Reading Arctic imperialism through colonial urbanities: Three claims on Kalaallit Nunaat, 1951–2026

Abstract

This article reads Arctic imperialism through urbanism, taking chronopolitics – the politics of time – as its analytical entry point. It examines three projections of urbanity onto Kalaallit Nunaat: the US military's ‘city under the ice’ (Camp Century, 1959–1967), Danish welfare colonial urbanism (1950s–1970s), and the Silicon Valley ‘freedom city’ proposal (2025–present). Each is read as a colonial urbanity – a distinct urban form, language, or imaginary through which an external power claims territory and orders time on colonised land. Each enacts a distinct politics of time – frontier time , developmental time , disruptive time – through material and imaginary registers, evicting existing Kalaallit lifeways to an anachronistic past. The article further argues that this temporal ordering constitutes domestication : of the hostile environment, of Indigenous life, and of sovereignty itself. Each urbanity encounters, however, an active past – an existing order of inhabitation that refuses to be displaced. Together, the three cases reveal that the urban imaginary is itself an instrument of territorial claim-making, doing chronopolitical work in advance of, or instead of, built form.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Environment and Planning D Society and Space, 2026 · DOI ↗