Cities and buildings are materializations of imaginaries of place. The Arctic is urbanizing, and Svalbard can help us understand how this realization takes place, and some of the diverging forms urbanization takes when translated into built form by architects and planners... Read »
Twentieth-century development policies in the Arctic played out differently across the region but often involved colonization, environmentally damaging resource extraction and urbanization of Indigenous peoples. These are uncomfortable dimensions of the history of development in the North... Read »
The entire urban planning history of Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland falls within living memory, and the history of urban design needs to be documented. We have studied the evolution of urban space design through selected residential projects from different periods of the country’s planning history... Read »
Architecture in Scandinavia’s Arctic north exists in a tension between place-specific approaches and globalizing and potentially homogenizing meta-narratives. Here, I will show how ‘Nordic architecture’ is constructed in the Arctic. We can start with the region’s geophysical qualities of snow and darkness... Read »
Arcticness (or Northernness) has been expressed in the planning and design of Arctic cities over the past century. This paper explores how the imaginary conveyed in this notion has influenced the urbanism and architecture of northern communities in different ways... Read »
Making the Arctic City explores the unwritten history of city-building in the Arctic over the last 100 years... Read »
The interdisciplinary Future North project experimentally investigates the territories and landscapes of the High North or Subarctic regions of Northern Europe. It studies the relationship between people and their environments and attempts to map the ›future‹ landscapes that are developed through both social and individual agency... Read »
The changing Arctic is of broad political concern and is being studied across many fields. This book investigates ongoing changes in the Arctic from a landscape perspective. It examines settlements and territories of the Barents Sea Coast, Northern Norway, the Russian Kola Peninsula, Svalbard and Greenland from an interdisciplinary, design-based and future-oriented perspective... Read »
Public lecture at HafenCity University in Hamburg 10 January, 2018. Despite being remote, the Arctic is in fact home to millions of people, and the region is facing some of the most rapid urban change on the globe due to climate change, resource exploitation and geopolitical posturing. The talk will present historical trajectories and contemporary dimensions of urbanism in the circumpolar region... Read »
This paper presents and discusses the use of serendipity in the design and use of experimental urban mapping tools and practices. We address the issue of error in design processes by exploring the role of serendipity in an experimental cultural mapping activity enabled by an iphone app of our own design... Read »
This book documents the joint effort of an international group of researchers and students of architecture and landscape architecture to understand the everyday Kirkenes, its life, and the thinking of the inhabitants about the town and its future. These crucial local elements inform the students so that their design proposals can better suggest ways that the future of the town could unfold... Read »
This paper presents and discusses the use of serendipity in the design and use of experimental urban mapping tools and practices. We address the issue of error in design processes by exploring the role of serendipity in an experimental cultural mapping activity enabled by an iphone app of our own design... Read »
Guest lecture, Université de Montréal, Quebec, Canada. 14.10.2016 .. Read »
Guest lecture, Université Laval, Quebec, Canada. 13.10.2016 .. Read »
Guest lecture, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. 12.10.2016 .. Read »
Guest lecture, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. 11.10.2016 .. Read »
The Arctic is urbanizing. Not just in terms of demography and economy, but also in terms of cultural evolution, changing values and lifestyle choices. The tension between colonial modernization as expressed in architecture and urban planning and indigenous ways of life is evident in many Arctic cities... Read »
Seminar: Conservation Through Transformation – Cultural Heritage and Place-based Development Varanger Museum, Vardø, 20 April, 2016 .. Read »
In 1968, the British/Swedish architect Ralph Erskine published an article ‘Architecture and town planning in the north’ in this journal, in which he called for a particular Arctic approach to the design of buildings and cities that is distinct from mainstream architecture due to conditions such as harsh climate, resident indigenous or sparse population and remoteness... Read »
The planning of Arctic cities largely still happens within a modernist master-planning framework. This tendency has paradoxically persevered, as anti-urban identity discourses relating to indigenous populations have left little room for re-evaluating city design... Read »
On the east coast of Greenland is city of Tasiilaq where the icebergs tower over its wooden houses in the summer. These landscapes, the urban on land and the wild at sea, form a dual relationship, shaped by the long history of traditions and the recent stories of modern life... Read »