And here is evidence to what I claim here sent from a friend. That the new urban planning in Maniitsoq not far from Nuuk is designed to in small ways promote ‘traditional’ lifestyle things. It sounds like the building is designed to have at least one of these hangers under a window for each apartment to allow for drying fish. This sort of thing is done in makeshift ways in houses and apartments all over the country, but unlike the European-model housing bloks in Nuuk, the design acknowledges and enables this. I think this is an interesting suggestion to the ‘problem’ of an urbanizing indigenous nation, as it suggests an urban space that does not totally reject the countrylife.
Plan for the proposed Alcoa smelter in Maniitsoq.
This is a bit odd. Maniitsoq is built almost entirely on bedrock and along mountains, so because the soil is too tough to dig into the sewers are completely above ground traveling waywardly through town.
70°N Arkitektur’s vision for Maniitsoq. The seal skins graphics and shadow people are a nice touch.
Maniitsoq, lovely and bright.
As perhaps you can see clicking on the Maniitsoq tag, Maniitsoq is going through an mini urban and a design revolution. Alcoa is building an aluminum smelter near the town which would make a large number of jobs, and housing had to be planned to support new families moving. The first two ‘waves’ of urban planning in Greenland were entirely based on European models of living/landscapes. The type of utopian, 1970s massive tower blocks that made up Nuuk’s development wound up not quite fostering urban communal spaces, but more encouraging cycles of poverty, belittlement and class-stratification Denmark’s rule already created and perpetuated. The new landscape being imagined is both more sound geographically and more attuned to a supposed ‘modern Greenlandic’ lifestyle. The blocks are broken up and made into many smaller buildings scattered across the rocks - requiring much less alteration of the land - and some include designed communal spaces set aside for drying skins and fish (the small red sheds in the first image) as well as access to docks. But this idea is somewhat utopian also.
New architecture in Maniitsoq.
