Constructing a centre on the periphery: urbanization and urban design in the island city of Nuuk, Greenland.

Abstract

Both islands and cities are often conceptualized in terms of centre-periphery relationships. Scholarly attempts to nuance popular associations of islands with peripherality and cities with centrality reflect awareness of underlying power relationships. Drawing upon island studies and urban studies knowledge, the case of Nuuk, Greenland, is used to explore how centring and peripheralizing processes play out in an island city. Greenland as a whole came to be regarded as a peripheral region under Danish colonialism, but since the 1950s, Danes and Greenlanders have sought to transform Greenland into its own centre. Nuuk grew into a city and a political, administrative and economic centre relative to Greenland’s small settlements, which came to be seen as central to Greenlandic culture. Nuuk’s rapid growth – dependent on imported Danish designs, materials, technologies, policies and labour – has resulted in an island city of immense contrasts, with monumental modern buildings standing alongside dilapidated 1960s apartment blocks and with strongly differentiated neighbourhoods. Nuuk is both at the centre and on the periphery, enmeshed in power relationships with other Greenlandic settlements and with Denmark. Nuuk is a result of urban design processes that are conditioned by both infrastructural systems and a confluence of spatio-temporal factors.