Arctic Six Chair in Architecture & Planning

Smart and Sustainable Arctic Towns: aligning top-down and bottom-up urban sustainability in the Arctic.

Summary

According to recent estimates, the Arctic is home to over 4 million people of which about 3 millions live in urban areas. However, little urban-sustainability research is devoted to this part of the world. Like the rest of the world, arctic towns are asked to contribute to the green transition by implementing actions to retrofit existing buildings (many of which have heritage significance) and urban areas as well as build carbon-neutral and positive energy urban districts. At the same time, and relative to their size, arctic towns contribute to climate change as they are large (per capita) consumers of energy for heating (during the long winter months), individual motorized transport (given the sparsely populated nature of Arctic regions), and industrial operations (resource extraction, manufacturing, etc.).

The project aims to study sustainability in arctic towns and cities. The focus is two fold:

• studying the (top-down) implementation of smart and sustainable urban policies and projects by cities and government agencies (e..g., positive energy districts, etc.), and;
• the (bottom-up), inhabitants-led urban sustainability initiatives from inhabitants and associations (e.g., sharing mobility, etc.).

The main research questions are:

• what (and how) are arctic municipalities doing to meet the climate goals (SDGs and national goals) at the urban scale?
• what (and how) are the inhabitants-led sustainability projects contributing to urban sustainability?
• how do top-down and bottom-up projects align or conflict to deliver sustainable Arctic towns?

Case studies: Norrbotten, Finnish Lapland, Troms and Finnmark.

University Partners: LTU, UiT, Arctic Center at ULapland.

Research Team

Lead PI

• Agatino Rizzo
  Arctic Chair Professor in Architecture & Planning, LTU. Keywords: urban sustainability, resource-urbanization, urban living labs, arctictecture.

Co-PIs (Arctic 5)

• Jing Ma
  Associate senior lecturer, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Keywords: urban sustainability, landscape, green infrastructure, GIS, geodesign.
• Ava Soroudi
  PhD student, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Keywords: urban sustainability, green infrastructure, GIS.

Participating and affiliated researchers

• Aileen Aseron Espiritu
  Senior Researcher, The Barents Institute, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Keywords: Arctic; Arctic urban sustainability; borders and borderlands; regional development; local communities.
• Kamrul Hossain
  Research professor, Arctic Centre, University of Lapland; UArctic Chair, Arctic legal research & education. Keywords: Arctic governance, climate change law, Indigenous peoples' rights, sustainable developments.
• Juha Saunavaara
  Assistant Professor, Hokkaido University Arctic Research Center, Japan/ Arctic Centre, University of Lapland. Keywords: Arctic, multilevel governance, regional development, telecommunication and transport infrastructure, tourism.
• Silvia Colombo
  PhD, Cultural Strategist, Haparanda stad, Sweden. Keywords: culture, sustainability, cultural strategies, cultural cooperation.
• Michele Campagna
  Professor of Spatial planning, University of Cagliari, Italy. Keywords: spatial planning, geodesign.
• Stefano Tornieri
  Research Fellow in Architecture & Landscape Desing, University Iuav of Venice, Italy. Keywords: production landscapes, nature based solutions, wetlands, landscape heritage.