87

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gold rush 15–16, 87, 114 Gordon Robertson Education Centre (Inuksuk High School) 97. See also Papineau Gérin-Lajoie Le Blanc Greenland Commission (Grønlandskommissionen) 123–4, 133, 150. See also G-50 Greenland Council (Grønlandsrådet) 125, 129 Greenland Department (Gønlandsdepartementet) 125 Greenland Provincial Council 123 Greenlandicness 145–6 Grydehøj, Adam 146 Gulag. See also forced labour camp 51, 61–2, 71–3 historical phase 68 landscape 67 policy 51 system 51, 53, 59, 159 workforce 51, 158 Gutheim, Frederick 177 Hamelin, Luis Edmond 11–12, 85, 100, 162, 182 Hammerfest 172 Healey, Patsy 184, 189 Hendriksen, Kåre 152–3 Hesteskoblokka 172 High Arctic 17, 28, 33, 99, 169, 171 high Modernism 18–19, 21, 162. See also Modernism Home Rule (hjemmestyre) 127, 129, 132, 136, 140–1 housing programme. See also masshousing Canada 86, 92, 111 Greenland 130, 143 international 143 Soviet 54–9, 67 housing shortage Canada 95, 111 Greenland 132, 152 Soviet 54–5, 57 Hudson Bay 118 Hudson’s Bay Company 95 Iceland 10, 12–14, 17, 22, 29, 119 Ilimmarfik 146

250

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imaginary 3, 24, 34, 165, 167 Imaneq 148–9 Indigenous empowerment 22, 29, 159, 176 Indigenous groups 15–16, 24, 32, 52, 86, 88, 111, 164. See also Indigenous people Indigenous homeland Indigenous people. See also Indigenous groups assimilation 1–2, 13, 21–2, 52, 109 Canada 83, 88, 93, 109 colonialism 162 empowerment 29 of the North 2, 13, 158 Soviet 16, 52, 72 traditional 2, 3, 32 Indigenous rights 30, 53, 72, 83, 115, 162 Inni á Gøtu 172 International and Universal Exposition (Expo ‘67) 94, 97, 112, 179 Inuit Circumpolar Conference 140 Inuit Nunangat 33, 83 Iñupiat 136 Inuvik 89–90, 109, 113, 136, 163 Iqaluit 23, 97–8, 109, 188. See also Frobisher Bay iron mining 13, 17, 94, 100 Ivittuut 122

Kotzebue (Kikiktagruk) 136 Kucherenko, Vladimir 67

James Bay 94 Jarmund/Vigsnæs Arkitekter 181 Jull, Matthew 33, 64, 169

labour shortage 50, 59, 62, 69, 80 Labrador 10, 15, 83, 85–6, 94, 100–1, 108 Labrador City 103, 107 Labrador Trough 93, 100 Lagutenko, Vitaly 55 Laing, Arthur 112 Landsplanudvalg 129 Langkilde, Hans Erling 122, 127, 132, 138, 142–3 Laruelle, Marlene 22–3 Le Corbusier 67, 170 Le Mur Écran 102–3, 106, 162, 172. See also climate wall Leaf Rapids 93, 178 Lenin, Vladimir 49–50, 68 Leningrad 61, 134. See also St. Petersburg Leningrad Zonal Scientific Research and Planning Institute (LenZNIIEP) 4, 61, 63, 65–7, 134, 159, 170, 178, 180 Livable Winter Cities Association (WCA) 173, 175 liveability, urban 27, 45, 159–60, 162, 172–3, 176, 184 Lov for Grønland om arealanvendelse, byudvikling og bebyggelse 129 Luleå 26, 67, 170–7 Lyager, Poul 137–8

K-7 55–7 Kalaallit Niuerfiat (KNI) 141 Kalemeneva, Ekatarina 33, 57, 71, 180 Katuaq, cultural centre 145–6, 149 Khanty 52 Khibiny Mountains 43–4 Khrushchev, Nikita 45, 53–7, 67 Khrushchyovka 55 Kirovsk 46 Kiruna 164, 170 kit house 130, 132 Klondike 3, 15 Kola Bay 73, 76 Kola Peninsula 43, 48, 53, 67, 73, 79–81

MacKenzie River 89, 136 Main Administration of the Northern Sea Route (Glavsevmorput) 21, 49, 51–2, 59 Makkovik 86 Malik swimming pool 145, 148 Malmberget 164 Maniitsoq 125, 128 Many Norths (Sheppard and White) 12, 33, 110, 113, 115, 172, 182 mass-housing 53, 52, 159. See also housing programme Mauneluk Association 136 McCannon, John 51, 157 mental map 36. See also city image

INDEX Métis 52, 83 microclimate alleviation 107, 172 artificial beneficial 45, 102 favourable 73 generation of 73 improve/ameliorate 73, 176 outdoor 160, 170, 172 sheltered 61, 144, 166 tolerable 175 urban 61, 62 microrayon (microdistrict) 33, 58–9, 64, 69, 162, 170, 176, 178 military cities 71, 79 Millum Gilja 172 mining community/town 27, 32, 86, 90, 92–3, 106–7, 163, 170 Ministry of Greenland 131 Ministry of Housing (Denmark) 135 Modernism 18–21, 35, 93, 139, 159, 167, 188–9. See also high Modernism Modernist architecture 18, 26, 32, 67, 139, 166–7, 186 Modernist (urban) planning Canada 89, 91 Greenland 127, 138, 143, 149 international 19, 21, 159, 161, 173, 175, 186–7 Soviet 71 modernity 1, 15, 26, 91, 94, 108, 113, 161, 181 Monchegorsk 43, 54 mono-industrial town 50, 60, 80 Morisset, Lucie 91–2 Moscow Design Institute 55 Murmansk 43–5, 48–9, 54, 71, 73–9, 112, 158 Murmansk-St. Petersburg Railway 48, 67, 73 Nakasuk Elementary School 97 Nanisivik 90, 113 Nanortalik 118 Narsaq 124 Nenets 52 New Order (Nyordningen) 122–3, 134, 137, 139, 141–5

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new town (as in New Town Movement) 67, 70, 143, 157 Newfoundland and Labrador 15, 85, 94, 118 Nordic Council of Ministers 23, 27 nordicity 11–12, 182 Norilsk 62–4, 73, 82, 112, 164, 170, 176, 187 Norman Wells 86 North Pole 2–3 North Slope 16 Northern Fleet 71, 73, 78 Northern Sea Route 21, 49, 71, 73, 82 Northern Shipment policy 49, 59 northern (Arctic/polar) vernacular 109–10, 160 northernness 11, 66, 108, 157 Northwest Passage 98, 149 Northwest Territories (NWT) architecture 181 history 88 geography 10, 83 government of 171, 92–3, 97, 110–12 GTO visit 112–13, 136, 178 housing 92, 111 Inuit 91 planning 111, 136, 178–9, 180 railroad 88 settlement 85, 92 Northwest Territories Housing Corporation (NWTHC) 92 Norway architecture 172 Arctic state 1, 10 Barents Region 33 development programme 17, 158 economy 22 geostrategic importance 118 history, 12–3 mining 17 Sámi 17, 53 UNECE Symposium 134 urbanization 23 Nunatsiavut 15, 83 Nunatsinni Teknikkikkut Ingerlatsivik (Nuna-Tek) 129 Nunavut 10, 14–15, 29, 83, 97

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Nuuk Center 148, 150, 180 Nuussuaq 148, 151 Odnovalova, S. P. 63 old settlers 52 omni-building 97, 178–9 othering 11, 186 Otto, Frei 180 Paamiut 125 Papineau Gérin-Lajoie Le Blanc 97, 109, 113, 181 permafrost construction 62, 89, 92, 112, 134–5, 136, 160 definition of Arctic 10, 60 domes 110, 180 subarctic 10 thawing 82, 164 Pershin, N. 65, 180 Petrov, Andrey 68, 88, 92, 114–15 phenomenology 36, 184 Pivovarov, Y. 65, 180 Planning Expedition 124–6, 128–9, 133, 137, 141–2, 150 Polar Circle 15. See also Arctic Circle Polar-Alpine Botanical Garden 43–6, 73, 80, 158 Popov 63 Port Nelson 118 Post-Arctic City 189 Pressman, Norman 27, 33, 159, 170, 172–5 Problemy Severa (Problems of the North) 61, 112 propaganda 45, 51–2, 71 Prospekt Geroyev Severomortsev 76 Prospekt Kol’skiy 75–6 Prospekt Lenina 53, 76 Prospekt Metallurgov 54 Pyramiden 163 Qaanaaq 122 Qinngorput 148 Quebec geography 10, 85 Inuit relocation 99 Nunavik 83 politics 85, 162

INDEX settlements 83 towns 100–1, 106, 110–11, 163, 178 Québec Cartier Mining Company 101 Queen of the Polar Lands 116, 119, 150 Qullissat 153, 163 Radiofjeldet 132, 135, 144 , 147 Radisson 110, 178 Rea, Kenneth 21, 34, 89 Red Arctic 51–2 regional learning 34, 67, 112, 184 regionalism, critical 159, 167, 184 reindeer herding 13, 52 remoteness 3, 10, 35, 60, 114, 182 Resolute Bay 33, 83, 98–100, 107, 112, 159, 169, 171 resource exploitation 22–3, 50, 62, 85, 88, 115, 153 resource extraction Canada 39, 99–100, 112, 114 controversy 115, 165 development 1 economy 22, 114 Russia 48–50, 59–60, 81 resource frontier 3, 13, 16, 108, 186. See also frontier Roads to Resources 88 Robinson, Jennifer 186, 189 Rogers, William C. 173–4, 177 Rosendahl, Gunnar P. 27, 129, 131–5, 142, 145 Råvad, Alfred J. 116–24, 149–50, 158, 166–7, 170 Said, Edward 11–12, 184 Sámi 17, 52–3, 73 Sápmi 17 Scandinavia architecture 168, 177 geography 10, 78 history 16, 23, 134 postcolonial discourse 162 Sámi 24 settlements 31–2, 112, 185 visit from USSR 67 Scott, James C. 13, 20–1 Self-rule 116, 139, 141

INDEX Semersooq municipality 151–2 Severomorsk 71, 76, 79 Seward’s Success 4, 178 Sheppard, Adrian 107 Shields, Rob 11–12, 34, 37, 85, 94, 98 Shipkov 63 Shipkova 63 Shopping (Luleå) 67, 170–1, 177 Shtokman Gas Condensate project 79 Siorarsiofik 151 Sisimiut 125 sixtieth parallel 10, 85 Skjelbo, Per 127, 137 Skriver, Poul Erik 138, 142, 145 Slavin, Samuil V. 60, 64 small peoples of the North 52 snow accumulation 170, 181 snow clearance/removal 62, 93, 102, 144, 161 snowdrift 62, 73, 99, 109, 170 social engineering 13, 19–22, 69, 139, 143, 161–2, 164 Social-Economic Development Strategy for the Murmansk Oblast 79–80 socialist city 15, 53, 65 socialist realism 53 soften the North 1, 159 Soviet Academy of Construction and Architecture 61 sovietization 16, 52 St. Petersburg. See Leningrad 76 Stalin, Joseph 50, 53, 67 Stalinist architecture 45, 54–5, 62, 77, 158 standardization of construction 55, 57–8, 61, 68–9, 131 State Committee for Civil Construction and Architecture (Gosgrazhdanstroy) 58 State Committee for Construction (Gosstroy) 57–8, 61, 67 State Committee on Science and Technology 135 State Planning Committee (Gosplan) 50, 80 Subarctic Habitat 4, 26, 167, 169–70, 172, 176 Svalbard 17, 23, 49, 163, 181 Svalbard Science Center 181

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Svappavaara 26, 170 Sweden Arctic nation 10 Arctic settlements 163–4, 170 Barents Region 33 development policy 1, 17 Erskine 26, 100, 167, 169–70 geostrategic importance 118 history 12–13 invitation to USSR 67 Sámi 17, 53 UNECE symposium 27, 134 Sørensen, Bo Wagner 37, 151 Territories Equated to the Far North 46, 60 Third Programme of the Communist Party 50 Thule Air Base 95, 122 Tilsynsrådet 129 Tórshavn 172 tourism 16–17, 23, 87, 109, 114–15, 153, 165 Trans-Alaska Pipeline 16, 134 Trans-Siberian Railway 48 Tromsø 188 Trouschinsch 63 Trudeau, Pierre 67, 112 Tsimbal, M. B. 63, 65, 180 Tumbler Ridge 93 tæt-lav 132 Udachny 66, 159, 178 Ulitsa Kominterna 76 United Kingdom (UK) 67, 167, 172 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe 27, 68, 113, 134, 160 United States of America (US) Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act 16 aluminium industry 123 Arctic development 14 Arctic nation 1, 9, 10 economy 16, 22 frontier myth 85 geopolitical ambitions 87 history 16, 118, 122 Marshall Plan 124

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military 15, 67, 88, 94–5, 97, 122, 177 South Pole 180 tourists from 121 UNECE symposium 27, 134 urban planning 27, 38, 116, 119, 173 visit from USSR 67 Ural Mountains 49 Uranium City 111, 163 uranium mining 86, 114 urban age 182–3, 185 urban futures 2, 36, 114, 152, 166, 187–9 urbanity alter-urbanism 183, 185, 189 anthropological studies 32, 182 Arctic settlements 12, 182–3 European 149 Indigenous culture 32 infrastructure and 33

INDEX utilidor 89 utopian urbanism 4, 94, 150, 159, 161–2, 166, 180–1 van Ginkel, Blanche Lemco 110, 167 Vindum, Kjell 145 Wabush 101, 103, 107 Whitehorse 85, 96 Whittier 177–8 Winter Cities 4, 27, 33, 110, 159, 172–7, 184 World’s Columbian Exposition 119 Yakutsk 134 Yellowknife 85, 136 Yukon 10, 15, 83, 85, 87–8, 92 Yukon River 85 Ølgaard, Hans 135, 137, 145

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