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The Canadian Arctic is one of the fastest-growing regions per capita in the country, with more than 120,000 people now living in the cities, towns, and hamlets in the territories north of 60 degrees (Statistics Canada 2016). This region is predominantly populated by small, dispersed communities. With the exception of the three territorial capitals—Whitehorse (pop. 25,000), Yellowknife (pop. 19,500), and Iqaluit (pop. 7,700)—most of the 85 communities north of 60 have fewer than 1,000 residents, and only a handful cross the 3,000-person threshold.[1] Vast differences exist within the Canadian Arctic, from east to west, from coast to inland, from territorial capitals to remote hamlets. The diverse histories and cultures of Indigenous peoples and their inhabitation on the land and coast have indeed shaped these differences. Today, the eastern and western Arctic are at different stages of resource and infrastructure development and urbanization. Access via air, road, and water have come to accentuate disparities in terms of the cost of goods and building supplies, which has yielded distinct responses regarding planning, architecture, and infrastructure. Nonetheless, far northern communities are growing and will need to confront the challenge of conceptualizing an authentically northern practice of planning and design that best reflects place and people.

While more familiar southern models of development exist in larger communities such as Yellowknife and Whitehorse, remoteness, geography, and climate continue to resist the flattening forces of globalization and modernity in much of the Canadian North, creating distinctly arctic communities. This essay focuses on questions pertaining to urbanization in Nunavut, Canada’s largest and youngest territory. With a population of over 39,000 that is 85% Inuit, distributed in 25 communities, this territory is the fastest growing per capita in the nation, rising by 8.5% between 2011 and 2016.[2] We outline three ideas or approaches that propose more culturally reflective planning practices for Nunavut: (1) redefining what constitutes a northern vernacular; (2) challenging the top-down models of master planning; and (3) designing with greater responsiveness to geography and climate.

Figure 1

While relatively speaking still small, communities in the Canadian Arctic are growing rapidly

While relatively speaking still small, communities in the Canadian Arctic are growing rapidly

-> See the list of figures

Imagining Arctic Indigenous Urbanism

Despite the recent growth of Arctic communities, Danish anthropologist Susanne Dybbroe, in her analysis of Greenland, questions whether urbanization is the right term in the context of the Arctic (2008). Dybbroe, Vachon (2017), Hemmersam (2016), and others acknowledge that life in Arctic communities is transforming: increased access to internet, hunting using snowmobiles and GPS navigation systems, and the use of telehealth and distance education in certain instances have brought the conditions of the global to the remote North. Many aspects make Inuit societies modern, such as living in towns, access to technology, and connections to the South, among others. Dybbroe argues that “while these situations are often not obviously urban in all, or even many, details, a certain urban colouring is created by their integration into regional, State and global systems” (ibid., 26). As Nunavut continues to grow in population, so will its communities, such as Rankin Inlet and Arviat, and other medium-sized communities (by Nunavut standards) will graduate from hamlet to town.

The North is increasingly connected, but perhaps not urban, at least in a conventional sense. As environmental historian Finn Arne Jørgensen notes, “The North is a networked region: Northern places can’t be understood as disconnected sites, isolated from the world: they are instead nodes, tightly networked and connected in a variety of ways” (2013, 277). This notion of networked space has a strong link to Indigenous ways of knowing and being on the land. Geographer Beatrice Collignon observes, “Inuinnait geosophy appears to be founded on a high sense of context and relations in which space and networks are indeed more important than places. The Inuinnait sense of places is in their relations to others, in the fluidity of the connected territory” (Collignon 2006a, 204). Perhaps, then, Arctic urbanism must be understood in a multivalent way: a distributed territorialisation of small communities linked by non-physical networks of trails, internet, and a shared culture. Although Nunavut’s towns and hamlets can be understood as geographically separated islands of inhabitation, the region is connected in other ways: technologically, culturally, and through specific social infrastructures.

The notion of decentralization is inherent in the foundations of Nunavut. When the territory was officially established in 1999, government institutions were intentionally decentralized throughout the territory into three regions. This represented a desire to distribute the wealth of administrative jobs and was an attempt to create a less hierarchical political structure and bring government closer to the people (White 2015). Certain social infrastructures in Nunavut, such as the regional college programs and health and government services, already operate as distributed networks present in all or many communities, depending on the service.[3] However, these attributes are not necessarily reflected in architectural design nor in spatial planning strategies. Given the remote, dispersed nature of communities, one can argue that institutions should imagine new building and campus types which could better support and reflect—in the programming, siting, and calendar cycles—decentralized health services, higher education, and culture. It is compelling to imagine a social infrastructure that could be tactical, scalable, and adaptable to leverage and respond to the scale of the territory. Connectivity through spatial distribution, digital technology, or physical infrastructures thus represents significant opportunities for design thinking.

That said, does technological, infrastructural, or digital connectedness make a place more “urban,” and indirectly, less northern? Such questions were raised four decades ago in Québec geographer Louis Edmond Hamelin’s Canadian Nordicity (1978). Hamelin charted both a geographic and a mental nordicity, which was calculated according to a series of “polar values”, including infrastructural connectivity, economic development, population size, and climate, among others. He acknowledged that modernity and urbanity could be at odds with certain northern or polar values and that the condition of nordicity could change and diminish over time: as economic development, connectivity, or population increased, polar values diminished (ibid.). How might design help identify and argument an urban “nordicity”, rather than diminish it, and what does this imply for planning?

Figure 2

Evolution of Iqaluit (previously known as Frobisher Bay) from 1940 to 1990s

Evolution of Iqaluit (previously known as Frobisher Bay) from 1940 to 1990s

Iqaluit evolved from a military base to capital city through the progressive addition of various civic and residential structures. The functionalist legacy of the military base can still be felt in the current planning of the City.

Image courtesy of Lateral Office, Toronto

-> See the list of figures

One of the cultural challenges of an urbanizing the Canadian North is that for most Indigenous peoples, permanent settlement (with its imposed spatial, temporal, economic, and institutional structures), has been antithetical to traditional ways of life, which are deeply tied to the land and attuned seasonality (Mauss, Beuchat, and Fox 1979; Damas 2009). Anthropologist Edmund Searle notes, “Inuit identity requires particular places that nourish Inuit identity (e.g., outpost camps) while other places drain it away (e.g., Iqaluit)” (2008, 240). Inuit elders have observed that “being in town feels like being in jail” and that many Inuit feel free once they are out of town and either at their land-based cabins or camping on the land for the weekend; that being on the land was “being at home” (Tester 2018, 14). Indeed, for the last seventy-five years, imported models of architecture, infrastructure, and settlement form have served as deliberate spatial tools of cultural colonization, imposing an image of State while neutralizing local culture and geographic specificities (Farish and Lackenbauer 2009). Therefore, how can planning for northern Indigenous communities address the fundamental challenge that emerges from a legacy of colonial rule? (Thomas and Thompson 1972; Tester 2009; McCartney 2018). In light of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 report, there is a heightened awareness that planning northern communities must develop a more inclusive approach; one that involves knowledge exchange rather than the imposition of ideas (McCartney 2018). How can planning, community design, and architecture engage the fundamental challenge of creating communities that reflect and support Inuit culture, social structures, and patterns of daily life? And how might a truly authentic Indigenous arctic urbanism be defined or imagined?

Figure 3

Iqaluit is growing by approximately 2 percent per year

Iqaluit is growing by approximately 2 percent per year

Urban planning is driven my infrastructure needs and access to easily buildable land (given the complexities of constructing on permafrost) rather than considerations of public space or relationship to landscape, making urban develop often appear unplanned.

Image courtesy of Lateral Office, Toronto

-> See the list of figures

Current planning in Nunavut is driven primarily by such functional concerns as fire services, deployment of available land, efficient road and lot layout, climate change impacts, and infrastructure servicing.[4] Community planning typically replicates southern, suburban models in their lot and road layout and parking allowances and often ignores key spatial and visual relationships to water’s edge, trail access points, local knowledge of where to build, and which land provides stable ground.[5] As Nunavut communities continue to grow, new planning models are needed. This paper outlines three ideas or approaches which could constitute the beginning of more culturally reflective planning practices for Nunavut: (1) redefining the northern urban vernacular and its potential role in design; (2) challenging the current top-down masterplan by embracing strategies of informal urbanism; and (3) encouraging master planning approaches that embrace territorial strategies and are more responsive to geography, landscape, and seasonality.

Defining Northern Vernaculars

Within the discipline of architecture, vernaculars are often characterised by building design using local materials and construction practices, without the involvement of architects. Such architecture typically adapts to regional geography and is responsive to climatic and environmental conditions through unique building form or material responses. The role of the vernacular in architecture was brought to the forefront by architectural historian Bernard Rudofsky (1964) in his celebrated book, Architecture Without Architects, an Introduction to Nonpedigreed Architecture. The images indirectly reinforced the perception of the vernacular as an aesthetic, picturesque, and pattern-based logic, given the book’s limited analysis of building form’s relation to climate, cultural patterns, or social structures. However, other architectural historians, such as Amos Rapoport (1969), Paul Oliver (2006), and Marcel Vellinga (2008), extended their understanding of vernacular to include cultural practices and social rituals, as well as the study of “cultural impact.” Oliver argued that vernacular architecture was critical to ensure sustainability in both cultural and economic terms. Other social science disciplines (sociology, anthropology, ethnography, etc.) similarly define architectural vernaculars as a mirror of a given society’s material culture, deeply intertwined with the patterns of daily life and ritual.

In the context of the Canadian North, landscape theorist J. B. Jackson’s understanding of vernacular landscapes as reflections and materializations of cultural landscapes and values is perhaps a more fruitful model. For Jackson, the rural, the vernacular, and the seemingly banal-built environment of America were worthy of investigation and reflected a multiplicity of narratives about the people that inhabited it. In his view, landscape should begin with commonplace: “American vernacular represents the hybridization of Old World and New World factors. It is not simply rural and agricultural, it is identified with mining and shipping communities, with cities and the architect- or engineer-planned villages having military or political function. Finally, it used materials and techniques imported from elsewhere” (Jackson 1984, 11). The analogies with Nunavut communities are striking in recognizing that vernaculars are hybrids of imposed and local systems. Like Jackson’s rural landscapes, Canadian Arctic communities are rarely beautiful or picturesque in the conventional sense, except for the sublime landscapes in which they sit and their spatial manifestation of local culture. Furthermore, they are the embodiment of a particular set of local constraints with regard to siting, layout, construction logistics, and mobility. This notion of “commonplace” is also framed by Harold Kalman in his History of Canadian Architecture: “many Northern designers have adopted an approach to design that is more pragmatic, and consequently less appealing… [producing] tight and well-constructed buildings [that] strive to work in harmony with the local climate and circumstance” (1994, 704). This northern pragmatism suggests a logical response to context; a less optimistic interpretation is the prioritizing of efficiency and expediency over culturally contextual response as the primary criteria for architecture and planning in Nunavut.

The key question, however, is what constitutes Nunavut vernacular today? There is a well-known legacy of Inuit vernacular architecture: the iglu, the qarmaq, the tupiq, and others. However, with the imposition of permanent settlements, these types have lessened in everyday relevance. In central and eastern Arctic, building and planning practices imposed by Canadian agencies have been the antithesis of vernacular traditions: the product of imported materials and external logics such as building or fire code, southern shipping logistics, and construction cost efficiency. Yet the utilidor, the trucking of fuel and water, the town fuel tanks, and the port and beach landing that receive the annual sealifts, are all uniquely northern infrastructures (Sheppard and White 2017). Similarly, building types such as Northmart, community freezers, and multi-plex housing are pervasive and have arguably become a contemporary vernacular. Simultaneously, bottom-up practices, such as the repurposing of shipping containers for sheds and storage, the construction of cabins out on the land, and the activation of school parking lots for festivals, are contemporary, locally generated practices.[6] Traditional spatial activities include going out on the land, hunting, and harvesting berries and other food sources. Together, these top-down and bottom-up systems constitute northern spatial practices or vernaculars—actions, constructions, movements, and markings—on the land that have come to shape a modern northern vernacular (ibid). How might the design of these vernaculars be given better consideration?

Figure 4

The North’s vernaculars include sheds, cabins, multiplexes, utilidors, fuel and water tanks, and northern co-op stores, among others

The North’s vernaculars include sheds, cabins, multiplexes, utilidors, fuel and water tanks, and northern co-op stores, among others
Image courtesy of Lateral Office, Toronto

-> See the list of figures

For example, one critical infrastructure in several northern communities is the utilidor, found in Iqaluit, Inuvik, and in the future, Arviat, among others. It is a distinctly northern innovation in which municipal water and waste infrastructure is carried above ground because of the difficulty of ground conditions (permafrost or rock). Running within the interior of a planning block, utilidors are sometimes paired with walkways to enable pedestrians to navigate over and along it. That said, the utilidor and its attendant walkways could play a larger role in planning and defining zones of movement and be more catalytic in shaping urban space, rather than becoming a spatial afterthought. An interesting precedent for this potential is the extensive network of walkways in Nuuk, Greenland, which navigate between the backs of residential buildings and across complex rocky topography, thus offering a more intimate pedestrian navigation system than walking on the main streets. Nuuk’s walkways are a distinct response to context, much as the utilidor in Nunavut communities could be as an alternate mode of navigating and experiencing the towns in which they are found. Similarly, every community in Nunavut depends on sealift deliveries, yet most communities lack the proper deep-water port infrastructure to receive sealift ships. Instead, cargo ships moor in the bay and a second barge moves back and forth between cargo ship and shore over several days, unloading the sea cans while navigating dramatic changing tides (Sheppard and White 2017). Iqaluit is finally set to complete construction of its deep-water port in 2021, yet the design of this infrastructure is entirely perfunctory, unfortunately missing the opportunity to imagine the port as an extended public realm[7].

Figure 5

Iqaluit’s utilidors appear throughout the city in a haphazard way

Iqaluit’s utilidors appear throughout the city in a haphazard way

In Nuuk, the utilidor is typically paired with the exterior walkways that lead residents to various housing complexes.

Images courtesy of author

-> See the list of figures

Figure 6

The proposed Deep Sea port for Iqaluit, scheduled for completion in 2022

The proposed Deep Sea port for Iqaluit, scheduled for completion in 2022

The design misses the opportunity for even a modest sense of public realm, for this critical piece of urban port infrastructure.

Image produced by Aarluk Consulting for the City of Iqaluit. Public report, August 2005

-> See the list of figures

Refuting the Masterplan: Adaptable Urbanism

Another significant challenge of planning in Nunavut is the resistance to appropriation or change by its residents or even the ability to adapt to community priorities. Hamlet and town plans are often done with limited community engagement, leaving absent the degree to which residents see themselves reflected in the layout of their community (Havelka 2018, 137; McMillan and Sheppard 2020). Driven by legitimate efficiency and safety concerns, community plans tend to replicate southern, suburban models as unquestioned solutions. These functionalist plans actually date back to the military bases and trading posts of the nineteenth century, from which many of the communities emerged (Damas 2002; Sheppard and White 2017). Amplifying the intransigence of the collective realm is the singular nature of housing in Nunavut: the cornerstone of the built fabric of all communities. In an effort to control costs, housing (most often the 5-plex or 5-unit block built by the Nunavut Housing Corporation) is reduced to the most minimal of structures; the interface is limited between interior and exterior in the form of decks and wind-shelter areas; and even the cold porches and rear doors have been eliminated or reduced in more recent versions of the multiplex.[8] Furthermore, little consideration is given to the spaces created between buildings, how these might be appropriated by citizens, or how this space could shape the quality of life in the urban realm. The question of the space created between buildings, the semi-public collective realm of the domestic, must therefore be prioritized as communities grow, to move from a functionalist planning paradigm to one that actually supports communities.

A more community-driven approach could produce a more culturally reflexive northern urbanism. Urban theorist Margaret Crawford’s concept of “everyday urbanism” may offer clues on how to conceptualize an urbanizing North that eschews traditional approaches of public realm design or even function. Strongly influenced by the work of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Guy Debord, Everyday Urbanism resists top-down planning structures, finding its meaning instead in everyday life through an understanding of the social use of space (Crawford, Chase, and Kaliski 2008).[9] Using careful observation of the patterns and temporalities of daily life and community engagement, this practice serves to eliminate the distance between planning “experts” and ordinary users. Resisting the logic of large-scale planning, everyday urbanism leverages incremental, small-scale interventions through the intensification of existing experiences and practices rather than the imposition of new spatial structures. Contrasting Jackson and Crawford who wrote about a dramatically different climatic and cultural context—that of Los Angeles—the notion of customizability of interior and exterior space of dwelling and the conception of bottom-up planning strategies show potential in the context of Nunavut.

The ability of the Inuit to respond and adapt to their physical environment, both historically and today, has been extensively documented (Mauss et al. 1979; Tester 2006). Architect Suzanne Havelka has observed this strong culture of adapting dwellings in communities such as Clyde River, through the construction of uqsuu (porches), sanavii (workshops) and ilugarlaa (outbuildings or storage sheds) to produce an unintentional everyday architecture. Havelka writes, “the leveraging of the ‘gap space’ or akuningaa is an important concept in the eastern Arctic. The gaps comprise all micro spaces that are part of the town proper but not the houses themselves” (2018, 176). Considering this at an urban scale, it is precisely the “gap spaces” that have been ignored by town plans in Nunavut and elsewhere in the North. These gap spaces offer the promise of a more flexible collective realm which residents can appropriate. Shacklands, a term coined by architect Josh Armstrong in his analysis of Iqaluit’s waterfront structures, describes this informal landscape as speaking to an indigenous informality of place (2012). Such gaps in the city fabric have the potential to be nurtured over the long term, as they provide sites for the imagination of a culturally considered built future (2012, 3). A first step could be an “asset mapping” or spatial inventory of existing built and landscape elements in the “in-between” spaces of communities: the landscapes (lichen, rocks, local berries), objects (boats, snowmobiles, ATVs stored by the residents’ houses), structures (cabins, storage structures), and infrastructures (utilidors, fuel and water tanks, rock bollards) that make up the urban realm. Once documented and considered, these could translate to constitute elements of design of a truly Nunavut public realm.

Figure 7

Iqaluit’s waterfront is populated by numerous cabins, shacks and boats used for storage, work, and recreation, which shape the character of the City’s land/water interface.

Iqaluit’s waterfront is populated by numerous cabins, shacks and boats used for storage, work, and recreation, which shape the character of the City’s land/water interface.

As the City grows, a more comprehensive approach to integrating these structures, (without displacing them) seems critical.

Image courtesy of author

-> See the list of figures

Figure 8

Fuel tanks, storage, stairs and balconies in Iqaluit’s multiplexes contribute to the northern housing vernacular and inadvertently shape the public realm

Fuel tanks, storage, stairs and balconies in Iqaluit’s multiplexes contribute to the northern housing vernacular and inadvertently shape the public realm
Image courtesy of author

-> See the list of figures

A simple example is the potential role of shipping containers and cabins in Nunavut communities. Often left behind following the annual sealift deliveries, the containers are repurposed by individuals for storage or workshop spaces, while cabins are built in a do-it-yourself manner using locally available and often repurposed building materials (Armstrong 2012; Havelka 2018). In most Nunavut communities, residents place the cabins and shipping containers in an ad hoc way. Armstrong notes that the cabins by Iqaluit’s beach waterfront tend to fall in a grey zone in which authorities do not want to impose strict control, while the cabin owners have subverted formal authority through a series of tactics that include construction, squatting, and resistance to imposed rules (2012, 65). In contrast, in the city of Nuuk, Greenland, storage structures are often built by the municipality as an integral part of housing projects and are adjacent to the walkway networks described earlier. These structures define a planned but informal, collective space—a northern equivalent to the rear laneway. One could imagine Nunavut accommodating for containers and cabins in the design and zoning of community plans, not in an effort to suppress or control them but rather to coordinate them in order to create deliberate spaces for work, repairs, or crafts.[10] Furthermore, micro-grants could enable owners to improve, paint, maintain, or adapt their out-buildings, thus offering community residents agency over a small element of their domestic space as it relates to public realm. Greater community engagement and participatory design practice could therefore foster more inclusive community plans in which the Nunavummiut see themselves reflected.

Engaging Geography and Seasonality

Geographers and anthropologists have written extensively about the relationship of the Inuit to the land and their long-standing knowledge of its topography, seasonality, and morphology (Aporta 2009; Collignon 2006b). Movement in Nunavut communities extends between and beyond the roads to include informal snowmobile and all-terrain vehicle paths, thereby creating a second layer of seasonal movement. This effectively expands the territory of the community beyond official boundaries, as these trails connect the community to a vast hinterland of hunting spots and gathering points marked by mobile as well as permanent cabins that form an extension of life in the community. Here is a space that can be appropriated, constructed, and built up as residents wish (Havelka 2018). Returning to Collignon’s observation of networks of spaces in Inuinnait geosophy, she states, “What is important to them is not so much to have a place of their own but to have at their disposal a whole set of various places, with very different qualities, all connected together through the shared experiences of the various members of the community” (2006a, 204). While the spaces in question refer to ones out in the land, could an Arctic urbanism operate in a similar manner, with diverse, connected places offering a range of experiences? For rapidly growing northern towns, there is no tradition of main street familiar in rural morphology. Instead, community life occurs in a constellation of spaces in town: in schools and their parking lots, at skating rinks, in community centres, and out on the land. In this model, city and hinterland, material and virtual networks, cease to be dichotomies. Could we envisage planning that acknowledges and integrates this extended territory and geography?

It is surprising how little the town and hamlet plans of Nunavut communities engage or respond to the landscapes and ecologies in which they sit. For instance, few significant municipal buildings in Iqaluit address Frobisher Bay in their siting, except for the Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum and the Visitor Information Centre, which are situated near the bay. Even the Nunavut Legislature, perhaps the most symbolic building in the territory, sits perfunctorily at the intersection of two downtown streets, with no consideration of view or siting to the adjacent majestic landscape. This is largely the legacy of functional planning whose roots lie in the military encampment that Iqaluit once was (Qikiqtani 2014). Informal cabins line the Bay’s edge in Iqaluit in an ad hoc manner, neither amplifying the community’s relationship to the land nor acknowledging the paths that serve as a gateway to the extended landscape when the bay freezes. At a more intrusive scale, Arviat, in its new town plan, proposes to pave over the local ground, landscape, and its attendant ponds to create a new artificial ground for construction (McMillan and Sheppard 2020). This lack of planning and landscape consideration stands in sharp contrast to that of a city like Nuuk, where several buildings, such as the University of Greenland or the Greenland National Archives (each of which addresses particular geographies), are situated at a geographic highpoint of the community and at water’s edge, respectively.

Figure 9

Walkways and storage shape the public realm of Nuuk. Retrofitted housing in Nuuk integrates storage in a more playful way

Walkways and storage shape the public realm of Nuuk. Retrofitted housing in Nuuk integrates storage in a more playful way
Image courtesy of author

-> See the list of figures

Similarly, the 2011 planning redevelopment of the very large Block P in Nuuk focused as much on public realm design as it did on building layouts.[11] Public realm design studies that examine more than merely land use are largely absent in Nunavut. One exception is the work of the group Habiter le Nord who is exploring arctic urbanism in the presence of housing and public realm concerns, in consultation with various communities in Nunavik, Québec. Their research leverages modern vernaculars such as the utilidor, cabins, and housing cluster strategies to shape collective space and respond to geographic and topographic conditions, social patterns, and wind and snow orientation in a more calibrated manner (Vachon et al. 2017).

Figure 10

Proposal for Inukjuak, Quebec, in which housing is considered in concert with infrastructure and public realm

Proposal for Inukjuak, Quebec, in which housing is considered in concert with infrastructure and public realm

Image courtesy of Genevieve Vachon, Avarello Garneau Larouch Renaud-Roy. (2015)

-> See the list of figures

Beyond the spatial, typological, and morphological fixity of Nunavut planning and housing, there has been an imposition of temporal structures. Over the course of the twentieth century, Canada imported and imposed southern institutions, calendars, political structures, and language, among other frameworks (Stern 2003; Searle 2008). Living off the land had very different notions of time; the emergence of permanent communities, wage-based economies (and the associated calendar of lunch breaks, paychecks, weekends, etc.) and patterns of social structures attendant to education and recreational activities, among others, produced increasing temporal regulation (Stern 2003). Contrary to Western control of time, “[the] Inuit learn how to relinquish a desire to control time in order to become more aware of, and therefore better able to yield to, the rhythm and movements of weather, ties, animals, seasons, etc.” (Searles 2008, 248). This contrast of southern time and northern time relates to design in how it questions programming, responsiveness to seasonality, and considerations about the life-span of structures. Could social infrastructures in the city acknowledge daily, seasonal, and annual events? How might collective spaces and buildings be calibrated to seasonal changes?

Figure 11

Iqaluit square

Iqaluit square
Image courtesy of author

-> See the list of figures

One example of planning that acknowledges temporal and local practices is the Iqaluit 2005 Masterplan developed to address the growing presence of snowmobiles in the community, and whose spatial patterns are distinct from pedestrians and cars, and hence overlay a non-orthographic system of movement that resists the formal order of the town. Although the proposed strategies and plan predominantly focused on pragmatic issues of intersection design and the negotiation of pedestrians and snowmobiles, it effectively incorporated the distinctly northern reality of snowmobiles into the urban design and acknowledged that mobility patterns change according to the seasons. This study coincided with the Iqaluit Core Area and Capital District Redevelopment Plan, which attempted to acknowledge seasonal trails and the City’s connection to the bay. However, some of the built outcomes of the plan, such as the creation or demarcation of Iqaluit Square, failed to be used by residents, begging the question as to what could best define successful public realm typologies in the Arctic. Rather than formally delineated spaces, public realm could be better shaped by the thoughtful use of programs and a deeper consideration of the relationship between buildings, and between buildings, the landscape, and the larger territory. Furthermore, given the long winter days with little light, focus on lighting of the urban environment is another unanswered concern. One speculative project from 2012 explored mobile lighting for the North which responded to environmental conditions through changing light colours.

Figure 12

Study of movement of people, vehicles and snowmobiles for the City of Iqaluit

Study of movement of people, vehicles and snowmobiles for the City of Iqaluit
Image prepared by Office for Urbanism for City of Iqaluit. Public report 2005

-> See the list of figures

Figure 13

Proposal for distributed lighting and environmental monitoring in Nunavut communities

Proposal for distributed lighting and environmental monitoring in Nunavut communities
Image courtesy of Claire Lubbell and Virginia Fernandez

-> See the list of figures

Building a Northern Design Vocabulary

A key challenge of planning and design in Nunavut is not only the absence of precedents, given its unique history, climate, and culture, but also the absence of relevant terminology or words to speak accurately about the particular phenomena of urbanization in this region of the country. Terms such as ‘urban design’, ‘landscape architecture’, or ‘public space’ are southern importations and are thus inappropriate, given the ambiguousness of the very term ‘urban’ or ‘landscape’ in the context of the Canadian far North. However, terms such as katilvik, meaning ‘a gathering or meeting place’ could offer some clues to developing a lexicon and morphology to characterize northern urbanism.[12] This would require working with Inuktitut speakers and groups, such as Nunavut Culture and Heritage, to imagine new terms to evoke ideas of collective space that uniquely reflect the Nunavummiut. In the late twentieth century, urban theorists such as Jackson and Crawford developed terms and practices that eluded traditional urban design and indeed challenged its tropes. In the context of Nunavut, and indeed much of the Canadian Arctic, where architecture and planning have long served as tools of colonization and cultural erasure, a similar recalibration of practice and vocabulary is needed.

Both Inuit leaders and scholars have affirmed the degree to which Inuit people have adapted to changing climate, culture, technology, and architecture (Mauss et al. 1979; Aporta 2009; Pearce et al. 2005; Simon 2011; Watt-Cloutier 2015). Indeed, in each instance, resilience and adaptability have emerged from locally developed tools or strategies for adaptation. The challenge to architecture and planning is mirrored: rather than community adaptation happening in spite of design, effective planning must not only embrace vernacular spatial practices (which hybridize tradition and modernity) but also develop frameworks that enable the actual users to adapt local plans. Lastly, it must evolve beyond the coarse scale of land use toward a finer-grain understanding of buildings’ relationship to each other, to the land, and to seasonality, which are so central to daily life in Nunavut communities. Only then will planning and design become sustainable tools of cultural empowerment for the Nunavummiut.