Lecture by Frederik Braüner
Chaired by Gisela Winckler

Throughout the postwar decades, the Danish state undertook an extensive modernization project in its Arctic and North Atlantic territories, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and Føroyar (the Faroe Islands). Through the construction of welfare institutions, housing, and infrastructure, the Danish state sought to consolidate its colonial presence in the region. These interventions were especially pronounced in the urban centers along Greenland’s west coast, where modern architecture and urban planning were instrumentalized in the large-scale displacement of Indigenous Inuit communities and the so-called “Danification” of Greenlandic society. Analyzing the spatial strategies of concentration, standardization, and compartmentalization implemented across Greenlandic cities, Braüner argues that high-modernist planning not only enabled new forms of welfare-colonial governance but was crucial to the very conceptualization of the Arctic and its peoples as manageable entities. Yet these strategies of colonial governance were not unique to the Danish Arctic. In his talk, Braüner suggests that a postwar Arctic modernity emerged through the circulation of planning ideals and governance strategies among the Arctic’s colonial powers, revealing a transnational history that transcends the region’s ideological and national boundaries.

Fall Thursday Lecture Series events are open to Columbia-affiliated faculty, students, and invited guests. All others interested in attending, please email the SOF/Heyman at [email protected].

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