Designing a Green New Deal at Greenland’s Resource Frontier
Honor Award
Communications
Various cities and places in South Greenland: Kuannersuit (Kvanefjeld), Narsap Qaqqaa (Narsaq Field), Narsap Ilua, Nuugaarmiut, Ungusivik, Tasiigaaq, Qaqqarsuaq and Talul, Kujalleq Municipality, Greenland (The Kingdom of Denmark)
Yining Zhu, Associate ASLA;
Yuanyi Cen, Associate ASLA;
Keith Scheideler;
Shanyun Hu;
Ying Zhang, Associate ASLA;
Maura McDaniel, Associate ASLA;
Shengqian Wang, Associate ASLA;
Günay Mammadova;
Jiachen Sun;
Jixuan Guo;
Faculty Advisors:
Billy Fleming, ASLA;
University of Pennsylvania
Good project, collaboration, robust research, media campaigns, and fieldwork.
- 2024 Awards Jury
Project Credits
Suuluaraq Motzfeldt
Innovation South Greenland
Maria Bach Kreutzmann
Glaciem House
Magnus Ásbjörnsson
Reykjavik Geothermal
Project Statement
Mining is often at the epicenter of Greenland’s most egregious acts of colonial violence. As prospectors began searching for deposits of rare earth elements in the early 2010s, an Australian mining operator discovered the second densest collection of such materials in the world at the Kvanefjeld mine.
What follows is an exploration of the kinds of alternative economic development strategies that can (1) provide the wealth to Greenlanders that could empower them to gain independence, (2) conserve their cultural practices, and (3) remove the need for industrial-scale extraction that would devastate the human and non-human systems of the region.
Project Narrative
For much of Greenland’s modern history, it has been viewed as a periphery by imperial powers—a vacant, featureless landscape on which their militaries can experiment (e.g. Project Iceworm), their scientists can collect data without any tangible benefit to local Greenlanders (e.g. Summit Camp), and their industries can plunder at will (e.g. Australia’s Greenland Minerals company). A set of conditions must be manufactured for this kind of colonial plunder to be possible—Greenland must be made, through media and technoscientific expertise (to say nothing of geopolitical exigencies) into a barren place of ice and charismatic megafauna and natural resources, devoid of any people or lands or non-human agents that matter. This is what it means to be a resource frontier at the beginning of the energy transition.
Above the town of Narsaq, billions of years and unfathomable degrees of heat and pressure formed the rocks and ore that stipple and pock the landscape—rocks that are now being mined as a part of the global energy transition, collapsing billions of years into a piece of ephemeral technology, and spreading radioactive waste throughout the region that will persist for millions of years. Farther still is the Greenlandic Ice Sheet—an archive of sorts, with ice held in situ for nearly 250,000 years. As it cleaves icebergs that slowly dissolve into the Arctic Ocean, the acceleration of planetary climate change threatens to erase it. The landscape of South Greenland is being transformed as quickly as anywhere else on Earth.
This is precisely why this studio is focused on South Greenland. It is also why the projects in this studio are so eager to build a more reciprocal relationship with the people there who have given so much of their time and energy, not only to us, but to their desire to maintain Greenlandic culture in the face of annihilation.
What comes after the mining question is finally answered is still an open question. Greenlanders often remark that, while they can imagine a future organized around their existing assets—eco-tourism, agri-tourism, and other forms of experiential and outdoors-driven recreation that draws upon and support the cultural and land-based practices that have defined life here for centuries—they have no interest in reproducing the Icelandic model of growth. The seeds of this future are already in the ground. They include experimental agriculture and forestry operations in Narsarsuaq, Igaliku, and Qassiarsuk; luxury eco-tourism projects now underway in Nanortalik and Alluitsup Paa; and critical infrastructure projects in Qorlortorsuaq and Buksefjorden.
In this submission, you will see projects that attempt to bring this future into being through a variety of means. There are proposals for a sheep-based industrial development plan—one that ensures the viability of Greenland’s sheep-farming industry into the future, while growing their crafts and trades sectors through a variety of investments in new building materials, eco-tourism models, and material reuse. There are proposals for agro-forestry and afforestation projects that translate Greenlandic wisdom into new, landscape-based economic development programs that stitch human labor, forestry materials, and eco-tourism together. There are many other radical imaginaries within, united by a shared commitment to Greenlandic sovereignty and self-determination.