Making the Arctic City

The History and Future of Urbanism in the Circumpolar North

Peter Hemmersam

• Editore: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350235885
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Arquitectura
• Categoria: Historia de la arquitectura

Making the Arctic City explores the unwritten history of city-building in the Arctic over the last 100 years. Spanning northern regions of North America, through Greenland, Svalbard to Russia, this is the first book to provide a truly circumpolar account of historical and contemporary architecture and urbanism in the Arctic – and it shows how the Arctic city offers valuable lessons for the post-colonial study of architectural and urban planning history elsewhere. Examining architects' and planners' designs for Arctic urban futures, it considers the impact of 20th-century models of urban design and planning in Arctic cities, and reveals how contemporary architectural approaches continue to this day to essentialize 'extreme' climate conditions and disregard the agency of Arctic city-dwellers – a critical perspective that is vital to the formulation of future design and planning practices in the region.

PART ONE

Framing the Arctic city

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 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 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

‘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, 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 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 ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART ONE: Framing the Arctic city
• PART TWO: Arctic urban development
• PART THREE: Constructing the Arctic city
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint