Svalbard Imaginaries: The Making of an Arctic Archipelago [Arctic Encounters, First ed.] 9783031438400, 9783031438417

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ARCTIC ENCOUNTERS

Svalbard Imaginaries The Making of an Arctic Archipelago

Edited by Mathias Albert Dina Brode-Roger Lisbeth Iversen

Arctic Encounters

Series Editor Roger Norum, Environmental Humanities, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

This series brings together cutting-edge scholarship across the social sciences and humanities focusing on this vast and critically important region. Books in the series will present high-calibre, critical insights in an approachable form as a means of unpacking and drawing attention to the multiple meanings and messages embedded in contemporary and historical Arctic social, political, and environmental changes.

Mathias Albert · Dina Brode-Roger · Lisbeth Iversen Editors

Svalbard Imaginaries The Making of an Arctic Archipelago

Editors Mathias Albert Faculty of Sociology University of Bielefeld Bielefeld, Germany

Dina Brode-Roger KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium

Lisbeth Iversen The Oslo School of Architecture and Design Oslo, Norway

ISSN 2730-6488 ISSN 2730-6496 (electronic) Arctic Encounters ISBN 978-3-031-43840-0 ISBN 978-3-031-43841-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Dina Brode-Roger This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those who have supported this project in various ways. In the initial phases, discussions within the Svalbard Social Science Initiative (SSSI) were very helpful, particularly during a workshop held in Longyearbyen in October 2021. Bielefeld University provided financial support for this project, and the Institute for World Society Studies in particular supported the authors’ workshop in Bielefeld in November 2022. Special thanks to Stephen Curtis for his invaluable help in polishing the manuscript. Moritz Köster at Bielefeld University has provided some assistance with formatting work.

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Contents

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Imaginaries of and in Svalbard: The ‘Making’ of an Archipelago Mathias Albert

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Part I Svalbard in the Arctic: Territory and Sovereignty 2

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Between Gateway and Theatre: Geopolitics, History and the Framing of Svalbard Roald Berg and Klaus Dodds

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Svalbard as a Norwegian Place and an International Legal Space Christoph Humrich

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Part II Imaginaries Through Images 4

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Visuals and Voices Through Time: Imagining Svalbard with Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (1962–1972) Eva la Cour and Samantha M. Saville The Arctic Imaginary as Reflected in the UK Television Series Fortitude Dina Brode-Roger

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CONTENTS

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Arctic Views: Virtual Remote Experiences—Reflections from the Field Tyrone Martinsson

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Arctic Imaginaries and Their Entangled Relationship(s) with Artistic Production on Svalbard Dina Brode-Roger and Eva la Cour

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Part III Heritage and Environments 8

Svalbard’s Urban Imaginaries Peter Hemmersam

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Imaginaries of Company Towns on Svalbard Ulrich Schildberg

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Part IV Living Imaginaries 10

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A Collective Imagination of the Future of Svalbard Communities Lisbeth Iversen

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Imaginaries of Svalbard, Interdisciplinary Research and Fieldwork: Where Emergent Knowledge Surges Jasmine Zhang

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Pictures of the Arctic: Visitors’ Visions of Svalbard vis-à-vis Their Experience in its Landscape Martin Fiala

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Imaginaries of and in Svalbard: What Is Being Made? Dina Brode-Roger

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Annex: Text of the Svalbard Treaty

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Mathias Albert is Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld. His research interests are in the history and sociology of world politics, the politics and science of the polar regions, as well as in youth studies. Roald Berg is Professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Stavanger. He has been Visiting Fellow at Cambridge (Scott Polar Research Institute), where he wrote his latest book, Norsk utanrikspolitikk etter 1814 (2016). His recent publications include ‘The genesis of the Spitsbergen/Svalbard Treaty, 1871–1920’. In: Adrian Howkins and Peder Roberts (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions (2023). Dina Brode-Roger holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from KU Leuven where she is a Research Fellow. Her current projects, all on Svalbard, include exploring an embodied understanding of place and the use of visual methods of inquiry. In 2022, she received the Rachel Tanur Memorial Visual Sociology Award. Eva la Cour is a visual artist and holds a Ph.D. in artistic practice from HDK-Valand, Gothenburg, also trained in media and visual anthropology. Drawing from experiences on Svalbard and in Greenland, her research has long centred on relational forms of the image and image practices. She is currently a postdoc at the Art as Forum centre, the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Klaus Dodds is Executive Dean and Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London. He is the author of many books and ix

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coedited collections including Border Wars (Penguin 2022) and Ice Humanities (Manchester University Press 2022) respectively. Martin Fiala studied Arctic Nature Guiding at the University Centre in Svalbard, where he currently lives and works year-round as a guide. He also holds a master’s degree in Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences from TU Delft. Peter Hemmersam is Professor in urban design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, where he directs the Centre for Urban and Landscape Studies. His main research interests include placemaking and Arctic urbanism. In 2021, he published Making the Arctic City—The History and Future of Circumpolar Urbanism (Bloomsbury Academic). Christoph Humrich is Assistant Professor for International Relations and Security Studies at the University of Groningen. He is broadly interested in the relation between law and politics in international relations. His current research focuses on Arctic governance and security. Lisbeth Iversen has been working in an adjunct position at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen from 2013 to 2023 on Community Based Monitoring and Citizen Science in the Arctic. She co-authored the book Community Based Monitoring of the Arctic, published in 2021. She is now finalizing her Public Sector Ph.D. at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, at the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape. Her main research topics here are participatory planning, co-creation, placemaking and place leadership. Tyrone Martinsson is Professor of photography at the University of Gothenburg. His research is in the fields of visualizing climate change and the history of Svalbard with a focus area of Nordvest-Spitsbergen National Park. Samantha M. Saville is a Senior Lecturer in sustainability at the Centre for Alternative Technology and an independent researcher. Her work and publications centre on processes of change, value and human–nature relations both in the Arctic and further afield. Ulrich Schildberg studied Urban Planning and has worked as a town planner and consultant. He is currently working on his PhD thesis (Development of Mining Company Towns. Longyearbyen/Svalbard as a Case Study) at the Institute of Geography of Ruhr-Universität.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Jasmine Zhang is a researcher at the Swedish Center for Nature Interpretation, SLU. Her interests lie in inter/transdisciplinary research and human–nature relations in the contexts of transitions in peripheral areas, natural resource management and knowledge production on environmental changes. Since 2020 she has been working on the project SVALUR, concerning environmental monitoring and narrative-based knowing in Svalbard.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

Airship ‘Norge’ leaving Svalbard (Photo Anders Beer Wilse, Source https://polarhistorie.no/imagearchive/Luf tskipet%20Norge%202_NP018380.jpg) The Soviet Union developed the ‘bastion’ concept in its defence planning during the Cold War. The Bear Island gap between Norway, Bear Island and Svalbard was crucial to sea denial operations and the defence of the Northern Fleet in the Kola Peninsula (Original source and redrawn by Jen Thornton::// www.fiia.fi/wp-content/uploads/2019/04 /bp259_geostrategic_arctic.pdf page 5) Screenshot of film still, image 1: Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (1968–1972) (Source Store Norske) Screenshot of film still, image 2: Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (1968–1972) (Source Store Norske) Poster for the UK television series Fortitude (2015–2018) created by Simon Donald for Sky Atlantic. Season 1 (Copyright holder: Sky Atlantic) Poster for BBC Earth’s Ice Town: Life on the Edge (2016) (Copyright holder: BBC Earth) Film stills from Fortitude trailer sequence ‘Peeling Off the Layers’ by Wildbirds & Peacedrums (2015) (Copyright holder: Sky Atlantic)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 6.4

Fig. 6.5

Fig. 6.6

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

Fig. 9.1

Gravneset, Trinity harbour towards Waggonwaybreen, 2 August 2022. Gorki Glaser Müller working the 360° camera assisted by Peter Johansson holding a frame to create a focus point. Below: the historical view of the frame (Henriksen & Sten 1953) (Courtesy of Norsk Polarinstitutt) Magdalenefjorden, 1 August 2022, mountain slopes on the eastern side of the glacier bay. At the location of the viewpoint of the photographer in 1926. Gorki Glase Müller setting up the location for rephotography and 360° filming and Thomas Nydén holding the reference image from 1926 (Carl Müller & Son) (Photograph by Author) Rephotography, 1 August 2022, Gullybukta from the vantage point of Carl Müller & Son 1926 (see below) (Photograph by Author; Historic Photo from Private Collection) Rephotography, 2 August 2022, Magdalenefjorden, Gravneset, from Wilhelm Solheim’s 1936 vantage point. Below: Solheim’s historic view (part of a 360° panorama) (Photograph by Author; Historic Photograph Courtesy of the National Library, Oslo) Visual Arena 2023, screen with the 3D model of the dome created by Tanja Taivula Välimaa (Photograph by Author) Comparative views 2022 and 1878. The colour lithograph by F. Larsen below is from a drawing by F. W. Schiertz, 1878 (Photograph by Author; Image of Lithograph Courtesy of National Library, Oslo) The central commercial district of Longyearbyen with houses from different periods. The coal ropeway towers serve as a reminder of the town’s industrial past (‘Longyearbyen colourful homes’ [2006] by Peter Vermeij/Svalbard Global Seed Vault is licensed as attribution only. https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Longyearbyen_colourful_homes.jpg) Lenin looks out over the central urban space of Pyramiden. Many wooden residential houses with ornaments from the immediate postwar period were later replaced with taller brick-clad buildings (Photograph by Elizabeth Bourne) Barentsburg, Svalbard 2022 (Photograph by the Author)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 12.1

Family homes (so-called spissehus ) in Longyearbyen, Svalbard 2022 (Photograph by the Author) Nybyen, Svalbard 2022 (Photograph by the Author) Guided hiking tour on Svalbard, 2019 (Photograph by the Author)

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CHAPTER 1

Imaginaries of and in Svalbard: The ‘Making’ of an Archipelago Mathias Albert

Svalbard is the Arctic North as you always dreamed it existed (Lonely Planet) Boring … nothing to see there (an Australian visitor’s online comment on Svalbard Kirke, the church in Lonryearbyen. This is a solitary comment: an intensive Google search did not reveal a single other instance of the word ‘boring’ being used in relation to Svalbard, except with a negative to signify that it is anything but boring) all the islands situated between 10° and 35° longitude East of Greenwich and between 74° and 81° latitude North, especially West Spitsbergen, North-East Land, Barents Island, Edge Island, Wiche Islands, Hope Island or Hopen-Eiland, and Prince Charles Forland, together with all islands great or small and rocks appertaining thereto

M. Albert (B) Faculty of Sociology, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_1

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(from Article 1 of the Svalbard Treaty) slightly smaller than West Virginia (CIA World Factbook)

The Complexity of Imaginaries: Constructing Svalbard This is a book about what Svalbard is, and particularly about how this ‘is’ is produced in and through imaginaries. Imaginaries can be many things. In a general sense, many imaginaries together make up a complex and ever-changing mechanism that serves as a means of transmission between many individual and collective representations of some kind of ‘whole’— without, however, necessarily clearly identifying the essence or boundaries of that whole, or even allocating it to a fixed state in time.1 Svalbard is many things. A vast range of imaginaries can pertain more narrowly to Svalbard, or prominently include Svalbard as a part of, for example, the ‘circumpolar Arctic’ or the ‘High North’. Some of these imaginaries closely relate to one another, while others do not. They can differ both as regards what they refer to and how they are constructed, ranging from simple cartographic depictions to works of art and cognitive frames orienting the thoughts of any number of individuals. While imaginaries are notoriously difficult to define in theoretical terms, owing to the different spaces that various social theories are able and willing to allocate to them, they nonetheless serve as a useful analytical heuristic. They invariably construct something as a relevant ‘whole’, that is, as something with distinct characteristics that allow it to be distinguished from something else (most notably itself in a different form or state). Imaginaries are, in that sense, a conglomerate of signifiers that, however stable or unstable, however deep or shallow, underlies the ongoing construction of a signified that is named as such. In this broad sense, basically any signifier can be used in political, economic, cultural or artistic practices in order to continue this construction. There is no restriction on the sources, which can be textual or visual, bodily practices or anything else, as long as they operate in a process of signification. Needless to say, this means that there 1 With this general understanding, we largely follow Castoriadis’s (1997) seminal work on the imaginary institution of society.

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is never a ‘true’ imaginary of something. That something is always in the process of being produced in and through a potentially endless number of imaginaries. However, while there is no theoretical limit to this number, there is a historical-practical one. Analysing imaginaries means concretely asking which ones are actually there and ‘in use’, how they are constructed and through references to what; who does this (including any unavoidable power relations embedded in the doing); how they are expressed; how they change over time; and how they are encountered, recorded or otherwise made visible. Against the background of such an understanding of social imaginaries, the aim of putting them to use for an analysis of Svalbard is to get a grasp of how Svalbard is made (and constantly remade) as what it ‘is’. Our main interest in analysing a select number of such imaginaries in the individual chapters of this book is to demonstrate how such imaginaries operate for various individuals or groups as well as from various angles and viewpoints. The intention is not, and cannot be, to attempt to identify all the relevant imaginaries in this context (an impossible task given both their number and dynamic character). Rather, the present book demonstrates how different kinds of imaginaries exist next to, and relate to, each other. It seeks to further our understanding of how the construction of Svalbard as a social reality is also partly the outcome of such a complex set of imaginaries and their evolution over time. Each of the following chapters provides a particular access point through which to study how different imaginaries of Svalbard—whether as an assemblage of material structures, an economic space, a sustainability object or a channel for tourist flows— occur, change, disappear and are interwoven over time and in various contexts. As mentioned above, through these access points we aim to decipher how some imaginaries work in the construction of Svalbard, not to provide an exhaustive list of them. One thing that we do hope to achieve by doing this, however, is to establish a frame of reference that can be filled with, and refined through, additional case studies in the future. This book is not primarily about theories and concepts, therefore, nor are its individual chapters. However, it cannot proceed entirely without any theoretical forays, precisely because it circles around a concept of ‘imaginary’ that, in different approaches and across many academic disciplines, is used in a somewhat flexible fashion, to put it mildly. Nonetheless, rather than providing an extended theoretical treatise on the subject, what the present chapter proposes to do is to follow the role model of the ‘guide’, a figure particularly prominent in Svalbard itself: in this case,

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this means not covering each and every inch of the rugged conceptual and semantic terrain of imaginaries, but finding a possible route through it that allows us to arrive at an understanding of the ‘overall’ picture through stopping at a range of promising viewpoints. However, given the fact that even a very brief guided tour through the landscape of imaginaries might be a somewhat strenuous exercise, the present introduction will first invest in some preparations for the journey. Rather than deriving the study of Svalbard imaginaries abstractly from the concept of imaginaries, it will start out more concretely by offering a brief overview of the Svalbard (research) topography, in order to establish where and how imaginaries play a role. The first, quite obvious distinction to be considered in this context is how, on the one hand, imaginaries are present in quite diverse scientific (as well as, for example, political, economic, artistic and military) practices, without necessarily being acknowledged or made explicit as such; and how, on the other hand, they serve as explicit analytical or framing concepts. It is particularly in this second sense that it is possible to draw on the use of the concept in relation to referents other than Svalbard (e.g. ‘the Arctic’, ‘the North’, even ‘the world’). Following this plan, the next section will deal briefly with Svalbard research, while the next but one will elaborate on the implicit or explicit role of imaginaries in this context. This will be done on the basis of a few theoretical remarks that serve as signposts in this respect, with the aim of arriving at a working definition of imaginaries that can serve as a guide for the individual chapters of this volume. As will become clear when previewing these individual chapters at the end of this introduction, however, their authors do not resemble the stereotypical busload of foreign tourists closely following the guide with the umbrella (or the rifle, in the case of Svalbard). Rather, as a group they are more than happy to take advice from the guide, but as individuals they are also inclined to wander off hither and thither if the promise of a better photo-op seems to lie in a different direction.

‘Svalbard Research’ Of course, not all research on Svalbard is research on imaginaries. However, it is difficult to find any research on Svalbard that does not also rely on some kind of an imaginary. Social science and humanities research, explicitly in the former case, is usually situated in a context that focuses

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on the social construction of Svalbard, including a wide range of political, economic, cultural or artistic practices. This research context has significantly expanded over the past one or two decades or so, the expansion probably being due to developments ‘on the ground’, on the one hand, and a general increase in interest in the polar regions in the humanities and the social sciences more broadly.2 Admittedly caricaturing the situation for illustrative purposes, one might say that, if we were to exclude the natural sciences, for a long time most ‘Svalbard research’ either dealt with issues of cultural heritage or mining history or saw Svalbard through geopolitical and legal lenses in relation to the special situation defined by the Svalbard Treaty. This is not surprising at all. It simply made no sense to do extensive research on tourism in Svalbard while tourism barely existed, or on the issues arising from the presence of different nationalities performing various functions while these functions were largely circumscribed by the rigid structures of a coal mining-company town, or on urban planning when all there was to be seen was a number of fairly standardized buildings. All of this has changed because Svalbard has changed. Of course, research is never purely ‘object-driven’ in the sense of merely ‘reacting’ to changes in a world out there: the system of science evolves and differentiates, researchers try to find niches previously barely covered, and fads exist in research as much as they do in relation to clothing. However, research mostly reflects on—and is interlinked with, often to the point of influencing—its object of study. It is in this sense that research on Svalbard in the social sciences and humanities has expanded significantly, in conjunction with and reflecting on a place that is changing. What these two developments, that is a ‘changing’ Svalbard on the one hand and increased attention to it in the social sciences and humanities on the other, entail is, however, quite complex. It is important to note that in both respects it is never about Svalbard alone. Svalbard is, after all, set in the Arctic as a region which itself has witnessed a dramatic shift both in its global role and in the ensuing political and scientific attention it has attracted. Whether with respect to its role in, and representation of, global climate change, its economic importance in relation to transport routes and natural resources, or as a site in geopolitical conflict settings, 2 In an even broader context, this needs to be put in the context of increasing attention to the cryosphere (in the context of climate change) in the humanities (see Dodds and Sörlin 2022) as well as in cultural studies (see Philpott et al. 2020).

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the Arctic has become more important in many respects, and Svalbard is firmly set within this specific regional-global environment. Centring more on the archipelago itself, the transformation wrought when a setting whose entire raison d’être, social and economic structures, and infrastructure changed, within a relatively short time, from an almost total focus on coal mining to become a mixed setting with the accent on tourism, research and an increasing permanent population, also brought about the question of what Svalbard ‘is’. Both intertwined settings and transformations go along with various and contested imaginaries (cf. Gerhardt et al. 2015). Before we take a look at this, however, one important issue needs to be resolved. What does the ‘expansion’ of research mean in the present context? It is based on a subjective impression, not on a full bibliometric analysis or an analysis of research funding. However, it is extremely likely that the latter would confirm the former, as even a quick look into the tables of contents of relevant journals over the past years, or a peek into the research in the Svalbard database (www.researchinsvalbard.no) will show. It needs to be emphasized that this diagnosis holds true even if— indeed, particularly if—one abstracts from the general surge of attention that the Arctic—naturally including Svalbard—has witnessed in various social science disciplines over the past two decades or so.3 Probably the most important point in this context, however, is that this increasing attention has not been focused solely on the established ‘usual suspects’, such as contributions from the fields of International Relations or International Law on the Svalbard Treaty (particularly its 100th Anniversary), or the Treaty’s implications for disputes regarding fisheries rights in the waters around Svalbard, or in this context more generally the sovereignty games being played on, and in relation to, Svalbard. Rather, it has, in a sense, followed Svalbard’s transition in creating research interests and opening research vistas that pertain to things like the issue of local politics at the local/international interface, the managing of a massive economic transition, research practices in Svalbard, the tourism industry and issues of sustainability.

3 This is, however, a diagnosis that needs to be put in context. It would probably be more correct to say that there has been an increasing number of contributions from various social science disciplines to ‘Arctic Studies’ as a loosely defined cross-disciplinary field. The reverse, that is, increased attention to the Arctic within these disciplines, does not necessarily hold true to the same degree.

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Both the scope and intensity of this kind of research are in a sense represented and showcased in a network (more recently, a formal academic association) of scholars called the ‘Svalbard Social Science Initiative (SSSI; www.svalbardsocialscience.com)’. Reflecting the rapidly expanding interest in Svalbard in the social sciences, this network has grown from barely half a dozen, mostly junior scholars a few years ago, to an organization with almost 40 members. It has by now even achieved a noticeable presence in the circle of natural-science-focused Svalbard research (represented by the biannual Svalbard Science Conference). There is no systematic social science research programme on Svalbard. Research is not so much driven by targeted major funding initiatives and large-scale projects as by the initiative of individual researchers. Consequently, the scope of Svalbard research reflects the contingencies of individual interests, funding opportunities, field access issues, etc. Nonetheless, as mentioned above, much of it reflects the changes on the ground, and pertains to a wide range of contemporary issues: the role of science in sovereignty games relating to constructions of Svalbard as a Norwegian space (cf. Paglia and Roberts 2016), the transformation of Longyearbyen and, to a lesser extent, Barentsburg, from mining towns to more multifunctional settlements (cf. Hovelsrud et al. 2020; Timm 2021), or the ‘writing’ of Svalbard history through contemporary politics dealing with cultural heritage (Avango and Roberts 2016; Avango 2018).

Imaginaries of (and in) Svalbard In its function of enabling representations of some kind of ‘whole’, an imaginary can be many things. This function does not necessarily make it into an ‘essentially contested concept’, but it does make it a concept that is used in a variety of ways across many fields and in relation to innumerable subjects. Possibly the easiest way to handle it pragmatically is by following Charles Taylor’s approach to identifying the ‘social imaginary’ by saying what it is not. It is not a theory (in this case, a social theory), but rather, and particularly, something through which ‘ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc.’. (Taylor 2007: 171f). While this, in principle, pertains to any imaginary, it is important to note the rather broad and indeterminate scope of the ‘social surroundings’ in Taylor’s definition. It is not possible to be more specific in this respect as imaginaries are not pictures of something existing ‘out there’, but are part

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of the constant remaking of that something. This is why an imaginary has no clear limits. In Taylor’s case, where the ‘something’ is the entire social world, this means it extends beyond practices to background understandings and the relations between the two.4 Nonetheless, while no imaginary has clear limits, it is possible to identify the central limit of any imaginary in cases where it operates with one prime referent (or a small number of main referents). In the present case, that prime referent is easy to identify: it is ‘Svalbard’. However, this does not mean that a clear understanding exists of what Svalbard ‘is’—quite the contrary, the entire business of imaginaries has to do with constantly making and remaking precisely that. Even so, every imaginary, however well or ill defined, however explicitly shown or hidden in presuppositions, needs to relate itself to the rest of the world. There are always background assumptions at work in how something sits in relation to a larger context or even a ‘whole’. Any such larger context or ‘whole’, moreover, is not a given either, but a set of boundary conditions often assumed in various practices and background understandings. Put simply, differences within and between imaginaries will often not stem from differences pertaining to the prime referent, but from differences regarding context and the situatedness of the referent in that context. Without going into a long conceptual and even philosophical discussion, it seems important to note, by way of definition, that an imaginary does not have a fixed relation to either the imagined or the image. It centrally constitutes an operation of imagining a social whole, but is flexible in relation to whether this entails (empirical) claims as to the (present or past) facticity of that whole, or whether it is a (normative or artistic) depiction of how that whole could or should be seen. Likewise, an imaginary may include an image as a decidedly visual component (an impression of a landscape, a map, a building, etc.), but this is not a prerequisite. Equally, and in notable contrast to a narrative, an imaginary may or may not have a temporal dimension, but it does not necessarily need one (whereas for a narrative one is central). This very loosely functional understanding of an imaginary leaves what might look, at first sight, like a zone of conceptual imprecision. This indeed is the case and the present book deliberately accepts this imprecision in order to be as open as possible to contributions across a wide 4 In this sense Taylor’s conceptualization of a social imaginary seems to be quite similar to Castoriadis’s, although it is quite remarkable that he fails to refer to it.

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spectrum of what could function as an imaginary. While this conceptual width will be described in more detail later on, it seems worth noting at this point that much of the analytical vibrancy that characterizes the present book as a whole stems from the fact that it is not a piece of work that asks individual contributions to elaborate on empirical ‘cases’ against the background of a fixed set of definitions, but rather one that is happy to work with a looser conceptual framework that is itself subject to being formed inductively by the individual contributions. Seen in this fashion, that is, in relation to different social and cultural theories, imaginaries can again be many things: processes of signification, practices, cognitive frames and belief systems. Most of all, however, they are a helpful way of pragmatically approaching a subject and making sense of it by using a concept that does not feature explicitly, but taps into and relates to many vocabularies in different social and cultural theories. The preceding observations lead to an important issue when, as in our case, we distinguish between imaginaries ‘of’ and imaginaries ‘in’ Svalbard. This distinction is not an easy one, and, as will become clear almost immediately, it is both blurred and to some degree necessarily artificial. Imaginaries of Svalbard comprise any in which Svalbard serves as a referent; imaginaries in Svalbard, any that are in whatever way (co)produced on the archipelago. Not only do the two types of imaginary overlap, they are broad and somewhat blurred within themselves. When we talk about imaginaries of Svalbard, this does not necessarily imply that Svalbard is the sole referent. It might very well be a, more or less important, referent in various contexts, such as ‘the Arctic’, the ‘Circumpolar North’ or ‘Norway’. Likewise, what it might mean to talk about imaginaries in Svalbard could well be discussed endlessly: after all, only a few people reside permanently in the archipelago, and arguably most Svalbard-related content (i.e. publications, social media content, artwork, etc.) is not produced literally ‘there’. Within this fuzzy spectrum, the present volume, without being very strict about it, tends towards what are probably the ‘least fuzzy’ ends: we focus on imaginaries of Svalbard that have Svalbard as the main referent—the imaginaries in question might, for example, relate to the North or the Arctic, but we would usually not focus on imaginaries of either of the latter in which Svalbard only plays a minor role. As far as imaginaries in Svalbard are concerned, we focus on those that are at

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least partially produced and/or received in the wider Svalbard community, whether permanent or temporary residents, researchers spending some time there, or tour guides. There are many that do qualify in this respect, but not imaginaries produced in locales and contexts that are never received by anyone in Svalbard at any point. As mentioned, there are no clear boundaries here. Nonetheless, one might assume that, for example, many of the more general enquiries into the special geopolitical and legal status of Svalbard, acquired as a result of the Svalbard Treaty, draw on and produce imaginaries of Svalbard that do not necessarily resonate with very many of the people who actually live there. Nonetheless, the existence of the Treaty itself is very much part of local discursive background (cf. Brode-Roger 2023), so that, in the end, it is an empirical question, to be addressed through the individual chapters of this volume, whether and to what degree the heuristic of the of/in distinction proves to be useful. We shall be assessing this in the concluding chapter.

The Scope of Imaginaries Taken together, the individual chapters of this book demonstrate that, although different imaginaries on and in Svalbard roughly share a common point of reference (i.e. ‘Svalbard’), they also vary sufficiently not to converge into a single ‘Svalbard reality’. They entail, and pertain to, a variety of ongoing negotiations and representations of pasts, presents and futures. In that sense, they reflect the fact that imaginaries make up a large part of what reality ‘is’. They do so by providing common, if contested and evolving, frames of reference for communicating about shared realities, where these frames of reference comprise such things as institutions, values, norms, symbols or laws. They can involve various kinds of textual and visual representation. As flexible as they may be, however, what they always do is to construct, implicitly or explicitly, some kind of relevant framework of reference pertaining to one or more specific referents. This framework may be more explicit in referring to what the referent is (e.g. ‘Svalbard is…’), or may contain a number of references that distinguish it from other relevant environments (e.g. ‘Svalbard is not like….’). In a distinction that is otherwise not often a very fixed one (if not in theory, then at least in practice), this reference to a particular referent and a framework of reference is what sets imaginaries apart from narratives. Both imaginaries and narratives play important roles in

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the social construction of reality, and they are closely, often inextricably, interwoven with each other. However, narratives as an ideal type always include a temporal dimension, a constant weaving (and unweaving) of stories. While a narrative strives to produce coherence in meaning, it neither requires nor necessarily produces clear boundaries, these often being buried under a thick ‘genealogical’ sediment of layers of meaning (or basically lost in the literal ‘mists of time’). That being said, imaginaries will often include, but do not necessarily require, historical depth. They may also be mere snapshots of the present and of possible futures, effectively blocking out layers of historical meaning. Where imaginaries and narratives do not differ is in the variety of possible references they may contain—spatial ones, visualizations both abstract (imaginations) or concrete (images), as well as textual and symbolic ones. Studying the imaginaries ‘of and in’ Svalbard is a worthwhile, yet at the same time an almost impossible, exercise. It is worthwhile insofar as it allows us to bring together—and to trace over time—how different imaginaries both relate to and stand in tension with each other in order to combine into an ever-changing social reality that goes by the name of ‘Svalbard’. This kind of combinatory approach is necessary in our view since, although studies of imaginaries of Svalbard abound, they span many levels and contexts that are rarely brought together, although they do in fact play out in relation to each other. It is also necessary in order to grasp the variety of actorhood behind the different imaginaries. This is where the ‘of and in’ of our title points to: the variety of sites—often (socially and spatially) close, but equally often (socially and spatially) distant—at and through which imaginaries are produced, reproduced and contested. At the same time, such a perspective on imaginaries points to what might appear to be an impossibility: there is no way of knowing, ab initio, how many imaginaries there are in play that go to make up Svalbard. There certainly are very many of them and they differ vastly in character and scope. But there are only a finite number of them. That much is certain, even though we have no idea how great the number is. Our ambition here is to set out, by way of example, a number of different imaginaries of and in Svalbard, and to demonstrate how these can be related to each other in order to make sense of the always fleeting reality of what Svalbard ‘is’.

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Themes and Chapters The contributions to this book reflect the fact that, in terms of imaginaries, Svalbard is indeed many things to many people. The imaginaries covered in the following chapters pertain, among other things, to Svalbard as a geopolitical site, a landscape, a tourist destination, a living space and a (mining) heritage assemblage. They also demonstrate that an imaginary can be both an analytical concept that permits something to be understood as a complex social-cum-material agglomeration and an object of study in the sense that it can be both made and used by actors through and in social practices. While there is no common overarching imaginary that emerges from the individual chapters (nor should there be, given the understanding of imaginaries underlying this volume), there are a number of themes that pop up repeatedly and thus seem to constitute common bracketing devices for a range of imaginaries. Probably most prominent among those themes is the one that designates Svalbard as a ‘unique’ and ‘exceptional’ place. Probably many people, including the contributors to this volume, would agree that, at first sight, Svalbard is indeed such a place. Nonetheless, it is quite important to critically assess whether and to what degree this ascription of uniqueness and exceptionality is merely a ‘normal’ expression of quite common ‘island dynamics’, or whether and to what degree things on Svalbard are indeed exceptional. A mere sense of remoteness probably does not make Svalbard exceptional. But the fact that it is the only place in the world where you can have a conversation with people on the street about an international treaty probably is—or the fact that it is the only place in the world where people actually live where a standard conversational question has not only to do with how long they have been living there, but also when they intend to leave. The concluding chapter will return to these and other themes, reflecting on the assemblage of Svalbard imaginaries. The intervening chapters take up a wide range of these imaginaries. Before briefly introducing them, it is worth commenting on this range and on the emergence of the present volume: the starting point of the present book were conversations in a working group within the Svalbard Social Science Initiative that met a number of times online and provided the input for a session during a workshop in Longyearbyen in October 2021. Both participants in this group and the workshop, as well as a number of people it reached out to afterwards, responded favourably to the idea of the present

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book. The resulting (unplanned) diversity of themes and authors is quite remarkable: they range from political geography and International Relations, via work in the arts, anthropological approaches, urban planning and mining heritage, to reflections on guiding in Svalbard. While this admittedly first appeared as a challenge in terms of offering potentially too great a diversity, the challenge quickly turned into an asset when it became clear (particularly during an authors’ workshop in Bielefeld in November 2022) that this diversity enabled productive exchanges between a variety of approaches that would usually not take place in your typical disciplinary workshop. The first part of the book contains two chapters that at first sight deal with the seemingly rather ‘classical’ issues to do with Svalbard’s geopolitical role over time and the peculiarities associated with the Svalbard Treaty. However, in dealing with the often not too obvious—or at least not explicitly mentioned—imaginaries that are at work in these debates about geopolitics and international law, both chapters provide a fresh perspective that demonstrates how imaginaries are not in fact a marginal aspect of but central to these debates. In what constitutes a broad tour d’horizon over the discourses and literatures about Svalbard (to which they have themselves contributed to a significant extent), Roald Berg and Klaus Dodds provide a succinct account of how in both geopolitical and (often intertwined) historical narratives Svalbard has been represented according to two powerful imaginaries as ‘theatre’ and ‘gateway’. While set in a broad context in this chapter, it is interesting to see how the motives of these imaginaries appear over and over again in some of the more specific analyses of many of the following chapters. Christoph Humrich uses a Hobbesian, a Grotian and a Kantian legal imaginary to outline differing legal images of Svalbard and the practices associated with them. While he argues that certain practices might increasingly be evidence of the presence of a more Hobbesian imaginary of Svalbard, the Svalbard Treaty and some related practices might on the other hand suggest a Kantian imaginary of international law, indicating some transformative potential. In the second part, we turn to the variety of ways in which imaginaries depend on, are reproduced through and ultimately also feed into images as visual representations. Very specifically in their chapter on ‘Visuals and Voices through Time’, Eva la Cour and Samantha Saville deal with material images shot on Svalbard in the 1960s, particularly the analogue film Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (Nature and Coal mining at

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78N), shot by Herta Grøndal. The chapter deals with the origins, production and circulation of Naturrikdom in order to unearth past Svalbard imaginaries as well as potential creative interplay with collective imaginaries of Svalbard futures in the present. Staying in the realm of film, but quite radically shifting genre to the contemporary UK television series ‘Fortitude’, Dina Brode-Roger in her chapter looks at the ‘Nordic noir’ style as well as the Western Arctic imaginaries that it typically makes use of as an important fictional framing context for Svalbard imaginaries. This context attains a particular, maybe even a paradoxical form as some parts of the series play out in a Svalbard-like setting without having been shot there, while parts actually were shot in Longyearbyen. Turning to a place at the interstices of the humanities, arts, the natural sciences and the development of new technologies, Tyrone Martinsson in his chapter turns to how particular imaginaries are created and transformed through exploring stories of ice. He demonstrates how the relevant processes of creation and transformation since 1596 have recently been influenced by the rapid development of powerful technologies that have opened up entirely new ways of visualizing and thereby imagining the north. Mostly using a dialogical form, Eva la Cour and Dina Brode-Roger in their joint chapter on ‘Arctic Imaginaries and their Entangled Relationship with Image-production on Svalbard’ engage with experiences and thoughts concerning artists’ visual productions and artistic practices on Svalbard, and the infrastructures and imaginaries that support and shape them. The chapter draws directly from the authors’ own professional practices and, in the style of a correspondence, connects their different perspectives with recent attempts to circumnavigate how conventional structures of academic writing often disrupt, separate and stage what is actually going on. The third part of the book turns to the role and production of imaginaries in relation to the past and present of Svalbard’s built environments. In his chapter on ‘Svalbard’s Urban Imaginaries’, Peter Hemmersam shows how Svalbard has a history unique among the Arctic regions for the various parallel projections of urbanism onto its territory by southern states with different urban planning cultures. He demonstrates how both Longyearbyen and Pyramiden can be read in terms of their urban and architectural iconographies, with distinct historical layers that reflect evolving place imaginaries. He uses these layers to identify evolving northern place imaginaries that comprise complementary dimensions of what can be conceptualized as global Arctic urbanism. Turning more to

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the mining heritage of Svalbard, Ulrich Schildberg draws on a rich literature on the transition of company towns in order to demonstrate first the variety of developmental trajectories undergone by Svalbard’s company towns. Focusing on Longyearbyen in particular, he demonstrates how a company town’s ‘successful’ transition (and survival) after the loss of its original purpose (e.g. mining) depends not only on making structural adjustments, but also on creating or activating new imaginaries of its role and place. The fourth part turns to what we call ‘Living Imaginaries’, focusing on how imaginaries are always created and employed in everyday practice by specific people who have, in a sense, to negotiate the differences and tensions between international treaties and geopolitics, on the one side, and everyday experiences of working, living, doing research, visiting, guiding, etc., on the other. Analysing a range of policy documents and drawing on engagements with a wide range of stakeholders, Lisbeth Iversen demonstrates in her chapter that there exist considerable inconsistencies and tensions when it comes to the urban imaginaries being played out over Longyearbyen in particular. However, while on the one hand she identifies an imaginary strongly tied to the precautionary principle as being strongly present with the Norwegian authorities, she also hints at a range of processes that underlie alternative, bottom-up and co-creative processes of producing urban imaginaries. Taking a highly reflexive approach on her own work as a researcher, Jasmine Zhang looks at the ‘effects and affects that imaginaries bring in the form of interrelationships and entanglements, rather than answering any question on imaginaries per se through a descriptive approach’. This implies not treating imaginaries as an object of study, but rather using them as a ‘productive site’ for analysing the subjective experiences of a visitor (in this case, the researcher as visitor). Martin Fiala then turns to his experiences as a guide and, based on a wealth of observations from guided tours, reflects on how visitors (usually tourists) come with a range of specific imaginaries regarding Svalbard, and how Svalbard is experienced and imaginaries adapted in that context. In particular, he reflects on the experience and entanglement of the guide who, rather than claiming greater authenticity in this respect, also finds himself taking part in the (re)production of imaginaries. In her concluding remarks, Dina Brode-Roger reflects on the contributions to this book both in the light of the themes set in this introduction, but also briefly reflecting on the many aspects that could not be covered.

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Most importantly, she points out that reflecting on, and establishing a dialogue between, the ‘multiple threads of the imaginaries in, of, about and with Svalbard’ not only fosters our understanding of Svalbard itself, but also helps us ponder the multifaceted and complex situated positionings beyond the archipelago.

References Avango, Dag (2018) ‘Extracting the future in Svalbard’. In: Nina Wombs (ed.) Competing Arctic Futures. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Cham: Palgrave: 47–71. Avango, Dag and Peder Roberts (2017) ‘Heritage, conservation, and the geopolitics of Svalbard: writing the history of Arctic environments’. In: LillAnn Körber, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport (eds) Arctic Environmental Modernities. Cham: Springer: 125–143. Brode-Roger, Dina (2023) ‘The Svalbard treaty and identity of place: impacts and implications for Longyearbyen, Svalbard’. Polar Record 59 (e6): 1–11 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0032247422000365). Castoriadis, Cornelius (1997) The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (French original 1975). Dodds, Klaus and Sverker Sörlin (eds) (2022) Ice Humanities. Living, Working and Thinking in a Melting World. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gerhardt, Hannes, Adam Keul, Elizabeth A. Nyman, Philip E. Steinberg and Jeremy Tasch (2015) Contesting the Arctic. Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North. London: I.B. Tauris. Hovelsrud, Grete K., Bjørn P. Kaltenborn and Julia Olsen (2020) ‘Svalbard in transition: adaptation to cross-scale changes in Longyearbyen’. The Polar Journal 10 (2): 420–442. Paglia, Eric and Peder Roberts (2016) ‘Science as national belonging: the construction of Svalbard as a Norwegian space’. Social Studies of Science 46 (6): 894–911. Philpott, Carolyn, Elizabeth Lane and Matt Delbridge (eds) Performing Ice. Cham: Palgrave Taylor, Charles (2007) A Secular Age. Harvard, MA: Belknap Press. Timm, Caroline (2021) 78°N. The Imaginaries of an Uncertain Future— Longyearbyen, a Place of Change. Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology.

PART I

Svalbard in the Arctic: Territory and Sovereignty

CHAPTER 2

Between Gateway and Theatre: Geopolitics, History and the Framing of Svalbard Roald Berg and Klaus Dodds

Introduction The Norwegian territory of Svalbard is a paradox. Formerly known as Spitsbergen, it was a no man’s land for centuries. It was commonplace to speak of a ‘Spitsbergen question’ during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century (Hansen 1926; Kruse 2014: 273). Following the entry into force of the 1920 Spitsbergen Treaty, the territory became ‘Svalbard’ in 1925, ruled by Norway (Jensen 2020). Third-party signatories such as Russia, the US and UK were, however, granted access and resource-based rights, which had to match those offered to any equivalent Norwegian parties (Pedersen 2021). In his circumpolar overview of the human history of the Arctic, the archaeologist Robert McGhee reflects candidly on what he terms ‘the

R. Berg University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway e-mail: [email protected] K. Dodds (B) Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_2

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rape of Svalbard’ and dates that ecological and material violation from the late sixteenth century onwards, with the locus of responsibility firmly established in European domains (McGhee 2005). For much of the twentieth century, both Norway and Russia (and the former Soviet Union included many Ukrainian miners) found common cause in coal mining, even though it was widely thought to be less than profitable. Nowadays, it is far more likely for Svalbard to be associated with tourism and science, as well as with being an environmental change hotspot. What Svalbard signifies is complicated and debatable. This chapter considers two imaginaries that encapsulate central ideas and visions associated with the archipelago (Anderson and Nuttall 2004; Steinberg and Tash 2015; Dodds and Nuttall 2016). It takes inspiration from a body of literature that has been invested in how the Arctic has been interpreted and engaged with as well as defined as a spatial entity. Our first identified imaginary addresses Svalbard as a ‘theatre’—both a conventional military theatre caught up in strategic calculation and a scene of technological-exploratory achievement. It was a place for investors and pioneers to experiment with novel technologies. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Spitsbergen and Svalbard served as a stepping-stone for those eager to journey ever onwards towards the North Pole (as interrogated by Bloom 1993; Berg 2006; von Spreter 2021). A multimodal approach followed with plans hatched to use airships, aeroplanes, balloons, ships and even cable cars. This theatre imaginary was intersected by our second one—Svalbard as ‘gateway’ to points further north and/ or from the Arctic Ocean to the Norwegian Sea, the Greenland Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. Twentieth-century Svalbard was a resource and strategic gateway for Norway and other countries. The local, national and international governance of the archipelago reflects the importance afforded to it. During the Cold War Svalbard’s proximity to the central Arctic Ocean and its relative proximity to Greenland and northern Scandinavia ensured that these ‘northern waters’ could hide third-party submarines and underwater sabotage. Locally, the science hub established at the small settlement of Ny-Ålesund continues to act as a knowledge hub for all parties eager to consolidate their scientific presence in the Arctic, most recently Asian countries such as China and India. Norway and other parties have invested considerable sums in constructing infrastructure, devising planning systems, operating mechanisms for collaboration and exchange,

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and soliciting the engagement of others including scientific, military and commercial operators (Nyman et al. 2020). The ‘theatre’ and ‘gateway’ imaginaries intersect with one another and indeed with others involving environmental change, science and tourism. We investigate Svalbard as a theatre for pioneers and opportunists initially. Thereafter, we argue that Svalbard’s status as a military theatre during World War II helped to transform it into a gateway with gaps and cracks that were the subject of plenty of intrigue and military manoeuvres. We emphasize how the two imaginaries find traction in security and sovereignty matters. Finally, we posit that Svalbard is being actively imagined as both a theatre for climate change and a geopolitical gateway that is looming ever larger in both Russian and NATO security thinking. As other chapters note, the ‘theatre imaginary’ of Svalbard in the non-military sense persists.

Svalbard as Elemental Theatre for Dreamers and Pioneers In the beginning, Svalbard was imagined by those who set eyes on it as a hostile and inhospitable place. Willem Barentsz, who discovered it in 1596, noted its jagged peaks and thought of them as a natural sentry against any human intruders: ‘therefore we named them Spitsbergen’ (Arlov 1996: 42; 2020: 6). His expedition continued eastwards hoping to find a North-East passage north of Russia and thenceforth onto Asia. The unrelenting elements forced them to winter at Novaja Zemlja, where he and several of his crew died (McGhee 2005, 176; Hauan 2021: 62). For those who experienced it, pain, peril and fear were the overwhelming impressions of Spitsbergen as of any wilderness. ‘All soil that was not inhabited, cultivated and controlled by humans, was godforsaken and virtually the domain of the evil one’ (Wråkberg in Drivenes and Jølle 2004, vol. 1: 23). Countless disaster stories confirmed the imagination of these polar islands not only as a political ‘no man’s land’, but also as ‘no place for man [sic]’. However, Spitsbergen was also reimagined as a resource frontier with polar bears, walrus and whales in its fjords (McGhee 2005: 178). The Barentsz expeditions—there were three of them—revolutionized European understandings and knowledge of the Arctic (Degroot 2018: 73–79). Fleets of British, Dutch and Danish whalers and seal hunters competed for the best land stations. The legendary Smeerenburg

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on Amsterdam Island was said to have had a population of 10,000 men in the summer season, which is obviously a huge exaggeration (McGhee 2005: 181f). But such boosterism did empower eighteenth-century expeditions to harvest sea mammals so effectively that hunting fields were literally emptied (Avango et al. 2011). The fleets then simply disappeared. Smaller-scale hunters followed in their wake. In bestselling Norwegian novelist Lars Hansen’s I Spitsbergens vold [In Spitsbergen’s power], the main characters bring down 580 seals in one catch alone—‘fat like pigs all of them’ (Hansen 1926: 166f). Seventy-five hunting expeditions set out from Hammerfest for Spitsbergen between 1819 and 1830 alone (Nielsen in Drivenes and Jølle 2004, vol. 3: 55). The many small-scale hunting expeditions were never of any national economic importance to Norway. For communities in the northern provinces of Norway and Russia, however, Spitsbergen was a promising resource frontier (Nielsen in Drivenes and Jølle 2004, vol. 3: 76–79). The costs, though, were not inconsiderable as expeditionary teams tended to die of scurvy and lead poisoning (Gorter et al. 2011: 143–145; Davodov 2021; Kjær and Aasebø 2012). Hunting remained a proxy for gradual European colonization of this ‘no man’s land’. In the nineteenth century, the so-called ‘leisure classes’ (Veblen 1899) came to Spitsbergen for other reasons. Its elemental beauty was about to be ‘harvested’. Onboard their luxurious tourist steamers, the millionaire hunters became ‘deckchair explorers’, as they shot ice bears from the deckside and left the animals lying on the shore (Spring 2020; Kolltveit 2006). The new age of tourism, nationalism and steam transport in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries redesignated Spitsbergen as a literal and figurative site for adventures and record seekers. Like the hero in Jack London’s bestseller The Call of the Wild (1903), they were tired of modern easiness. They wanted to undertake new heroic deeds such as reaching the North Pole and putting new technology to the ultimate test. Spitsbergen was reimagined as a take-off point for a great number of North Pole expeditions, motivated by what Robert Peary described as an urge: ‘I must have fame’ (Cited in Arlov 2020: 5). Fuelled by an international sensationalist media (Riffenburgh 1993) and integrated into a Gesamtkunstwerk of techno-spectacular adventurism, Spitsbergen proved a fertile environment for all manner of land-, sea- and air-based—and first and foremost masculine—adventurism (Bloom 1993; Berg 2006; Cronin 2013; Lewander 2004). In one of the most extreme cases, the German Oskar Bauendahl believed he would be able to travel to the North Pole

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via an overhead railroad track from Spitsbergen. The plan was devised simply in order to overcome the myriads of irregular hummocks that made skiing or walking almost impossible. Poles were taken to treeless Spitsbergen and set up on the ice at regular intervals. Heavy wire was stretched between them, and a coach hung by overhead wheels which was intended to roll forward as on an aerial track. It did not work, unsurprisingly. Roald Amundsen concluded in his autobiography that the German was obviously ‘insane’ (Amundsen 1927: 231f). The archipelago’s reputation for being an experimental air hub was well established by the late nineteenth century. But it was a dangerous one. Svalbard’s inclement weather and mountainous landscapes were hard to escape. In 1897 the Swedish polar pioneer Salomon August Andrée took off from Danskøya hoping to balloon all the way to the North Pole. The attempt ended in failure (Capelotti 1999: 20–43). The crew perished. Three decades later they were found on the Spitsbergen Island, Kvitøya. In 1909 Roald Amundsen experimented with the development of a ‘wire dragon’ that would hoist a man above the expedition ship to facilitate piloting between open holes in the ice to get as far north as possible on the way to the Pole. After that experiment ended with another death, Amundsen turned to aeroplane technology. In 1923 and again in 1925 he tried to fly to the North Pole. The first try ended in an immediate crash. In 1925 he took off from Ny-Ålesund with two planes. Eight hours later they had to make an emergency landing in the ice. After some weeks, they returned in the one undamaged plan with the entire crew miraculously alive. The lesson they drew was that dirigible technology (an airship) was the safest means to ‘lift the explorer above the Arctic landscape and to shield his body within a technological shell’, as the historian of science and technology Marionne Cronin summarized (Cronin 2013: 58). The answer was the ‘Norge’ (Fig. 2.1). ‘Norge’ was constructed by Umberto Nobile, the best airship engineer in the world. He was the real captain during the sensational flight from Svalbard via the North Pole to Alaska in 1926, financed by the American millionaire Lincoln Ellsworth (Lüdecke 2011: 174; Berg 2006). Amundsen was, technically, a passenger. However, the Norwegian Prime Minister had authorized him to take possession for Norway of any new land that might be discovered during the voyage. The chance to create such a world-wide sensation was another good reason for attempting the ‘Norge’ voyage. But, first and foremost, it was a triumph for air transport technology: the adventurer was reduced from the hero to a

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Fig. 2.1 Airship ‘Norge’ leaving Svalbard (Photo Anders Beer Wilse, Source https://polarhistorie.no/imagearchive/Luftskipet%20Norge%202_NP018380. jpg)

team member in a huge discovery industry. Svalbard’s jagged landscapes had been safely left behind as aerial exploration allowed explorers to simply glide over them. However, tragedy followed in 1928 as the great Roald Amundsen himself was lost while searching for the ill-fated expedition led by Umberto Nobile in his ‘Italia’ airship, which had crashed near Svalbard. The press and even public reaction in Norway at the time of Nobile’s disappearance was hostile believing that an Italian had no right to be engaged in the exploration of the polar regions and blaming his recklessness for the death of the great Norwegian explorer, Amundsen (Aas 2005 and for a creative intervention on the subject of the Amundsen–Nobile controversy, the Soviet/Italian film Red Tent 1969). Svalbard had, by the time it acquired its new Norwegian name and sovereign, become the international playground for geographical as well as scientific adventurers and explorers. Once a resource frontier for hunting and extraction, it was by the turn of the twentieth century a well-established theatre for scientific-technological experimentation and

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research. But those imaginaries were also punctuated by tragedy, loss and controversy.

From ‘Spitsbergen Question’ to Gateway ‘The land is free. Anybody is free – as far as his rifle reaches’ (newspaper Finnmarken in 1903, quoted in Berg 2023). Prior to the Spitsbergen treaty of 1920, the polar archipelago was imagined as terra nullius. For the hunters this meant that Spitsbergen was an Arctic Arcadia, open for anybody, blessed by the absence of any authority that hampered the effective harvesting of nature’s abundance. From the 1870s onwards, Spitsbergen was a ground zero for the extraction of coprolite—guano—to fertilize international agriculture, and from the turn of the century, of coal. The islands, in short, were subject to both imaginative competition and international congestion. In Norway, there were several decisive moments in the nineteenth century when the country’s political elite turned their gaze northwards. In the 1820s, the Norwegian Parliament funded geologist Baltazar Keilhau’s expedition to Finnmark and Spitsbergen. He included Spitsbergen in his three-volume magnum opus, Gaea Norwegica, published in the 1830s (Enebakk 2022: 203). During the nineteenth century, he was followed by a modest stream of international scientists (see, for example, Drivenes 1992). They strengthened the dual imagination of Spitsbergen as an arena for internationally funded science while embedding the archipelago’s special relationship with Norway (Enebakk 2022: 203). In the 1870s the Norwegian state sent a hydrographic expedition into the North Atlantic Ocean to map the fish resources. In 1876 this expedition declared that this huge body of water was in fact ‘the Norwegian Sea’ (Berg 2013: 163; Bjørnsen 2003: 94f). This was later formalized by the work of the International Hydrographic Organization in their publication, Limits of Oceans and Seas, which declared the existence of a Norwegian Sea in its original publication of 1928 (IHO 1928/ 1953). Spitsbergen appeared on the radar of international capitalism as the industrialization of western agriculture intensified. The US led the ‘guano age’ that followed and took possession of minor guano-bearing islands in South America (Cushman 2013: 23). The Swedish polar scientist, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, discovered guano deposits on Spitsbergen, and in 1871 proposed to the king that His Majesty should annex the islands

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for Norway to protect the guano deposits that he wanted to extract to finance his research. The king acted diplomatically. The Russian Tsar rejected any idea of changing the international status of the islands, as he and the Russian polar lobby insisted on maintaining Spitsbergen open to anyone to protect the Russian hunters, the Pomors, who had been hunting on the islands from the fifteenth century—before the Norwegians (Arlov 1996: 222–224; Jørgensen 2017). Other European great powers also dismissed Norwegian sovereignty, and, most importantly, the Norwegian government, which had certainly been consulted by the king’s foreign minister in Stockholm, rejected Nordenskiöld’s proposal. Norway opposed any policy option that might provoke an adverse international reaction. Some Russian scholars have claimed that the Nordenskiöld incident ended with a ‘bilateral treaty between Russia and SwedenNorway on establishing a Russo-Norwegian condominium on the island’ (Vylegzhanin and Kilanov 2007: 10). This has never been evidenced though it has been reiterated recently by both foreign and Norwegian political scientists (Rossi 2018 51; Jørgensen 2010: 25). On the contrary, the Norwegian government declared in its reply to the king that if anybody were to have the sovereignty, the territory ‘should be placed under the sovereignty of Norway’ (Berg 2013: 164). A decade later, in 1884–85, the Berlin conference endorsed the European partition of Africa. In 1892 the Norwegian minister responsible for external relations urged the king of Norway and Sweden to push for full sovereignty over Spitsbergen to be awarded to Norway and referred specifically to ongoing European colonialism elsewhere (Berg 2013), but this time in vain. Shortly afterwards, it was becoming clearer that the status of Svalbard was beginning to encourage a new formulation: the ‘Spitsbergen Question’ (Hansen 1926). It was even described as ‘A Unique International Problem’ by the American international lawyer Robert Lansing in 1916 (Berg 2017; Singh 1980). International commentaries at the time of the First World War addressed this ‘Question’ in a variety of ways, in large part dependent on nationalist conceits. It was not uncommon in places like the UK to think that these islands might one day become their possession. For the Scandinavian countries, the relationship with Spitsbergen was complicated by the constitutional status of Norway. After the dissolution of the union with Sweden in 1905, Norway, quickly initiated two conferences with Sweden and Russia, in 1910 and 1912, to compose a

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plan for international administration, and in 1914 the ‘Spitsbergen Question’ was deliberated at an international conference in Oslo (which was ended abruptly and without a successful outcome by the outbreak of the world war). After the war Spitsbergen was caught up in discussions about its internationalized status. The course of events that concluded in 1920 with the Treaty can hardly be said to have been driven by Norway, though there was both an inner, Norwegian chain of events (see Hustoft 2022; Berg 2013) and an international one. In 1899 the two lines entangled. A Norwegian skipper was the first to find coal in profitable quantities and sold it in Norway (Arlov 2022: 32). The press noted that the islands should have been Norwegian. At Bear Island, a German adventurer occupied the island to start a coal mining business. He was chased away by a Russian warship (Barthelmess 1989; Reinke-Kunze 1992: 85f). The Norwegian press asked, ‘Who owns the Arctic islands?’ and answered with the assertion that ‘As soon as this question becomes a matter for serious international discussion, Norway must be in the foreground’ (Berg 2013: 166). Norway’s sense of manifest destiny when it came to Spitsbergen increased. As part of a demonstration of the full independence it had acquired in 1905, the negotiations 1910– 1914 had the additional concealed aim of seeking Norwegian sovereignty. After 1905 Norwegian scientists were also preoccupied with promoting Norwegian sovereignty over these polar islands and lobbied the government in its determined diplomatic efforts to secure Spitsbergen (Berg 2013). The established resource potential of Spitsbergen continued to play a part in the framing of the islands as a gateway for international investment and development. In 1901 the American mining millionaire, John M. Longyear, visited Spitsbergen as a cruise tourist, observed the coal, returned, and established the American mining company in the Isfjord in 1906. To protect his financial interests, he urged the US to take the legal initiative to resolve the lack of rule of law in Spitsbergen. In 1916 he sold his company to Norwegian investors, who partially financed their investment by selling shares to the Americans, who therefore took a positive view of Norwegian sovereignty in 1920. Longyear’s main collaborator, the international lawyer Robert Lansing, established a unique legal formula for Norwegian sovereignty combined with continued international access to the polar islands. That was the main content of the Spitsbergen Treaty, signed at the Paris Peace Conference in 1920 under the auspices of President Wilson and Lansing himself, now Secretary

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of State (Berg 2017). From the 1930s onwards, Spitsbergen, under its Norwegianized name Svalbard (Hustoft 2022: 20–22), became a Norwegian possession but open to citizens of any state that had signed or joined the 1920 Treaty. Svalbard was no longer a no man’s land, but Norway’s sovereignty was not entirely clear. And this legal-political uncertainty helped to cement further its reputation as a place for speculation and intrigue. From the 1930s, when the Soviet Union established its coal mines, Norway and the Soviet Union ruled their respective parts. Later the Soviet authorities claimed and practised ‘home rule’ in the settlement of Barentsburg, while the Governor in Longyearbyen became responsible for the entire archipelago.

Svalbard Between Military Theatre and Gateway During World War II, Svalbard was the most northerly point of contention between Allied and Axis powers (Dege 2004). Article 9 of the 1920 Svalbard Treaty barred the sovereign power Norway from either establishing naval bases or building fortifications on the islands—which ‘may never be used for warlike purposes’ (Arlov 1994; Bailes 2011). While Svalbard was not entirely demilitarized, signatories to the treaty recognized that economic activities would assume considerable importance in the light of the prevailing treaty (Grydehøj 2014, 2020). Both Norway and the Soviet Union regarded mining as an ongoing proxy for occupation and control, in part because Western and Soviet defence planners during World War II and the Cold War era, conceived of it as a ‘strategic gateway’ to the Atlantic Ocean. Even before World War II, the rising popularity of azimuthal maps including Rand McNally World Maps for the Air Age were depicting the North Pole and northerly territories such as Svalbard in novel ways. A polar-centred projection emphasized not only the relative proximity of the Soviet Union and the US (via the Arctic Ocean and Bering Strait) but also the way in which transport routes connected the Arctic as a strategic region. Calls for an ‘Air age’ geography coincided with a flourish of colourful mapping (Cosgrove and della Dora 2005). And then, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, access to and from the northwest Russian coast took on a very different aspect. Resisting German aggression in the High North was one concern, but another was simply tempering any potential for Norwegian domination of Svalbard.

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During the Nazi occupation of Norway, the Norwegian government in exile was based in London. As part of denying German access to resources wherever possible, the coal industry and settlements based in Svalbard were targeted for deliberate destruction. In 1941, under the auspices of Operation Gauntlet, a combined force of Norwegian, British and Canadian soldiers secured three objectives: to deny Germany access to coal, disable weather stations and repatriate the local population. Svalbard was widely recognized as a strategic gateway that could be used by German naval forces to harass and disrupt the Arctic convoys that were designed to provide emergency relief for the Soviet Union, which was in the grip of a German land-based invasion. While the operation was a success, for the remainder of the war German interest was largely focused more on securing meteorological data than coal supplies. But there had been a fundamental shift. German forces had demonstrated that occupation was possible, and the Soviet Union’s northern front was exposed. An imaginative rupture occurred. Between 1944 and 1945, German forces ran a network of secret weather stations on the archipelago, one of which only stopped operating in September 1945. Svalbard became a gateway for advanced weather information rather than a departure point for shipping operations or a northerly resource hotspot (Berg 2020). The experience of conflict on Svalbard, however, muted compared to other parts of the world, sparked further reflection on and a reassessment of the status of these northerly islands and the way in which they were imagined and known. The Svalbard Treaty does not limit Norway’s ability to defend its territories apart from the prohibition on establishing permanent military installations. German naval operations demonstrated that the North Atlantic and the southerly parts of the Arctic Ocean were significant theatres of operation and that remote islands could act as stepping-stones rather than a gateway for power projection. The consequences were substantial for Norwegian–Russian relations between the latter stages of World War II and the onset of what became known as the Cold War. Within the space of three years, however, the Norwegian authorities found themselves in discussions with their Soviet counterparts about the future of Svalbard. Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov sought to push for substantial Norwegian concessions in the form of a Russian–Norwegian condominium over Svalbard and the transfer of sovereignty over Bear Island from Norway to the Soviet Union. Underpinning Soviet demands

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was the proposition that the security ‘channel’ between Norway and Svalbard was being compromised by advances in naval and aerial technologies (Holtsmark 2004). The German armed forces had already shown what such violent disruption could achieve with long-lasting ramifications for the Soviet Union’s sense of national security. The Norwegian government in exile in London was in a vulnerable position. In April 1945 it sent a draft joint declaration to the Soviets in which most of the Soviet claims were met. The Soviets did not answer. In February 1947 the Norwegian Parliament, back in Oslo together with the government, rebuffed the Soviet claims. The Soviets answered with silence (ibid.). Two years later, Norway’s entry into NATO eliminated any further conversations around possible Svalbard-related concessions to the Soviet Union. The 1920 Svalbard Treaty weathered the discombobulation caused by World War II and, as noted, the more immediate postwar Soviet demands for potential change. What all of this reinforces is a point made by Roald Berg (2020) in his interrogation of the Svalbard ‘channel’. For the Soviet Union, the prevailing concern from World War II onwards was to achieve two fundamental objectives. First, Moscow was adamant that Svalbard must not be allowed to become a strategic gateway that might be used by Norwegian and or other NATO forces in the future. Maintaining a Soviet presence on the islands was thus essential for ensuring that Moscow’s interests were not going to be diminished. Second, the ‘strait’ between mainland Norway and Svalbard had to be kept secure and safe for Soviet commercial and military movements. The Norwegians had different aspirations, with corresponding implications for the geopolitical imaginaries of Svalbard—how, in short, to keep Svalbard ‘national’ and ensure that Norway’s most northerly territory was not overwhelmed by Cold War logics of deterrence and denial. As Norwegian scholars have noted, the 1970s and 1980s were decisive years in terms of Norway’s pivoting away from a relatively low-key management of Svalbard to a more assertive approach to administration and surveillance.

Gateway with a ‘Bear Gap’ Svalbard’s place within the competing Cold War geopolitical imaginaries of the US and the Soviet Union depended on an array of regional and global conceits (Wither 2018; Bertelsen 2020). For the US, the northern islands of Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard appeared as ‘gaps’ that needed

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to be monitored and/or supported by a basing presence. After the formation of NATO in 1949, it was primarily the US and the UK that conceived the North Atlantic as a strategic theatre that was laid open by a Greenland–Iceland–UK Gap that demanded naval and aerial patrolling in the face of a growing perception that the Soviet Union’s military arsenal would sail south from the Kola Peninsula and menace NATO parties. Further north, the decision to establish a military base in Thule in Greenland in 1951 was predicated on the conviction that the US had to have the capability to detect possible long-range bombers originating from the Russian North. While a permanent military presence was not permitted on Svalbard, there is little question that the archipelago was a puzzle for NATO planners—incorporated into the Supreme Allied Command (Atlantic) but without any military defence installations. Thus, NATO’s Article 5 secured allied support in principle, but neither Norway nor its allies made or could make any practical military preparations for active defence on Svalbard during the Cold War without breaching the Svalbard Treaty (Tamnes 2020: 149). Without an airfield until 1974, Svalbard could not be used as a stop-over by either the US or the Soviet Union. If the Soviets pushed, as they did, for the complete demilitarization of Svalbard, at least it had the indirect benefit of reinforcing Norwegian (and thus NATO-friendly) sovereignty (Fig. 2.2). Nevertheless, Svalbard was for Soviet defence planners a place that needed to remain demilitarized so that it did not complicate their sense of the waters around the Barents Sea as a channel for the movement of shipping and submarines. Later with the ‘bastion’ concept, Soviet military forces were directed towards ensuring the safety of ballistic missile submarines, so that they could operate beyond the Kola Peninsula and the Barents Sea. Maintaining a presence on the islands through coal mining, however, was another way of ensuring an active engagement, as was fishing. The very treaty that established the demilitarization of the archipelago was also thought to be an enabler of risky behaviour, an example of which came in the form of Soviet helicopter and plane accidents in the late 1970s which led to the Soviet authorities defying Norwegian demands to investigate and handle the management of the crash site. The most notable instance was when a military aircraft crashed at Hopen in 1978. The Soviets demanded access to the wreck (Berg 2020: 312). The diplomatic spat that followed between Norway and the Soviet Union revealed fundamental tensions inherent in the treaty relationship—and a desire on the

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Fig. 2.2 The Soviet Union developed the ‘bastion’ concept in its defence planning during the Cold War. The Bear Island gap between Norway, Bear Island and Svalbard was crucial to sea denial operations and the defence of the Northern Fleet in the Kola Peninsula (Original source and redrawn by Jen Thornton:://www.fiia.fi/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/bp259_geostr ategic_arctic.pdf page 5)

part of the Norwegian authorities to ensure that their sovereign interests were respected. Svalbard has thus been, and continues to be, conceptualized as a potential flashpoint, which, in turn, places near continuous pressure on Norway as the sovereign power. During the late 1970s, for example, there was tension regarding fishing rights. Norway faced disagreements with NATO allies including the UK and Iceland as well as others such as the Soviet Union over whether the Svalbard Treaty applied to any exclusive economic zone. The treaty only refers to ‘territorial waters’ so critics have argued that Norway cannot establish an EEZ and, if it did, the zone would have to be accessible by all treaty parties. Norway established the Fisheries Protection Zone in 1977, to which access was granted by historic activity. The Soviet Union and later Russia, as well as other

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states, have continued to resist Norway’s right to regulate fishing. Svalbard might yet provoke further third-party opportunism and aggression against Norwegian sovereignty. It is worth remembering that the Svalbard Treaty does not explicitly stipulate how Norway’s administration should be executed beyond the need to respect the rights of signatories and to avoid taxes to cover costs at Svalbard. The Norwegian coal mining company Store Norske assumed an exaggerated importance in terms of day-to-day management for the simple reason that it exemplified Norway’s effective occupation of the archipelago. Likewise, Soviet mining activities underpinned their occupation and maintenance of the settlements of Barentsburg and Pyramiden. A network of ‘company towns’ in effect were responsible for the daily management of local activities. The Norwegian authorities recognized that other activities such as science could also help to consolidate their effective presence across Svalbard. In the 1960s, after a coal mining disaster at a mining site in Ny-Ålesund, Norway took the decision to reimagine the site as a place for international scientific cooperation. This is yet another reminder of how Svalbard is both nationalized and internationalized through the nature and oversight of its activities. In the late 1970s, the office of the Governor of Svalbard was invested with new powers including to ‘seek to coordinate state activities on the archipelago. He must keep himself informed about any activities that may have significance for this work. He shall work for the good of Svalbard and, in this context, take those initiatives he considers necessary’ (Government of Norway 1999, Section 5.4.1). A suite of activities became formally part of the official portfolio including environmental protection, policing, transport and engagement with third-party settlements in Svalbard. The net result of this empowerment of the Governor was to give further scope for local efforts to ensure that Svalbard was indigenized further as a Norwegian territory. If fishing, mining and science (and later tourism) acted as reminders of Svalbard’s international qualities, then the role and scope of the Governor was decisively focused on enhancing Norway’s foothold by administrative and procedural labour. One consequence of this desire to secure further Norwegian sovereignty and security interests was to forestall attempts by the local communities on Svalbard to improve democratic representation. Around the same time, contemporary commentators such as Kirsten Amundsen noted that the UK newspaper media began to refer to Svalbard as NATO’s ‘Achilles heel’ (Amundsen 1981: 1). It raises the interesting

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issue of why the UK rather than the Norwegian media were keen to alert their readers to this newfound sense of strategic vulnerability. One answer might be a redirecting of attention away from a maritime gap (the Greenland–Iceland–UK Gap) and the business of denying Soviet submarines access to the Atlantic Ocean to territorial spaces such as Svalbard, which might yet become advanced staging grounds for Soviet power projection. If anything, the ‘Bear Island gap’ was the place to focus more attention on because it signalled not only the entry into the Russian ‘bastion’ zone but also the start of more aggressive sea denial operations. This ‘Achilles heel’ framing was stimulated in part because of the worsening of the Norwegian–Russian relationship and the realization that the Soviet strategic posture was calibrated to ensure that the USSR would never be removed from the archipelago and surrounding waters. One interesting trade-off during the 1970s was how the Norwegian authorities had to juggle how, when and where to assert their sovereign authority. While Norway did not detect any improper use of helicopters at the Russian settlement of Barentsburg in the late 1970s, it was nonetheless a nearconstant concern that the helicopter base might be transformed into a military one (Pedersen 2008; Wither 2018). This aura of uncertainty and intrigue meant that all sides became deeply invested in watching one another for signs of power projection, ‘presence’ through science and/ or potential violations of the treaty (Roberts and Paglia 2016; Pedersen 2021). Svalbard’s framing as a late Cold War hotspot might have also owed something to popular culture. The novel, Orion’s Belt (1977, and made into a film in 1985) proved to be a popular fictional account of geopolitical intrigue on Svalbard (Riquet 2021). Picking up on the idea of an ‘Achilles heel’, the book asks the reader to consider why the Soviets have such a substantial presence on the islands including early warning systems. The author Jon Michelet had visited Svalbard in 1976 as a journalist and written about the irregular use of Soviet military helicopters. The book proved a runaway success, as did the film released in the 1980s, and capitalized on this mounting anxiety about Svalbard as a vulnerable hotspot. By the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, however, the waters around Svalbard were no longer attracting quite the same level of strategic anticipation and intrigue. The demise of the Soviet Union as military superpower became in part visualized by decomposing infrastructure

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(recast as ‘industrial heritage’). Rusting submarines, deteriorating military facilities and abandoned mining/resource-based settlements such as Pyramiden on Svalbard helped to perpetuate a sense of systemic decline. The Soviet Union was no longer the ‘conqueror of the Arctic’ with a network of resource cities and settlements extracting wealth for the socialist republic. Pyramiden itself ceased as a coal mining operation in 1998, and Barentsburg became the only remaining Russian foothold. The local geopolitics in Svalbard was rather different from the diminishment of other resource centres in the Russian North. But, even if coal mining was no longer profitable, Russia’s presence inland and offshore persisted through fishing, smaller-scale mining and transiting through the archipelago to elsewhere in the Arctic. All of which meant that, for the host country (Norway), Svalbard in the post-Cold war era (maybe now framed as an inter-war period) was a strategic gateway with a ‘gap’ that went beyond the geographical. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the only notable third party in the islands. From the 1990s onwards, Svalbard became more international as others such as the UK and later China and Japan established a scientific presence in Ny-Ålesund. Mindful of securing long-term occupation of the islands, the Norwegian authorities purposely turned to other activities such as science and tourism to ensure that there were no regulatory or occupational ‘gaps’. That has meant promoting Longyearbyen as a tourist gateway to the Arctic region. It has meant that legislation that applies to mainland Norway applies also to Svalbard. And regulatory structures around environmental protection and science planning have also been used to ensure that Norway’s grip on Svalbard is not weakened by multinational engagement. The regulation of fisheries around the waters of Svalbard has had to be handled carefully given that Norway and other signatories to the Svalbard Treaty do not agree on whether the exclusive economic zone, as opposed to the ‘territorial sea’, is covered by the provisions of the treaty (Jensen 2020). The White Paper on Svalbard in 2016 reinforces the importance for Norway of ensuring that Norwegian sovereignty, first and foremost, is protected. This remains a ‘live’ issue as, in February 2020, Russia used the 100th anniversary of the Treaty to remind Norway that the self-declared fisheries protection zone is fundamentally unlawful (Østhagen 2021: 84).

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Between Theatre and Gateway and a Future Svalbard Where next for Svalbard and the mosaic of imaginaries that have helped to frame it, explain it and stage it? We argue that these past imaginaries will continue to inform media and policy-focused discussion on the archipelago and its wider sovereignty-strategic context. We believe that, in an era of intensifying strategic competition, contemporary imaginaries of Svalbard are reminiscent of the Cold War competition of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but are now largely rooted in a strongly held understanding of Russia as a revanchist geopolitical power. With the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this view has unquestionably been further consolidated. Described as NATO’s ‘Achilles heel’ in the late Cold War, the archipelago has assumed renewed significance as military analysts worry about Russia’s future intentions with regard to Svalbard itself while also ruminating on the Russian ‘bastion concept’ and its role in informing military defence planning. Put simply, Svalbard is considered by Moscow to be part and parcel of an area where Russia should enjoy overwhelming military superiority. This means, in part, that any perceived military usage by Norway of Svalbard would be strongly resisted. In 2017, it was reported by the Barents Observer that a report by Russia’s Ministry of Defence was already warning that the maritime zone around Svalbard might become a flashpoint for possible conflict with NATO (Nilsen 2017). This largely echoes Norwegian concerns and explains why NATO continues with military exercises such as Cold Response and Trident Juncture. Finland and Sweden’s coordinated decision to join NATO in 2022 will surely heighten the strategic stakes in the European Arctic. Over time, the opening of a trans-polar shipping route (across the Arctic Ocean itself) and the possible development of polar capabilities by others such as China might add further to this sense of the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean as more congested and competitive. Fishing around the waters of Svalbard might be a trigger for tension, as treaty parties (not only Russia) argue with Norway about what can and cannot be done under the terms of the Svalbard Treaty. In a post-Ukrainian context, we would expect to see more media and military commentary warning of possible escalation of tension, disinformation, hybrid operations or grey zone activities, and even worries about possible invasion and occupation by Russian forces or ‘little green men’. All of which will put further pressure on Norway and

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how it manages its rights and responsibilities as the sovereign power. As the Ukrainian conflict continues to unfold, it is highly likely that the Baltic Sea and the ‘straits’ around Svalbard will attract ever greater scrutiny as NATO/Nordic member states worry about further underwater sabotage to communication cables. Svalbard will continue to be both an imaginative and material gateway to the ‘polar theatre’ of conflicts as well as cooperation.

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Kolltveit, Bård (2006) ‘“Deckchair explorers”: the origin and development of organised tourist voyages to Northern and Southern polar regions’. International Journal of Maritime History 18 (2): 351–369. Kruse, Frigga (2014). Frozen Assets. British Mining, Exploration, and Geopolitics on Spitsbergen, 1904–53. Eelde: Barkhuis. Lewander, Lisbeth (2004) Polariseringens politikk. Studier av nation och kön. Karlstad: Karlstad University Studies. London, Jack (1903) The Call of the Wild. New York: Macmillan. Lüdecke, Cornelia (2011) Roald Amundsen: ein biografisches Porträt. FreiburgBasel-Wien: Herder. McGhee, Robert (2005) The Last Imaginary Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nilsen, Thomas (2017) ‘Kommersant: Russia lists Norway’s Svalbard policy as potential risk of war’. The Barents Observer (4 October) (https://thebarent sobserver.com/en/security/2017/10/kommersant-russia-lists-norways-sva lbard-policy-potential-risk-war [accessed 12 June 2023]). Nyman Elizabetha, Cassua Bomera Galvaoa, Joana Mileski and Rachelb Tiller (2020) ‘The Svalbard archipelago: an exploratory analysis of port investment in the context of the new arctic routes’. Maritime Studies 19: 1–13. Østhagen, Andreas (2021) ‘Norway’s Arctic policy: still high North, low tension?’ The Polar Journal 11 (1): 75–94. Pedersen, Torbjørn (2008) ‘The dynamics of Svalbard Diplomacy’. Diplomacy & Statecraft 19 (2): 236–62. Pedersen Torbjørn (2021) ‘The politics of research presence in Svalbard’. Polar Journal 11 (2): 413–426. Reinke-Kunze, Christine (1992) Aufbruch in die weiße Wildnis. Die Geschichte der deutschen Polarforschung. Hamburg: Kabel. Riffenburgh, Beau (1993) The Myth of the Explorer. The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery. London: Belhaven Press. Riquet, Johannes (2021) ‘Cinema, geopolitics and Arctic landscapes: the Cold War in Orion’s Belt’. In: Markku Lehtimäki, Arja Rosenholm and Vlad Strukov (eds) Visual Representations of the Arctic. London: Routledge: 159–177. Roberts, Peder and Eric Paglia (2016) ‘Science as national belonging: the construction of Svalbard as a Norwegian Space’. Social Studies of Science 46 (6): 894–911. Rossi, Christopher R. (2018) Sovereignty and Territorial Temptation: The Grotian Tendency. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singh, Elen C. (1980) The Spitsbergen (Svalbard) Question: United States Foreign Policy, 1907–1935. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Spring, Ulrike (2020) ‘Cruise tourists in Spitsbergen around 1900: between observation and transformation’. Nordlit 45: 39–55.

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Steinberg, Philip E. and Jeremy Tash (2015) Contesting the Arctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North. London: I B Tauris. Tamnes, Rolf (2020) ‘Sikkerhetspolitiske utfordringer og militær virksomhet’. In: Irene Dahl and Øystein Jensen (eds) Svalbardtraktaten 100 år. Et jubileumsskrift. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Veblen, Thorstein (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Macmillan. Von Spreter, Stephanie (2021) ‘Feminist strategies for changing the story: reimagining Arctic exploration narratives through (the staging of) photographs, travel writing and found objects’. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 13 (1) (https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2021.1997462). Vylegzhanin, Alexandr N. and Vjaceslav K. Kilanov (2007) Spitsbergen. Legal Regimes of Adjacent Marine Areas. Utrecht: Eleven International. Wither, James (2018) ‘Svalbard: NATO’s Arctic Achilles heel’. RUSI Journal 163 (5): 28–37.

CHAPTER 3

Svalbard as a Norwegian Place and an International Legal Space Christoph Humrich

Introduction At the authors’ workshop for the present edited volume, one participant remarked that Longyearbyen might be one of the very few cities in the world, if not the only one, in which you can start a discussion about certain aspects of international law with anyone you meet on the street.1 The regular white papers produced by the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security (DKJD) reporting on the archipelago on behalf of the Norwegian government, also feature extensive sections discussing international law (e.g. DKJD 1999, 2009, 2016). The administrations of other states and the European Union start to discuss international law when they have to do with Svalbard. There is too a host of academic literature devoted to questions of international 1 For very interesting insights on how much the Svalbard Treaty matters in everyday life on Svalbard, see Brode-Roger (2023).

C. Humrich (B) International Relations and Security Studies, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_3

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law as they affect the place. The ultimate cause of these legal exercises is, of course, that Svalbard only became a part of Norway by an international legal document, the Svalbard Treaty of 1920.2 However, as is well known and often mentioned in the academic literature (though usually not by the Norwegian government), the treaty contains something that has been called at least very ‘unique’ (Albert 2023: 2), often ‘a paradox’ (Rossi 2017b: 132) or even stronger, ‘an oxymoron’ (Rossi 2017a: 1510). The Svalbard Treaty gives Norway ‘the full and absolute sovereignty … over the archipelago’ (§1). Thus, as the Norwegian government states in the most recent white paper on its policies for the archipelago: ‘Svalbard is the northernmost part of Norway’ (DKJD 2016: 12)3 —clearly a Norwegian place. However, it is and remains also an international legal space, ‘an exceptionally international territory’ (Grydehøj 2020), in much more immediate and obvious ways than sovereign territory usually is. The parties to the Svalbard Treaty ‘subjected[ed]’ their recognition of Norwegian sovereignty ‘to the stipulations of the … treaty’ (§1), which in the subsequent paragraphs of the document amount to limitations of Norwegian sovereignty in such important areas of statehood as defence, taxation and the rights of foreigners. Right after the ‘consistent and firm exercise of sovereignty’, the second objective for the Norwegian government’s Svalbard policies stated in the white paper is ‘correct compliance with the Svalbard Treaty’ and respective control of its observance (DKJD 2016: 5). The Norwegian government maintains that the Svalbard Treaty’s goal was the ‘final clarification of all outstanding international legal questions’ (ibid.: 17), but disputes over how to resolve the paradox, that is, how exactly the treaty’s stipulations define the extent and limits of Norwegian sovereignty, have continued throughout its now over onehundred-year history.4 Somewhat in contradiction to the obvious need to mention this, the Norwegian government states that ‘Norwegian sovereignty over Svalbard is uncontested’ and that it implies Norway’s exclusive jurisdiction and administrative authority over the archipelago (ibid.: 17). While disputes over Svalbard’s status are nothing new then

2 Svalbard Treaty, signed 09 February 1920; in force 14 August 1925 (2 LNTS 7). 3 All translations from Norwegian are my own. 4 For an overview until the 1990s see for instance Ulfstein (1995)—a more recent account is given by Jensen (2020).

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(Moe and Jensen 2020: 511), their salience is currently increasing due to the dramatic geophysical, geopolitical and socio-economic changes affecting the whole Arctic and Svalbard within it. In the context of these changes, the ramifications of the Svalbard Treaty are an example of what Akiho Shibata et al. see as ‘core problématique for the emerging legal orders in the Arctic’: the ‘delicate balance between Arctic and non-Arctic interests and perspectives’ (2019: 2), or more precisely here, between Norwegian interests and perspectives and those of some parties to the Svalbard Treaty and other interested actors. In their divergent perspectives, Svalbard is constructed through, or at least influenced by, international law—and that applies to local people in Svalbard, the Norwegian government, Svalbard Treaty parties, academics and other non-state actors. But how the law is understood and/or constructed itself and how it is translated into legal images of, and legal-diplomatic practices concerning, Svalbard is dependent on the legal imaginaries in question. In accordance with the goal of this edited volume, the present chapter tries to illuminate how imaginaries of international law work in the construction of Svalbard as both, either-or, or something between a Norwegian place and an international legal space. It aims to show how legal imaginaries and the legal images of Svalbard emerging from them make possible, and provide legitimization to or justification of, government’s legal and political practices regarding the governance of the archipelago. The next section briefly specifies how the concept of imaginaries is used as an analytical framework and introduces three broad theoretical accounts of international law emerging from what Charles Taylor has called ‘the modern social imaginary’ (2004, 2007: 159–211): a Grotian, a Hobbesian and a Kantian account. They are meant to capture the legal imaginaries producing different and diverging conceptions of what Svalbard is or could be. The subsequent sections then try in turn to show how each of the three legal imaginaries relates to certain legal images of Svalbard and its respective practices. I start with the Grotian imaginary, which is clearly dominant in informing the legal practices concerning Svalbard and has been explicated and expounded in this respect by Christopher Rossi (2015, 2017a, 2017b)—on whose work I rely heavily in the respective section. But, as I will argue, certain practices might, increasingly, be evidence of a more Hobbesian imaginary of Svalbard as a place and space, although, as I have also argued more extensively elsewhere (Humrich 2022), the Svalbard Treaty and some practices might

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also suggest a Kantian imaginary of international law and thus indicate some transformative potential.

The Social Imaginary and Imaginaries of International Law The social imaginary, as both Taylor (2004, 2007: 159–211) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1975/1997) argue, is part of the background from and against which people can make sense of their world. As Taylor characterizes it, it is a ‘largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding … within which particular features of our world show up for us in the sense they have’ (2004: 25). It is ‘unlimited and indefinite’ and thus ‘can never be adequately expressed in … explicit doctrines’ (ibid.). For the analyst, who seeks understanding of social practices through relating them to an underlying social imaginary, this creates a severe analytical problem. Luckily, Taylor suggests, there exists a relationship between social imaginaries and social theory. Social theories could be understood as maps of a familiar environment, the social imaginary, in which an actor usually gets around without a map. Maps will differ by highlighting different aspects or dimensions of the same environment or accounting for variations in perception of it. Drawing such maps, however, helps to make actors’ orientation with respect to social imaginaries explicit by recognizing and identifying their ways on the map. In the long run, social theories as maps might also contribute to changing the social imaginaries when they become ‘associated with social practices’, with another orientation, and then ‘begin … to define the contours of [the actors’] world and … eventually come to count as the taken for granted shape of things’ (Taylor 2004: 29). Thus, Taylor seeks to show how social theories, among them Grotius’s, came to shape the (!) social imaginary of Western modernity with a ‘new conception of the moral order of society’,5 which in turn gave rise to certain characteristic social forms (2004: 2) and makes possible ‘repertories’ of practices relying on it.6 While Taylor explores 5 I speak of the modern social imaginary when referring to the particular modern shape of the most basic, all-encompassing ‘unstructured and inarticulate understanding’, and of particular social imaginaries for more specific parts of it as captured by conceptual maps. 6 Castoriadis seems to imply a similar relationship between imaginary and social forms, the latter treated under the concepts of ‘institution’ and ‘symbolic’ (1975/1997: 117– 131).

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market economy, the public sphere and democracy as such forms, I take it here that the modern national state and the law between states can also be counted among these. Castoriadis (1975/1997: 115–164) gives four fields in which social imaginaries are articulated (Arnason 2014: 36–40). I have adapted these here as structuring aspects of the social theoretical maps of the social imaginary from which the legal imaginaries derive and with which I then want to capture the practices constructing Svalbard: the being of the individual in society, the goals of society, society’s internal structure and the relation of society to other societies within a certain social context. While Taylor (2004: 19–22) does not explicitly rely on Castoriadis, his characterization of the moral order entailed in the modern social imaginary broadly covers these aspects. Again with slight amendments and additions for my purposes, but broadly following Taylor, the moral order of the modern social imaginary can thus be said to broadly entail that society is a structure for the mutual benefit of its individual members; that the benefits aimed at in and by society include preservation of life, the means to a good life, and freedom; that within the state these benefits are secured and protected by equal individual rights and the rule of law in varying interpretations of that moral order; and, finally, that relations between the societies organized in modern nation-states rest on sovereign equality. Above that rather abstract content of the modern social imaginary, Taylor (2004) seems to provide for different layers of social imaginaries—for instance, variations in the concrete interpretation of, and emphasis on, how exactly the individual fits into society; which benefits are most decisive for individuals and society; and how equal rights, the rule of law and sovereign equality are to be understood.7 It is these variations which make the different maps provided by social theory. Before I come to legal imaginaries emerging from the social theoretical maps of Grotius, Hobbes and Kant as variations interpreting the modern social imaginary, the role of social imaginaries for practices of law in general and the construction of Svalbard as international legal space and Norwegian sovereign territory more specifically needs to be clarified. For this two very brief detours into the philosophy of law and jurisprudence and into legal and political geography are required.

7 Castoriadis also seems to imply layering between central and secondary imaginaries (1975/1997: 129).

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Any system of legal norms and rules is necessarily underdetermined. The application of the norms and rules thus necessarily requires the participants in legal practices to engage in interpretation and judgement on the basis of some additional background linking the norms and rules to the case at hand. Participants in legal practice thus always apply the law ‘through the image … of their society’, or against the background of what Jürgen Habermas calls ‘legal paradigms’ (1996: 388). In Taylor’s terms, legal paradigms would simply refer to variations of the relevant aspects of the modern social imaginary, in particular of the moral order it expresses.8 More concretely, the legal paradigm specifies which moral problems in the organization of society the law responds to and which determine the shape of respective practices (Habermas 1996: 389). As legal geography shows, such responses and practices also produce space and legitimize certain forms of spatiality: ‘legally informed decisions and actions take place’ and make place (Bennett and Layard 2015: 410). A common distinction between space and place is that the former is abstract and absolute, and the latter socially constructed—for instance through law—and imbued with subjective value (cf. Agnew 2011). I use the distinction a bit differently here. While international (legal) space is also constructed through states’ collective practices, place here denotes legal space that has been appropriated (or allocated) by legally recognized practice to a particular nation-state actor authorized to alter or maintain it according to its subjective preferences.9 So, how does the law produce Svalbard as an international legal space and a Norwegian place and on what basis does the law distinguish between the two? The answer to this question depends on which problem of organization international law is meant to solve with the distinction. In other words, it depends on the respective legal imaginary or paradigm of international law. To map the orientation of actors at such imaginaries emerging from the modern social imaginary, I take Martin Wight’s (1992) famous account of international thought distinguishing between

8 Ronald Dworkin has elaborated on the close connection between moral order and jurisprudence (1986: 96–101). 9 This is more akin to Stuart Elden’s concept of territory (2010). To allow for an easy grasp of the distinction between international and particular national, however, I stick to space and place respectively.

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three traditions respectively rooted in the theories of Grotius, Hobbes and Kant.10

Three Modern Legal Imaginaries and Legal Images of Svalbard and Practices Related to it As already mentioned, Rossi has argued at length the extent to which modern international legal and political practice is informed by a Grotian legal imaginary—Svalbard being a case in point for which he provides ample evidence. Relying on his work, I thus first sketch the legal image of and practices relating to Svalbard that emerge from a Grotian imaginary. I conclude, as Rossi does, that, in light of Grotian practices, the Svalbard Treaty necessarily fails to solve the sovereignty question by providing an unequivocal distinction between Svalbard as a Norwegian place and an international legal space. The disputes emerging from this might very well feed into an interpretation of the modern social imaginary regarding Svalbard, which is more akin to the second variation of international thought that I then discuss, the Hobbesian one. According to it, outside enforceable sovereign power, organizational problems cannot be solved by law. In the Svalbard case, this becomes most visible with respect to the question of Svalbard’s strategic value and military status. The idealistic contrast to this pessimistic view is to be found in the third variation, the Kantian one, which emphasizes the pacifying and transformative power of law. While some Kantian background can be discerned in the legal background and norms of the Svalbard Treaty, the Kantian legal social imaginary rather serves to show the contrast between existing practices and the interpretation of the modern moral order as Kant would see it. I shall go through all three international legal imaginaries in three broad steps. First, I sketch the legal imaginary, then I relate it to the broader historical and political context of the Svalbard Treaty to show what legal image of Svalbard it supports, and then suggest how the imaginary in question makes some of the legal practices related to Svalbard meaningful.

10 A very similar triplet informs Alexander Wendt’s distinction of cultures of international anarchy (1999). Instead of Grotius, he uses Locke. That Taylor lumps Grotius and Locke together, however, shows that they are not far apart. See also Keene (2009) for the relevance of this tripartite distinction.

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The Grotian legal imaginary and Svalbard Grotius, according to Taylor, views human beings as ‘rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit’ (2004: 3). The collaboration for mutual benefit mostly relates to the exchange of material goods for individual well-being or societal prospering.11 This prefigures Grotius’ view of law: the problem of societal organization that it is meant to solve is the achievement of this mutual benefit—both in national and international society. While Grotius, for instance, also emphasizes spiritual needs requiring a protected sphere of religious freedom elsewhere in his work, Grotius’ imaginary of law is tied tightly to individual acquisition and possession of goods (1625/ 2001: II.2.II-IX). His best-known writings on international law are mostly concerned with the legal ramifications of acquisition and (international) trade and limitations on warfare (Grotius 1609/2000; 1625/ 2001). Together with a model of law still informed by the ancient Roman law idea of the private property of the household (his understanding of sovereignty is as a household writ large; Rossi 2017b: 19–20), international law mirrors private law between owners, ramifying from dyadic transactions or exchanges of goods and services. Individual property and sovereign state territory emerge from land and its use, in other words, its altering or the exclusive appropriation of its respective resources (Grotius 1609/2000: 24; Rossi 2017b: 31–32). The three different types of legal space Grotius distinguishes are directly related to this. The two types of international legal space are made up either of areas as yet unappropriated, but that are in principle appropriable (terra nullius ), or of principally unappropriable areas (res communis ). As appropriation is possible (and necessary) if something can be altered by investing work in it or the respective resource can be used exclusively, res communis exists when, and for as long as, usage would not alter or deplete the respective area and its resources (Grotius 1609/2000: 22). It is this characterization on which Grotius’s famous justification for the freedom of the seas rests (Grotius 1609/2000: 28): marine resources were seen as non-depletable and the sea, by contrast to the land, as not alterable. Territory of national sovereignty was distinguished from international space, by virtue of exclusive rights being exercised over areas and resources on the basis of 11 For the relevance of Grotius for international relations and international law see Bull (1990).

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alteration and usage—which, in the terminology used here, makes the areas particular places. Grotius thus rejects territorial title based on merely symbolic taking-into-possession and insists on appropriate usage. As Rossi has argued, the appropriation- and resource-dependent conception of property and the conception of sovereignty as owning property give rise to what he calls ‘the Grotian tendency’ (2017b). This legal imaginary seems to work in two ways. On the one hand, attempts to establish sovereignty follow resource use. The tendency thus manifests itself ‘in laying parochial claim to resources previously considered unattainable … once the means to … extract them become available’ (Rossi 2017b: 49). On the other hand, if land and resource use gives rise to sovereign ownership, then where there is use by multiple actors, there is either no sovereignty possible (res communis ) or possibly competing claims exist (terra nullius )! According to Rossi (2015; 2017a; 2017b), the disputes over Svalbard are a case in point. He shows in detail how the availability of resources and the ability to appropriate them influenced the legal image of the Svalbard archipelago. While it seems impossible to clearly differentiate the prevalence of respective images in terms of successive time-periods,12 it is tempting to argue that, after its first discovery, Svalbard might at least implicitly have been seen as res communis, simply because the resources it harboured (seal, walrus and whale) seemed infinite at first and the vast archipelago not appropriable due to the harsh Arctic conditions. What is clear, however, is that the image of Svalbard changed when competition did indeed arise over space on the islands in the whaling era, and it became clear that the harvested living resources were finite after all (Avango et al. 2011). Again, from a Grotian point of view, it could be expected that this change would be consolidated into a new image when coal and other minerals were discovered and mining activities manifested alteration and appropriation of territory—which would suggest a legal image of Svalbard as terra nullius. The problem was, however, that the terra nullius status did not lead to attempts at seizure and establishment of sovereignty. With living resources depleted and the extraction of mineral resources not profitable enough to offset the costs expected to be incurred in maintaining exclusive sovereignty with effective occupation or achieving it in the first place, Svalbard remained 12 Arlov (2020: 9, footnote 4) suggests that lack of historical material makes a clear differentiation difficult.

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terra nullius, in the Grotian legal imaginary an international legal space waiting to be appropriated, throughout the nineteenth century. If the meaning of law was to provide effective legal ramification for acquisition and extraction, thinking informed by the Grotian legal imaginary would not be surprised that, absent the natural conditions for res communis, the absence of sovereignty created difficulties. Indeed, towards the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, such difficulties seemed to make it harder to derive any benefits from extractive activities on Svalbard without effective administration (Berg 2017). Presented with the choice between massively investing in effective occupation or foregoing benefits from extraction, states engaged or interested in extractive activities on Svalbard chose the solution of allocating sovereignty to one state, Norway, which was also interested in the archipelago for reasons other than material benefit.13 However, the interested other parties wanted to have it all. Not only did they impose on Norway the duty of administering the archipelago’s resources and their extraction effectively (Jensen 2020), in exchange for recognition of sovereignty they also retained the right to equal access to economic activity and thus mixed an element of terra nullius together with sovereignty. Rather than solving the problem of acquisition and ownership, from a Grotian legal imaginary the Svalbard Treaty thus must seem to have set in stone, or law, a tension between being an international space and a Norwegian place. Accordingly, the prevalence of such a legal imaginary would also explain Norwegian practices regarding Svalbard. Since the tension between international legal space and a Norwegian place remains unresolved, it is no wonder that the Norwegian government still feels the need to bolster its claim to the archipelago even after ‘full and absolute sovereignty’ over Svalbard was accorded to it by treaty. If sovereignty was seen as being somehow dependent on the use of resources, such use would, on the one hand, be required, while, on the other, continued use by other parties would pose a constant challenge to Norwegian sovereignty. Ever since the entering into force of the Svalbard Treaty, therefore, efforts have been undertaken by the Norwegian government to keep the archipelago by using it. However, even marking it as a Norwegian place by a Norwegianization of place names carries a link to 13 During the later phases of the nineteenth century and up to World War II claims supporting polar-sea imperialism that tied expansion in the polar areas to national-romantic narratives about Norwegian identity were popular in Norway (Berg 2016: 59–64).

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sovereignty according to a Grotian imaginary. Arlov (2020) concludes that this change—most obvious in the substitution of Svalbard as the archipelago’s name for Spitsbergen—was primarily an attempt to pacify those factions in the Norwegian parliament and public who, alluding to the connection between resources and sovereignty, would see the Svalbard Treaty not as a conferral of sovereignty on Norway, but rather as the safeguarding of other states’ rights at the expense of Norwegian sovereignty. More directly linked to the Grotian imaginary was the long maintenance of unprofitable and highly subsidized coal mining, which ‘has been regarded the most powerful means of establishing “legitimate” political presence on Svalbard’, not only by non-Norwegian parties, but also by the Norwegian government (Roberts and Paglia 2016: 895). But in the increasingly obvious absence of profitably exploitable resources on land, science, which had already played an instrumental role in bolstering the Norwegian claim before the Svalbard Treaty (Roberts and Paglia 2016), became an alternative way of appropriating and using the area as well as maintaining presence—again, and ironically, first by the Norwegian government, but then—following Grotian logic—by other interested parties as well (Grydehøj 2014; 2020). However, even though the treaty harbours that tension between sovereign territory and international space, it seems that on land tension has remained at a fairly low level owing to the decreasing relevance of resource extraction on the one hand and—disputes over interpretation notwithstanding—the clear formulation of the treaty parties’ rights. This, however, is not the case regarding resources in the marine areas surrounding the archipelago. Here, the existence or emergence of more profitable resources together with competing interpretations of the treaty have increased the political salience and fervour of disputes between Norway and other interested parties.14 The competing interpretations relate to the question of whether Svalbard generates maritime zones according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)15 in the Svalbard Treaty area and whether the regime of the Svalbard Treaty regarding the rights of the non-Norwegian parties 14 The most recent instance being the curious snow crab dispute between the EU and Norway (Østhagen and Raspotnik 2018). For how those resource disputes could gain security relevance see Pedersen 2021. 15 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed 10 December 1982; in force 16 November 1994 (1833 UNTS 3).

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would also extend to these. The treaty extends the regime of resource use to one maritime zone only: the territorial waters. On the basis of a strictly wording-related interpretation of the treaty, the Norwegian government therefore concludes that in the zones beyond the territorial waters emerging from UNCLOS (the Exclusive Economic Zone and the Extended Continental Shelf even beyond that) all resource usage rights are reserved for Norway (as they are anywhere else for any other coastal state). Other treaty parties, however, argue that the treaty extended to all existing maritime zones at the time of its conclusion and that it should therefore also extend to all zones now existing, at least within the treaty area. Resource usage rights would thus be shared.16 While for a long time the Norwegian government acted quite carefully, for instance establishing a 200-nautical-mile Fisheries Protection Zone instead of an EEZ (Østhagen et al. 2020), it has recently become more assertive of its sovereign rights as a coastal state. One of the most important vehicles for this assertiveness has been the claim that the Norwegian mainland generates a continental shelf that also includes the Svalbard archipelago. Because it projects from the mainland, however, it would, according to Norway, not be subject to the Svalbard Treaty regulations—a claim that the Norwegian government sees as supported by the approval given by the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to the limits in the Norwegian Sea as determined by Norway (Pedersen 2009; Pedersen and Henriksen 2009). Other parties again dispute the claim on legal grounds, such as the established practice that islands generate their own continental shelf zone, which then might be subjected to the Svalbard Treaty regime. But what matters for the purposes of this chapter is not the legal dispute and its detail per se, but the fact that the question of what Svalbard is and the legal practices that question gives rise to are so closely connected to resource extraction. This is not only because of the material gain from these resources, as some analysts would have it. It is because the underlying legal imaginary links sovereignty via property to resource use. As Rossi concludes: ‘what is clear from the long human history of Svalbard is that the territorial temptation to secure its resources lurks ever so close …, despite … the legal regime of the Svalbard Treaty’ (Rossi 2017b: 169).

16 For a legal evaluation of the merits of these positions see Anderson (2009) and Churchill and Ulfstein (2010). Overview in Jensen (2020).

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The Hobbesian legal imaginary and Svalbard By contrast to Grotius, Hobbes emphasizes the unsociable characteristics of human beings—famously in his phrase referring a Latin proverb that ‘man is to man an arrant wolf’ (Hobbes 1651a: 1). The reason for initial collaboration among human beings is mere survival and not as in Grotius’s thinking mutual benefit in terms of material goods. Society is a mere by-product of agreeing to install a sovereign, who in turn ensures survival both internally among the citizens of the state and externally against other states by coercive force. As Raino Malnes put it: ‘the central premise of the Hobbesian theory is that central authority is the only effective source of restraint on conflict behaviour’ (1993: 79). In the Hobbesian legal imaginary this implies two things: that the most important function of the law is to solve the problem of order and that law will only be obeyed when sanctioned by force: ‘where there is no common power, there is no law’ (Hobbes 1651b: 79), and ‘where no common power to fear … manner of life … degenerate[s] into … war’ (ibid.: 78). Following from this, Hobbes distinguishes clearly between living in a state of nature and living under coercive force under a sovereign in a state. On the individual level, the state of nature is a ‘war of every man against every man’ (ibid.: 79) and consequently life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’ (Hobbes ibid: 78). Between states, as law is tied to coercive force, there can only be a state of nature or international anarchy. Thus, there is only sovereign territory and territory not (yet) under sovereign control, but no international legal space. Hobbes did not think of legally sanctioned sovereignty from the perspective of international law, but mostly from that of domestic politics. As states can protect themselves and resist coercive force to some degree (unlike individual humans, who, for instance, need to rest), they do not have the same incentive as individual humans to submit to a coercive force. Despite or because of this, between states fear and uncertainty as to the motives of others persist, which makes violent conflict escalation likely (Malnes 1993: 52–64). In the previous section, I tied the perceived need for a change in the status of Svalbard from terra nullius or res communis to sovereign territory to securing gains from resource exploitation. While this is certainly an element, one could ask the question why the stakeholders involved discarded the idea of some form of collective governance or mandate system, but accorded sovereignty over the archipelago to one state. While, historically, many factors played a role in Norway getting

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what it desired, some of the comments of contemporaries and analysts suggest that they perceived the situation with a Hobbesian legal imaginary in mind. As Roberts and Paglia (2016: 898) write, for instance, regulation by law and sovereignty seem to have been tied together: ‘the absence of a sovereign power was interpreted as the absence of a common legal framework’, and sovereignty of one state advocated as a solution ‘on the grounds of superior capacity to enforce rational, stable administration’. This perception is maybe no wonder, if, as Avango and Roberts show by means of quotations from the reports of Norwegian scientist Adolf Hoel (1879–1964) from Svalbard, ‘disputes over who controlled what field sometimes led to threats of fatal violence’ (2017: 129). At least for Hoel that ‘reinforc[ed]’ the very Hobbesian image ‘that people needed order’ and that what was required was not so much mere administration as law coercively enforced by a centralized authority to end the ‘Wild West atmosphere’ (Avango and Roberts 2017: 129). However, what is more relevant here, is that the drafters of the Svalbard Treaty also seemed to hold an image of Svalbard existing not only as a state of nature among people on the island, but also as an international security problem (Koivurova and Holiecin 2017: 133). The treaty forbade the installation of fortifications and naval bases as well as the use of the archipelago for ‘warlike purposes’ (§9). The reason for this is the strategic relevance of the Svalbard ‘Channel’ and the archipelago’s use for controlling it. Roald Berg (2020; see also the previous chapter in this volume) has nicely elaborated how the channel has at different times acquired significance for Russia’s connection to the Atlantic, which showed itself first during World War I, became obvious during World War II, remained relevant throughout the Cold War, and has increasingly become so again as geopolitical tensions between Russia and the West have grown to more or less open confrontation, at least since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. During the First and Second World Wars the channel was important for shipping supplies to Russia. In addition, Svalbard is interesting as a site for meteorological stations from which tactically relevant weather information can be gained. During the Cold War it provided the Soviet Northern Fleet’s access for power projection on NATO’s Northern flank and deterrence measures in the North Atlantic. Even in less tense times, the channel has been part of Russia’s concept of bastion defence. In the logic of the security dilemma, the strategic importance of Svalbard for Russia also makes it the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of NATO (Wither 2018). The provisions of the Svalbard Treaty could be seen as an attempt to mitigate this dilemma,

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but, as Wither (2018: 28) finds in accordance with a Hobbesian imaginary, Svalbard’s ‘peculiar legal status leave[s] it politically and militarily vulnerable to Russian adventurism’. The Hobbesian problem with the treaty is that there is no overarching power to secure or enforce the archipelago’s neutrality. In a situation in which Norway was considered neutral (as was still the case in World War I), there are no defences on the archipelago against any warring party interested in its seizure for strategic reasons—as the Germans were in World War II. This led to the destruction of the mining infrastructure by Allied forces for the fear the Germans would gain from its use (Berg 2020; Østreng 1978). When Norway became a member of NATO, pitted first against the Soviet Union and now Russia, Svalbard’s strategic value made Norway and NATO prepare for the archipelago’s defence by devising a NATO strategy and incorporating it within a NATO command. But the problem for Russia then is to distinguish between the defence of Norwegian sovereignty over Svalbard and more offensive uses against Russian forces in the Svalbard channel during times of increased tension or even war. This, of course, poses a security challenge to Russia, which would need to keep the archipelago neutral or neutralize it for both defensive and offensive military activities in the North Atlantic in case of a direct conflict. As it turns out, therefore, the Svalbard Treaty’s provisions for the ‘peaceful utilization’ (Preamble) are not doing away with the security dilemma, but giving rise to practices in which neither the legal status of the archipelago nor its resources matter too much—but only the possibly coercive securing of control. If even disputes over resource use can lead to security problems regarding Svalbard (Pedersen 2021), the Hobbesian imaginary of international relations, by contrast to the Grotian one, suggests that the most likely reason for Russia’s continued highly subsidized presence on the archipelago (in the town of Barentsburg and also in the remnants and newly renovated parts of Pyramiden) is not any assertion of rights for and through usage of resources, but rather mere pretence to maintain some (potentially militarily utilizable) access to the islands. The so far unresolved sabotaging of internet cables17 and the strange rumours about appearances of Russian soldiers on Svalbard18 are 17 See https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2022/02/unknown-human-act ivity-behind-svalbard-cable-disruption. 18 See https://icds.ee/en/russia-continues-to-test-western-resolve-spetsnaz-units-operat ing-in-norwegian-territory/.

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a reminder of Svalbard’s strategic value and an underlying competition for strategic advantage—even if the former was an accident and the latter fake news and Russia had nothing to do with either.19 At the same time, Russia loudly protests possible dual uses of installations on the islands, as well as any connection Norwegian policies might have to national defence (as for instance with Coast Guard operations) or with NATO (as with a visit of the NATO parliamentary assembly to Svalbard in connection with work on climate change).20 Likewise, and scarcely understandably on the basis of a purely Grotian imaginary of international law, Norwegian legal rhetoric and state practice have increasingly amounted to a ‘creeping militarization’ of Svalbard (Simon-Butler 2022). However, as far as resource use is concerned, Norway’s literal and narrow reading of the Svalbard Treaty limits the meaning of the Treaty’s stipulation that the archipelago ‘may never be used for warlike purposes’. Interpreted on the basis of a wide understanding it would amount to demilitarization, forbidding all military activity on the archipelago. However, as Andrew SimonButler has shown, Norwegian practice sought to legitimize and establish a narrow understanding of the phrase as allowing military activity as long as it was not used in actual warfare or its preparation. Thus dual use, Coast Guard cruises or NATO officials, even a military presence would be seen as legally permitted. As Simon-Butler argues, that would be contrary to at least some established readings of and practice regarding ‘warlike purposes’ or similar phrases in other international treaty contexts. At the same time Norwegian restriction of Russian helicopter use has also been interpreted as being driven by security concerns. In addition, one might wonder why the Norwegian administration and policies focus mainly on Longyearbyen and less on the mostly Russian settlement of Barentsburg. This might testify to the impossibility of enforcing Norwegian sovereignty over the Russian areas in the event of conflicts arising. Again, whether or not this is really the case does not matter much here. That practices are perceived in that way in the respective discourses already testifies to sensitivities emerging from a Hobbesian legal imaginary.

19 See facts/.

https://jamestown.org/program/russian-spetsnaz-in-norway-fake-news-versus-

20 For an older overview of these issues see Åtland and Pedersen (2008).

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The Kantian Legal Imaginary and Svalbard While, according to Taylor, it is characteristic of the modern social imaginary (and thus of all its varieties) that moral order includes some form of individual freedom, of the three thinkers treated here, Kant certainly places the strongest emphasis on it. He conceives of freedom mainly as autonomy, the ability to live under freely chosen laws only—both regarding internal motivation (moral law) and external, as a member of a community (public law).21 For Kant, the main organizational problem that law was meant to solve was enabling the realization of everyone’s freedom together with everyone else’s. Against this background, the Kantian legal imaginary differs from both Grotius’s idea of (private) law as providing the framework for mutual benefits and Hobbes’s idea of (coercive) law as securing mere survival. For Kant, law must be based on an idea of publicness expressed in its constitutionalization and generalized reciprocity (Flikschuh 2010). Crucially, individual and collective autonomy requires law on three levels (Kant 1795/1968): on the domestic (ius civitatis ), international (ius gentium) and transnational, that is with respect to affairs not only within and between states, but also between the citizens of these states (ius cosmopoliticum). Domestically, freedom is organized in a democracy. Internationally, that freedom requires a legally instituted federation of states for peace, transnationally a proto-human right to hospitality. For Kant, as for Hobbes but unlike Grotius, sovereignty arises from the citizens of a state and not from possession of territory (Corradetti 2017). Unlike Hobbes, however, Kant did not think that sovereignty was transferred to the government, but that it was an expression of the citizens’ collective autonomy, which in turn was the means to ensure their individual freedom. While the Hobbesian imaginary of sovereignty rejects the idea of law between states altogether, Kant’s conception of international law differs markedly from Grotius’s. In the Kantian view, Grotius was one of the ‘sorry comforters’ (Kant 1795/1968: 210) who conceded too much to the present realities of international affairs and saw too little potential in the transformative capacity of law. For Kant a law of war was an oxymoron, as was peace

21 The catch, of course is that to be truly free (and not guided by mere personal desire or emotion) one needs to strictly follow reason, which in turn also informs the form of law.

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without law, law being a necessary precondition of peace. One immediate consequence of the Kantian imaginary of sovereignty and law is that land cannot simply be acquired by appropriation or effective control— that would limit the freedom of everyone else. According to Kant, the surface of the earth must be thought of as common property originally, as res communis without the implication of non-depletable resources or unalterable areas. It is not terra nullius, as it can only be accorded to an individual owner by an act of will of the community. Any possession absent such an act is preliminary (Kant 1797/1968: 382). Moreover, also unlike Hobbes, Kant famously believes that domestic affairs matter for international politics, and that democratic people will not start wars. Therefore, domestic and international affairs must always be thought of together. After having gone through the Grotian and Hobbesian legal imaginaries and how they make sense of certain legal images of Svalbard and relate to certain aspects of the respective legal practices, the emphasis of the Kantian legal imaginary seems rather far-fetched. After all, academic, public and media discourse about the politics of Svalbard seems too occupied with the scramble for resources or the increasing tensions in the High North security environment. However, it is certain that Kantian ideas about international law informed the American position in the postwar Versailles negotiations (Eberl 2008: 67–79), and thus might also have influenced the drafting of the Svalbard Treaty. For instance, Robert Lansing, then US secretary of state, expressed the opinion on the Svalbard question (1917) that governance of people could be separated from governance of territory. While there is an uneasy mix of ideas in his position, this seems to be more compatible with the Kantian opinion, that there is a difference between a state and a mere territory (cf. Kant 1795/ 1968: 197), than with Grotian or Hobbesian thinking. If the Svalbard Treaty is viewed through the Kantian imaginary, it could probably first be seen as a treaty of sovereignty conferral in the Kantian sense. The sovereign title here is allocated through public law by the potentially universal legal community of interested states, and not by a takinginto-possession or exercise of effective control. Moreover, the Svalbard Treaty clearly would appear as a peace treaty, which with its paragraphs on military use and equal access to resources seeks to remove causes for a future war – some of which Kant discusses as preliminaries to peace (Kant 1795/1968: 196–202). Finally, as I have argued elsewhere, one could see the Svalbard Treaty as a special agreement emerging from Kant’s ideas

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about the cosmopolitan right to hospitality. With the limitation of any a priori rights foreigners may have to the right of hospitality, Kant sought to prevent the practices of colonial or imperialist trade agreements and to protect a sovereign people from undue interference by foreign powers (Eberl 2008: 220–228). However, he also wanted to provide for refuge and enable trade. Thus, the right to hospitality is part of cosmopolitan law, individuals’ rights, not states’ rights. He also envisioned that specific agreements could extend such rights further to extend interaction, from which Kant hoped to derive a peace dividend through vested interests (for this argument see Humrich 2022). Reading the Svalbard Treaty in this way markedly contrasts with Grotian thinking, in which those doing business on Svalbard are mere representatives of interested state parties (which seems to be the basis for some Norwegian practices related to Svalbard and clearly for the Russian ones), and turns this image around: the states merely represent their citizens. This might at least have been true of the US position, which was pushed by entrepreneurs.22 As Rossi’s analysis and the broad literature on High North security clearly suggest, today’s practices regarding Svalbard are most likely not informed by a Kantian legal imaginary, but infused with assumptions stemming from Grotian or Hobbesian variations of the modern social imaginary. However, the Kantian imaginary might provide some transformative potential for a time in which the question of Svalbard’s local population, the interpretation of the Svalbard Treaty’s provisions and peace in the High North become more pertinent. As Dina Brode-Roger says, ‘the Svalbard Treaty was written to secure access for extractive industries, not for the construction of family-oriented communities’ (BrodeRoger 2023: 1). That Svalbard increasingly also provides a home for the latter challenges any view which reduces the question of sovereignty to a question of resource utilization or keeping order by mere administrative directives and coercive force. As Brode-Roger (ibid.: 10) concludes, ‘within the structure imposed on this space by the Svalbard Treaty, as currently interpreted by the Norwegian state’, there seems to be a clear tension between ‘an open, democratic community’ and the Norwegian state’s desire to create ‘a normal Norwegian town to anchor Norwegian presence’. The tension could be resolved in the direction of either more control and less democracy or more democracy and less control. Acting, it

22 See Berg (2017).

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seems, on the basis of a Grotian legal imaginary, the Norwegian government seems to have opted for the former, probably for fear of losing sovereignty. The protestations from Svalbard against the new restrictions on participation in elections, however, suggest that there is some more Kantian impetus, which sees sovereignty not as something which needs to be bolstered by utilization and thus requires the mere presence of people on Svalbard to this end, but something that is exercised for and with the people there (Grydehøj et al. 2012; Grydehøj 2020). As for the international level, a Kantian legal imaginary would clearly suggest that there is no other prospect for resolving the existing tensions regarding resource access and security, than through further development of the law. The Kantian legal imaginary explains that if there were any hope for law to take effect and produce stability, it could be based neither on the coincidence of converging interests in private transactions and exchange, nor on individual interpretation and practice. For Kant also, international law must by definition be a general and public endeavour if it is to make sense. It needs to be bolstered by publicness in the sense of public deliberation over its interpretation and the weighing of the liberties and rights of each subject against the liberty of any other. The Svalbard Treaty, like most traditional law, unfortunately lacks a mechanism for such exercise of collective autonomy (e.g. conferences of the parties, etc.) and its further development—resulting in the parties stubbornly insisting on their subjective interpretation and pursuing (at times very costly and politically damaging) individual practices to secure their interests. If Kant is right, the best way for Norway might not be to avoid any collective opinion-formation about the interpretation of the Svalbard Treaty, as it currently does, but negotiate with all treaty parties on the basis of the unequivocal allocation of sovereignty to Norway (and not through bilaterally achieved diplomatic understanding) how this ought to be understood in today’s context. That might become all the more important as, with climate change, Svalbard and the extent and exercise of sovereign rights on it are subject to challenges the causes of which are produced not on Svalbard or even in Norway, but mostly by the other parties to the treaty. Recognizing Norway’s full and absolute sovereignty as the parties to the treaty promise to do, might—in the contemporary world—also entail respective obligations. Finally, the security problems related to Svalbard as a place with strategic significance will also remain as planning for war on both NATO’s and the Russian side will need to consider the archipelago. While now is certainly not the time to discuss

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this, it should be borne in mind that in times when tensions were lower, nothing was done to deal with the problem of strategic significance with a view to prospectively occurring contingencies. Measures to mitigate the effects of strategic significance—like verification to satisfy Russian security needs or security guarantees against violations of Norwegian sovereignty on the archipelago—would, if they were to be successful at all, need to take the form of public international law and be embedded in a wider peace context.

Conclusion In the preceding paragraphs, I have attempted to show that certain aspects of legal images and practices pertaining to Svalbard or present in public discourses could be understood through underlying legal imaginaries as variations of the modern imaginary. Presentations of Svalbard as primarily a site of resource extraction and of conflicts tied to this might be influenced by a view of sovereignty bound up with property as established by resource appropriation or alteration of land as in the Grotian legal imaginary. In such a view, tensions remain despite the Svalbard Treaty, because Norwegian sovereignty must appear to be challenged by others’ claims to resource use, in turn providing an incentive for Norway to establish a claim to resources by other legal means, as seems possible in the case of marine resources. These resources could even give rise to security problems if disputes became militarized. As the Hobbesian imaginary suggests, sovereignty is only as good as the means to enforce it, both domestically and against other states. Here, limitations on the enforcement of Norwegian sovereignty in the Russian settlements on the archipelago, as well as the practices related to the security dilemma created by Svalbard’s strategic importance, gain meaning from a Hobbesian legal imaginary which would regard Svalbard as de facto (!) neither under full Norwegian sovereignty, nor an international legal space—merely a strategically relevant area in which the imperatives of self-help under anarchy play out. It is from a Kantian imaginary that attention would turn to the people on Svalbard, for which Norwegian sovereignty would need to provide an enjoyment of their autonomy together with the rest of the Norwegian people. Thinking from a legal imaginary that centres on the autonomy of people in the context of the Svalbard Treaty, and not on resource access or strategic control of territory, would most likely require a change in certain practices. Here then lies the transformative potential

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of alternative legal imaginaries. In the section on the Kantian legal imaginary the present chapter has indicated how aspects of the Svalbard Treaty could have or acquire respective meaning, and what this could entail for future practices.

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PART II

Imaginaries Through Images

CHAPTER 4

Visuals and Voices Through Time: Imagining Svalbard with Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (1962–1972) Eva la Cour and Samantha M. Saville

Introduction Over the years since our first visit to Longyearbyen on Svalbard, we have both pieced together imaginings of this place in the days when coal mining was front and centre. As a visual artist and a human geographer who have been coming and going to Svalbard since 2010 and 2013 respectively, our personal imaginings are woven with nostalgia-tinged memories shared, wanderings among material remains and remnants,

E. la Cour (B) Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] S. M. Saville Centre for Alternative Technology, Pantperthog, Wales, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_4

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photographs on hostel walls, journeys through reports, archives and coffee table books at the local library and museum. Our imaginings feature coal-dusty, dark, cold, hard men doing precarious, difficult work in dark, cold conditions with grim determination. The tonic of warm community spaces, gatherings, sporting competitions and provisions from the mining company must have been all but indispensable to sustaining operations. The company must have been all-encompassing. Our perceptions of Svalbard in the past are shaped by imaginaries that are made up of material images (postcards, posters, films, guidebooks, souvenirs and artworks) and more intangible ones (accounts, anecdotes, memories). In this way we understand Svalbard to be constantly (re)produced through personal imaginaries alongside industries, institutions and individuals that act to circulate its representations (even if they do not share the same meaning). We understand images as tangles of trajectories, contradictions and disjunctures (Little 2016) that, alongside material frameworks of memory (languages, rituals, myths, songs, monuments, institutions), configure collective memory (Halbwachs 1992) and are co-constitutive of the imaginaries through which they—images and imaginations—make collective sense of the past, present and the future (Davoudi and Machen 2022). Images affectively ‘arrest’ (Stewart 2003) us as they splice with the imaginary capacity of our wider political collective. As with the wider Arctic, visual materials about and of Svalbard have a particular potency and complexity (Lehtimäki et al. 2021), which we acknowledge and integrate into our critical approach. This chapter is about very material images shot on Svalbard in the 1960s by the Austrian photographer known as ‘Herta Grøndal’ (1930– 2019) and the archival analogue film Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (Nature and Coal mining at 78N) that they comprise. Our chance encounter with this film in 2021 grew out of a subgroup of the Svalbard Social Science Initiative (SSSI), with Dina Brode-Roger, Mathias Albert and Lisbeth Iversen and sparked a shared urge, between the two of us, to speculate on the mandate, production and circulation of Naturrikdom in the past—and its potential creative interplay with collective imaginaries of Svalbard futures in the present. From this vantage point, the chapter is structured as a historical arc with a preface, while also reflecting a research process that has continued to resituate the material at hand. In the first section, ‘Herta and Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N ’, we introduce our initial research inquiry. Then, in ‘Filming Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N ’, which begins with a short transcript

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(and translation) of an excerpt from Naturrikdom’s voiceover, we step into the Longyearbyen of the past, to the time of Herta’s filming when the town was approaching a transition away from being a company town. This prompts us to describe in more subjective terms what we see when we watch the film. The following section relates Naturrikdom to the present day. Here we recount and reflect upon the current transitions of Svalbard society towards a post-coal-extraction era; the recent cleaning up of the Svea coal mine as well as initiatives to turn long abandoned industrial relics into cultural heritage attractors. As a mode of reflecting, we wonder what voiceovers of Naturrikdom written today might sound like. We include our experimentation with putting the voices of interview participants together with Herta’s footage as an example. Finally, we reflect and speculate upon the potential future afterlives of the film— and on the role of film archives in general, as reservoirs in negotiating collective perceptions of a place like Svalbard.1

Herta and Naturrikdom a 78N och Kullgrubedrift p˚ ‘Herta Grøndal’ is a well-known Svalbard photographer, and her still photographs are found in many places in Longyearbyen—reproduced on postcards, stamps and in museum displays. She took a great number of photographs while living on Svalbard from 1952 to 1974, and later as she continued to visit the archipelago regularly until 2008. Today, her images are therefore recognized as an important source for visual research related to Svalbard (Haugdal 2017), with a large collection (more than 12,000 items) donated to the Tromsø University Museum in 2014.2 ‘Herta Grøndahl’s maiden name was Niedermayer. She changed it to Grøndal after her marriage in Svalbard in the 1950s. However, during 1 Our thanks to Eva Grøndal for enabling this work through provision of the film and to Elin Haugdal for guiding us to notes on the film in the archives. We are also indebted to Dina Brode-Roger for sharing her research included in the voiceover and are grateful for Dina Brode-Roger’s, Lisbeth Iversen’s and Mathias Albert’s contributions to the RGS paper ‘Constructions and consequences of power-full Svalbard imaginaries’. This chapter has also benefited from constructive feedback from other contributors to this collection; thank you. 2 In addition, a collection is managed by two of her daughters in Longyearbyen, Grøndal Photo, and a collection of photocopies has been sold to SNSK. Both the Grøndal Photo collection and SNSK’s are deposited at Svalbard Museum.

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the 1970s when she moved back to Vienna, she remarried and took her second husband’s last name, Lampert. Hence, the collection at Tromsø University Museum is labelled ‘Herta Lampert’ on her instructions. But as a Svalbard photographer she is best known as Herta Grøndal. For this reason, we have used the name Grøndal above. And yet, out of respect for her instructions to the Museum, we simply refer to ‘Herta’ in the rest of this chapter. Our research is informed by the art historian Elin Haugdal’s (2017), efforts to examine Herta as a photographer who was also a woman with strong social standing on Svalbard. We thus recognize an important gendered agency of Herta’s photographs in mediating the everyday of Longyearbyen (Haugdal 2017), and understand this as an agency embedded in the materiality of Herta’s photographic practice, that affects how and why Herta’s lens-based work may be used to mediate a future past. Meanwhile, in this chapter we look to a dimension of Herta’s visual practice that remains unexamined: the 23-minutes-long 16 mm colour film, Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (Naturrikdom), edited and produced by Jan Alfred Løtvedt (Løtvedt Film) in Bergen on commission by the Norwegian coal company Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani A/S (SNSK). In other words, we are not looking at a film authored by Herta, but at a film assembled from her footage. This is important because we presume that there are several versions of the same film. Thus, while a note in Arbeiderbladet from 1968 (Arbeiderbladet 1968) states that Naturrikdom ock Kullgrubedrift at 78 Nord is scheduled to be shown at the industrial festival in Vienna that year, a long-time employee of SNSK, working with the company’s image archive, informs us that the film Gruvedrift og natur på 78 grad nord is from 1971. Meanwhile, the film figures in Kari Holm’s Longyearbyen-Svalbard: Historisk Veiviser (Holm 2018), where it is noted to have been published in 1972. Likewise, two short films, Gruvedrift på Svalbard and «Svea»— et gruvesamfunn under Polen, also seem to have been produced in 1972, appearing in the register of Nordic short films produced that year (supplement to the magazine Film & Kino no. 7A of 1973). And there is the film Svalbard vår nordligste landsdel from 1975, commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Moreover, all these films are from a period in Norway when there was a steady output of ‘industrial film’ in the form of information and educational films sponsored by industrial companies and corporations, in addition to films produced for public relations purposes and outright advertising (Sørensen 2009).

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It was during this period that Herta was settled on Svalbard and was the local contact for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), as well as having film assignments from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Hagevik 1992). That said, we still do not have definite answers to basic questions concerning Naturrikdom, and at times this has given us the feeling of researching an almost illusory film. Yet, we were not only interested in Herta’s footage as a source for narrative storylines, but also as a source for the evocation of emotions and imaginaries. We thus concur with critical approaches to film archives as valuable (re)sources of materiality with which to functionalize the past (Nielsen Gremaud 2013) and in relation to largely premediated terrains of the future (Grusin 2010). By the same token, however, this is how film archives lend themselves to considerations of the ongoing transformation of Svalbard imaginaries—how imaginaries are produced, by whom, how they circulate and change; what their material, experiential and conceptual consequences are. Indeed, it is telling that la Cour’s first encounter with Herta’s footage came not in the archives, but when she watched the music video Sleepwalker (2006) by the Norwegian duo Frost (Per Martinsen and Aggie Peterson—Herta’s grandchild), in which they use and assemble footage that also appears in Naturrikdom. This was when la Cour, in her own capacity as a filmmaker visited and interviewed Eva Grøndal—one of Herta’s daughters and one of the owners of Grøndal Photo—in 2011 and was told that Herta had made films and lectured on film in Austria and Norway. Sleepwalker provides an example of how archival film footage may be used and re-edited: Frost’s chilled and breathy electronic soundtrack lends a nostalgic and very different tone to Herta’s footage than that of the voiceover narration in Naturrikdom.

Filming Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift p˚ a 78N ‘One may wonder about the remote community, where coal has provided the basis for sustenance and built everything up. For many, employment with the coal company is their first encounter with industry. It can be unfamiliar. But those who have a will also have opportunities. The company helps with scholarships which, among other things, include training in mountain techniques or college training. Coal mining has provided our country with large amounts of valuable income. After the last world war, wages of approx. NOK 400,000,000 were paid just for

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employment in the four northernmost municipalities. Store Norske is the only company that has operated virtually continuously in Svalbard for almost 60 years. Through close cooperation with the Norwegian authorities, the raw material sources are today secured and the fringe community, with its many advantages, can become a safe workplace for a long time to come’ (voiceover transcription, 21:32–22:46; la Cour’s translation). In the 1970s, Svalbard underwent several changes. As unpacked in other chapters of this volume, the Norwegian government actively started initiatives to ‘normalize’ Longyearbyen (St. meld. no. 9 1999–2000, 3.5.), its main settlement, and in relation to industrial communities on mainland Norway (Arlov 2003). Consequently, political initiatives with a direct social impact resulted in the Norwegian government taking over the shareholding of SNSK. Reflecting a wider political agenda in the 1970s regarding environmental issues and cultural heritage, environmental protection became a tool that enabled the Norwegian government to increase its influence and presence on Svalbard (Avango and Roberts 2017). The Environmental Protection Act, instituted by the Norwegian government in 1973, instigated the first round of national parks, covering 40% of the land area, which was followed by legislation in 1974 to explicitly recognize evidence of past human activities as cultural heritage. Since then, several additional natural parks have been created with the purpose of maintaining ‘a virtually untouched environment in Svalbard with respect to continuous areas of wilderness, landscape, flora, fauna and cultural heritage’ (Klima- og miljødepartementet 2002: paragraph 1). Thus, initiatives to protect natural and cultural heritage were a result of multiple motivations (that could nevertheless be justified in reference to the Svalbard Treaty) to restrict resource exploitation by other nations, enhance Norwegian sovereignty and follow the Norwegian mainland’s direction in environmental management. Hence, this can also be read as one element in Longyearbyen’s so-called normalization towards a Norwegian mainland structure and society (Grydehøj et al. 2012; Pedersen 2017) and transition from company town to what some perceive as a ‘state town’ (Haugli 2021). By 2015 the state became the sole owner of SNSK. Prior to these institutional and legislative initiatives of the 1970s, SNSK began to commission films—(self-)promotional films that also had the purpose of documentation and information, and were likely used to train new miners (Arlov 1991). This reflects a trend at the time when both private companies and state corporations increasingly looked to make

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documentary films as a way of raising their profiles and promoting ideas (Sørensen 2009). Moreover, the post-World War II period in Norway was characterized by what historian Bjørn Sørensen (2009: 378) has called a ‘spirit of reconstruction’, entailing a set of central ideological positions that can be summed up as national pride and self-reliance, economic growth and technological optimism. And this was significantly reflected by and through the promotion of contemporary company towns (ibid.: 380)—towns where a specific company dominated the town’s cultural and social life; everything from the social organization of housing to politics, environmental problems, culture and leisure time (see also the chapter by Ulrich Schildberg in this volume). Thus, there was a steady output of ‘industrial films’ in postwar Norway when a distribution system of a weekly newsreel to municipal cinemas around the country functioned as an important and powerful mass media agent (from 1941 until 1963). The weekly newsreels had to do precisely with rebuilding, the construction of new homes, new industry, new technology, ships being launched, new Norwegian inventions and so on (Sellereite 1984)—in short: the reconstruction and growth of modern Norway. Interestingly, however, reporters also made films based on material shot for the newsreel. These films were distributed by Statens Filmcentral (State Central Film), established as a public service system for the use of film as a medium for education and enlightenment, which speaks to how films were regarded as an important part of public discourse (Sørensen 2009)— and why a company like SNSK would spend money on publicity films. Independent and mobile screening formats were also common at the time, not least with regard to films from and about the Arctic advertised in the context of a visual travel series, and often accompanied by a live-spoken lecture. Interviews with Herta in popular magazines thus mention her engagement as a film lecturer in high schools in both Austria and Norway (Lokvam 1965). Finally, industry films were selected for screening at international festivals, such as the 9th International Industry Festival in Vienna held in 1968 where Naturrikdom was used to promote Store Norske. In other words, there is a connection between the role of the film medium in the 1960s and how Svalbard’s key settlements of Longyearbyen (Norwegian), Barentsburg and Pyramiden (both Russian) were still functioning and imagined primarily as coal company towns. This was despite the fact that mining activities in the Norwegian settlement of Ny-Ålesund and the Russian settlement of Grumant had already come

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to an end. Watching Naturrikdom as a sort of infomercial, we notice how Longyearbyen is painted as somewhat exotic and intriguing, but as a place to live rather than to visit: a productive, well-organized, safe but challenging working environment with high earning potential; a lively community with good facilities, investment into new infrastructure and growing opportunities for families. At the same time, however, we also notice how the historically hard conditions for mining on Svalbard are left remarkably unmentioned. Perhaps this speaks to the film’s additional role as a state-company infomercial entangled with the Norwegian state’s geopolitical agenda. At least a clause from the Svalbard Treaty (see also Christoph Humrich’s chapter in this volume for his discussion of the Svalbard Treaty) refers to the mining regulations and includes the stipulation that Norway ‘shall guarantee to the paid staff of all categories the remuneration and protection necessary for their physical, moral and intellectual welfare’ (Article 8), offering different perspectives on the relevance of showcasing Longyearbyen as a company town. Or, how Norway approaches the Svalbard Treaty, alluding to there being a geopolitical dimension of promotional strategies during the Cold War period. A National Geographic article from 1978 covering Barentsburg tells us how conditions were better in the Russian settlement: ‘It [Barentsburg] was a more orderly place than Longyearbyen and one with more amenities. Cattle grazed near the town square, and a large greenhouse produced tomatoes, cucumbers, green onions and flowers’ (Young 1978: 278). A political dimension to promotion is obvious, when we read Naturrikdom as a message from Store Norske to the mainland, to funders, to onlookers far away. Now it seems as if it was a response from the past, an argument for SNSK’s care for its workers. While Herta’s film footage surely provides empirical material, the film’s voiceover, spoken by Rolf Røgsted, sets the stage from the outset: ‘From the twelfth century there are source references to a country to the north of the sea, which may have been Svalbard. In 1596 the archipelago was rediscovered by the Dutch, who meaningfully called the new land Spitsbergen. Since 1925, all land between 74 and 81degrees North, and between 10 and 35 degrees East has belonged to the Norwegian crown and the area has retained the old Norwegian name Svalbard – cold coast’ (translation by Eva La Cour). An account of Store Norske’s history of coal extraction since the early twentieth century immediately follows. The heart of the film portrays miners working to extract coal, or active in

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the different infrastructural facilities supporting the process. In addition, the film carefully presents and emphasizes Longyearbyen as a place with a modern lifestyle where nature can be easily enjoyed. Hence, Norway is presented as a country rich in natural resources. And while environmental issues are not spoken about directly, the inclusion of images from outside the settlement in the film’s concluding sequence seems to signal a time when awareness of environmental problems had started to emerge as a political movement in Norway. And yet, only insofar as nature is stated to be a rich resource from which Norway will proceed on its way to prosperity and social welfare through modernization. In this sense, at least with hindsight, Naturrikdom paradoxically testifies to a period when it was seemingly crucial to create images and promote Longyearbyen as a coal company town—which it was—because it was about to gradually become something else. In looking to the past, then, our guesses are that the intention behind SNSK’s commissioning of Naturrikdom could have been recruitment or garnering further government support, and perhaps creating a record before the town changed significantly. But these are indeed guesses, with evidence to support or contradict them being elusive. Yet, they bring to the fore issues of effect and of functioning (rather than of essence)— and while the soundtrack and voiceover of Naturrikdom present the film as factual, documentary-style source material, the directed and inevitably political portrayal of Longyearbyen as a (too) rosy scene is obvious. At least we consider the film an expression of a past anticipation of a coaldriven future that would also be Norwegian, and of a normalization process that was also a modernization process (promoted through the modern medium of film). But what is Herta’s role in this, as the film’s cinematographer? And, as we ask this, what are our own roles in the present? Can we consider our research on Naturrikdom to be a process of editing not unlike filmmaking and, if so, what are the methodologically oriented questions that may help us gain insights into how such processes work both with and against the power of imaginaries? In considering this as partly a matter of an affective aspect of the aesthetic quality of Herta’s footage, these questions cue us to think through the situatedness of our viewing, when ‘the imaginary emerges precisely as both a function of producing meanings and the product of this function’ (Salazar 2012: 864). Meanwhile, we are cognizant of our Southerly positions and that it is often ‘through the North that the South projects its dreams and nightmares’ (Lehtimäki et al. 2021: 2). Our approach to Naturrikdom, in other

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words, is not simply as a storyline, cut and connected from ‘fixed’ images shot by Herta—or a juxtaposition of sound and image. As we watch the film in the present, it is further ‘spliced’ with our own context of viewing it—historically, spatially and infrastructurally. As we watch we splice, and as we write (about it) we relate (see also Film stills 1 and 2): Suited men and women arrive by aeroplane, with a bus standing by. The mess hall is serving generous portions of hot food with coffee on tap to smiling, smoking workers. The narrator instils authority via a documentary-style officiality. He tells us up to 500 people gather on special occasions and from here workers can also take a bath and change to go to the mines. Later we get a glimpse of home life for the single male worker that looks excessively normal for the time, accompanied at all times by the reassuring instrumental orchestral music endemic to this era’s documentaries. Family photographs hang on the wall, he is relaxing in an easy chair, reading and smoking. There are local wildlife books and trinkets on the dresser, patterned blankets on the sofa and a TV standing in pride of place. Workers have time to feed the birds and admire the view before we see them being transported to the mine. The coal seams are likened to jam layers in a cream cake. A good portion of the film is spent with the workers in the mine and showcasing operations. We see miners riding carts into work, operating drills, filling wagons and in cramped tunnels shovelling coal assisted by electric ‘cutters’. The narrator maintains the friendly tone describing the operations and emphasizing safety precautions and equipment. The workers are organized in teams and get used to the crawling positions needed. Coal market prices and power per man per shift are the basis for salary calculations. Yet almost half of the film is dedicated to impressions of cultural life and new facilities being built. Sports competitions in skiing, football matches between Barentsburg and Longyearbyen, a swimming pool, dancing to live bands, the church, school and ceramic painting classes. Polar bears get a mention as possibilities for hunting, though hunting with a camera is described more positively (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2).

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Fig. 4.1 Screenshot of film still, image 1: Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (1968–1972) (Source Store Norske)

Fig. 4.2 Screenshot of film still, image 2: Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (1968–1972) (Source Store Norske)

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Naturrikdom och Gruvedrift p˚ a 78N in the Present As already pointed out, there has been a great deal of interest in Herta’s photographs, but less in her film footage. Our different attempts to get to know more about Naturrikdom—by contacting first SNSK and Tromsø University Museum and later the Norwegian Broadcast Company (NRK)—did not provide much of an insight. A photo archivist at Tromsø University Museum (now partially retired), Sveinulf Hegstad, confirmed that there had been film reels among the archival material donated by Herta to the Museum in 2014, but that they were without captions and still undigitized. Meanwhile, NRK was not even able to find her name (either under Grøndal or Lampert) in their audio-visual archive. Nonetheless, the digital copy of the analogue film provided to us through the kind cooperation of Herta’s daughter, Eva Grøndal, was playing right there on our laptops in front of us, with an opening intertitle crediting ‘Herta Grøndal’ as cinematographer. The 23-minute film was thus not only intriguing but also immediately raised pressing questions regarding the relationship between history, representation, imaginaries and filmmaking; our encounter with the film triggered speculations on the entangled relationship between image-making and history writing, as we recognize how history writing is formed by imaginaries but also how filmmaking has long been part of it. Not least in the Arctic, cameras, historically considered a neutral tool in the production of visual knowledge, have played a constitutive role in how we have come to know and assemble the region and people. Filmmaking has both formed Arctic imaginaries and been formed by them (Lehtimäki et al. 2021). Looking less to the past and more to the present, we consider the imaginaries of coal, minework and Svalbard as an Arctic place with which we watch Herta’s footage, and what these imaginaries afford us. In other words, we wonder about the aesthetic-affective aspect of viewing Herta’s footage, when affect is regarded as a vehicle for knowledge. Or, in the media scholar Ina Blom’s words, ‘the kind of unconscious bodily impulses which pull us forward towards new horizons, new relations, new thoughts’ (Blom 2020: 32), since these kinds of forces directly connect us to the present as it constantly unfolds—or to future realities produced from the affective surplus of that which already exists (ibid.). What we immediately notice, then, is how Naturrikdom challenges a common Svalbard imaginary of pristine nature and adventurous arctic

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explorations (Gyimóthy and Mykletun 2004; Saville 2020, 2022). In fact, the closing sequence mentioned above is striking as it juxtaposes the promotion of coal with footage of flocks of birds and ducks with ducklings on the tundra. It appears to be in tension and contradiction to present discourses. A context to this is how Svalbard’s recent and biggest mining site, Svea, has been sealed off after 100 years of on/off operation and now only two active mines are left—one in Barentsburg, and ‘Mine 7’, 11 km outside of Longyearbyen. Current plans see Mine 7 closing in 2025 and energy provision being fossil-fuel-free by 2030. If that timeline is followed, by the time this chapter is published Longyearbyen’s coal-fired power plant will have been shut down, with a temporary switch to diesel until a permanent alternative source is determined and large battery stores have been installed. In the context of this transition to a post-coal era, local residents and external planners are increasingly called upon to engage with Svalbard’s imaginaries and to direct Longyearbyen’s trajectory. Consequently, and as part of this, there is a current accumulation of interest and initiatives to activate more of Svalbard’s material industrial heritage as potential cultural tourism attractions. Attention is also turning towards how the connection to and imaginaries of coal will be carried forward in the shifting of local identities and communities. Having already diversified from a sole focus on coal since the 1990s, with both Russian and Norwegian communities also developing research, education and commercial tourism, there are existing examples of such endeavours that set the scene. For over a decade now, the non-operational Russian coal mining settlement, Pyramiden, 80 km North of Longyearbyen has been developed as a visitor site for tourists. Once valued for its material resources (coal) and as an ideological exemplar (see Peter Hemmersam’s chapter in this volume), Pyramiden these days offers an insight into past Soviet times as a ‘ghost town’ for daytrippers from Longyearbyen, while Russian tourist operators also emphasize the landscape and wildlife watching opportunities. Another example is ‘Gruva 3’, a long-closed mine right outside Longyearbyen, which in 2016 opened as a kind of museum with the mandate to offer the story of Longyearbyen as a coal company town. Here visitors can don a safety helmet to enter and experience the extractive infrastructures from the inside. A final example is the initiative to preserve and restore Longyearbyen’s old coal power station. Having been abandoned for 30 years, this older site is being brought back into use by LPO architects, just as the current powerplant prepares to close, with

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much debate over its potential as a tourist attraction, cultural venue and site for local identities and memories to surface (Brode-Roger 2022). Material remains, objects, buildings and infrastructure, and the combination of political, legal, economic and cultural forces that are at work to conserve them (or not) are of course integral components to imaginaries (DeSilvey 2006; Hacquebord and Avango 2016; Ingold 2012). Herta’s footage reminds us of the potential power of film and visual representations to feed into imaginaries. Even if once thought of as capturing the moment of their production, when reappraised, films show us something of our own time, and hence invite us to critically re-evaluate the past. This, however, also implies a space for strategic investments in the experiential (Blom 2020) and, in relation to this, cinematic expositions come to play a complex role with regard to the production of futurity through imaginaries of the past. Speculating on how imaginaries are shaped through creative interplay of archival film footage and the political collective in the experience economy, we wondered how a different voiceover for Naturrikdom would sound. In the excerpt below we attempt to give an impression of such an experiment that remixes conversations with residents in Longyearbyen with Naturrikom’s footage in order to connect the present with the past.3 Such a voiceover is not a singular perspective but intends to give an impression of Svalbard as a place of tension that includes the many trajectories, contradictions and disjunctions that characterize contemporary local debates on cultural heritage and energy provision. Our point here is also to draw attention to the ways in which archival films can be represented as a malleable storytelling medium (Burgoyne 2003; see Jørgensen 2017 for a discussion of rediscovered film archives in Greenland). Montage of voiceover excerpts: focus group and interview participants in discussion with Dina Brode-Roger on the potential for the old power station (FOSSIL project, 2021): It is quite important. It’s… really important to keep it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to see anything. But then, should it be owned by the state or privately? Like the old bakery. It’s standing there but no one is taking

3 In collaboration with the wider SSSI imaginaries research group, Eva la Cour assembled the new voiceover and produced an edited version of Herta’s footage, which was shown as part of the online Royal Geographic Society Annual Conference 2021; see: (https://vimeo.com/evalacour/rgs2021).

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care of it. Is that preserving? Just standing there. And then… do we need that? The Arbeidermesse Vest was special. They had pictures of Hawaii. And they had big parties… You know, hilarious (laughs). I’m divided. For me it is altered. I like it. But you have to know it has been altered. Other places I’ve been, there haven’t been as many people telling you what is important to know, how things are. Telling you how the community works. It might be because it’s a small place with high turnover. A man’s town. So many of those stories could be told. But women’s stories too. Families were here. Kids. Here history is very present. The buildings and infrastructures are so exposed. You see very clearly the different functions of the buildings. But it’s completely different for me since I knew them when they were going and made sounds. And there was the smell of coal in the air. You’ll never know that. You just see the structures. So, the sounds, the smells. They are gone now. But for me it was part of my childhood. Like the scooter smell.

Montage of voiceover excerpts: Interview participants discussing Svalbard’s future energy provision with Samantha Saville, 2014, 2015, 2019: A coal plant is not good for the environment. But the cruise ships, cruise tourism, is emitting even more CO2 than the powerplant. So, that is a thing to think about. Another thing is that, we don’t really have an alternative. Actually, I think the best solution so far, for the economy and the environment, is to actually continue using the coal. But we should have a new power plant. There are very high ambitions in the environmental legislation and they are very contradictory to how the local society here works. This society should be a place to really show the new technology, New sustainable technology. Renewable energy. I think Norwegian policies here have been clearly written but not followed up in practical design. When I see the climate report it is really hard for me to imagine that people are going to be able to live here in the future.

Naturrikdom shows us a version of what Longyearbyen once looked like while simultaneously evoking questions as to how, where and by whom Longyearbyen’s past will be recollected. It cues us to consider how Svalbard has depended, and still depends, on coal—historically as an energy source and currently as an imaginary foundation for the Norwegian presence. Moreover, viewed through the prism of the last decade’s media attention to the Arctic in the context of the climate collapse, Naturrikdom offers an interesting commentary on the role that the Arctic plays in the cultural imagination of the future of the planet and its

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political and ecological systems (Körber et al. 2016; Sörlin 2022). Used to prompt future actions, image production in the Arctic configures a web of both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ interactional relations, with imaginaries being embedded in mediations of the climate crisis (Davoudi and Machen 2022). We are required to consider the capacity of media modalities to affect, and specific processes of mediation to connect with, particular imaginaries. At stake in considering film’s potential power in the shaping of imaginaries is not simply a politics of representation, but a politics of an aesthetics that should be understood through its situated global infrastructure (la Cour 2021, 2022). Returning to Svalbard, then, the historical remains of mining activities in the mountain valley surrounding Longyearbyen appear not unlike scars (Storm 2014), as they remind us of the extractive trajectory of human presence in this place. Meanwhile, the clean-up of Svea, the former mining site 60 km south of Longyearbyen, aims to remove traces of human activity and to restore the place to its original ‘natural state’— a goal defined by the Norwegian authorities, with the clean-up project officially being ‘one of the most ambitious environmental projects in Norway’ and the area being incorporated into Van Mijenfjord National Park. This may be true without challenging a continuation of human technological control over nature. Or, precisely, as an expression of a global infrastructural organization of nature (subject to capital). A fitting anthropocenic approach, as mountains literally are being moved, again, but with a different purpose? As Ødegaard (2022) notes, cleaning up or ‘returning’ nature can be seen as a performative drama that both ‘heals’ coal mining’s industrial ‘scars’ in the landscape; and as a literal deletion of a part of history that does not fit the desired environmentalist narrative. At least our relation to the future seems here clearly premediated both by science and technology. However, questions remain about how to connect the problem of postindustrial heritage with an aesthetic concern with filmmaking and history writing. While film is not a metaphor for history, and not a device to record history, it holds the potential to affectively evoke a sense of history. Hence, as questions to do with the archive and memory are increasingly being reframed in planetary terms to also pertain to discussions in geology, the earth and its natural history (Parikka 2017), with history refracting into multiple and temporal directionalities in space (Massey 2005), we speculate how film archives relate to the geological time of the future. As we cannot help looking ahead, we wonder what it entails

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to engage with the scars of past practices and how our engagement will be taken forward. ‘The present selects an inheritance from an imagined past for current use and decides what should be passed on to an imagined future’ (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996, p. 6 cited in Grydehøj, 2010).

Futures of Naturrikdom och Gruvedrift p˚ a 78N About one year after our initial correspondence with SNSK, but while we were still seeking to figure out where and how Naturrikdom would be accessible today, we were advised to contact a long-term employee. Unfortunately, he could not give us an answer. He did, however, send us images, via sms, of his own DVD version of the film, testifying to SNSK’s digitization of Naturrikdom in 2004. He also pointed to the statement on the DVD back cover: ‘this film material is not the property of Store Norske’, and how this was different from a statement by Rolf Røgstedt, the speaker of the film’s original voiceover. Many open questions remain regarding the film’s production, circulation and legal status in the past as well as in the present.4 Having reapproached photo archivist Sveinulf Hegstad at Tromsø University Museum, however, we ascertained that the film reels in the Herta Lampert collection had now been digitized, and soon after we received digital copies. These amounted to less than expected, but the material comprises footage omitted from Naturrikdom during its edit. At first glance, these offcuts simply revealed the obvious: Naturrikdom is at once documentation and constructed narrative. But, considered as an image reservoir, they triggered our approach to Herta as an early skilled female photographer, mediating the visions of those with the agency to commission films. Compared with scientific monitoring stations in Longyearbyen in the present, automatically generating visual data 24 hours per day, Herta’s footage is subjective, handheld, human-centred, analogue and low-resolution. But, approached as empirical source material,5 it embodies a gendered, skilled and socially engaged resistance 4 We have also tried to contact the Regional State Archives in Tromsø, the Norwegian Polar Institute and the Norwegian National Library. 5 An article from the 1960s states that Herta at the time has already shot more than 2000 meters of 8 mm film (Lokvam 1965). Furthermore, the article says that Herta had many plans for further work, wanting to make films about historical places in Norway,

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to ideas of neutral transmission. Or, as noted by the image editor of Store Norske’s 75th anniversary book, Susan Barr, there is a shift in—or rather an expansion of—the choice of motives in the archives of SNSK when Herta’s photographs appear; she saw something different: ‘The period leading up to the war is well documented when it comes to buildings, mining, the cable car [for coal], loading facilities and ships …. However, what is completely or partially missing is the “softer” side of life: women and children, interiors, social and functional conditions beyond mining’ (Barr 1991: 228; la Cour’s translation). As a camerawoman and not as a director or author of films—as a local contact and visual fieldworker—Herta’s practice instantiates less of an interest in a ‘specific version of a Svalbard story’, or less of an interest even in the force of narrative, than in the shifting imaginaries embedded in filmic materialities. With regard to the offcuts, may a potentiality reside in their digital existence because of their exclusion from the once produced and circulated analogue film? When we approach Herta as first and foremost a film photographer her footage emerges as a matter of process, not of passive storage, which when activated—for example in support of a film to be circulated to promote Svalbard as a place for company towns and coal mining, or of Norwegian Sovereignty—functions as an archive for the negotiation of collective memory. The image archive becomes a space of potentiality, because ‘images fixed’ or identities of authority can be understood differently. In that light, and with Store Norske’s recent role in disseminating its history for tourists and researchers, for example in Gruva 3 and on its website, it is interesting as far as we are concerned that the coal company intends to let the Svea community re-emerge through a digital reconstruction. An online 3D digital model of the mining community that will demonstrate the dismantling of Svea could serve as a focal point in Svalbard’s transition from a coal society to a showcase for the future (Ødegaard 2022). However, as Ødegaard also describes and our own research attests, various, partly competitive stories exist about Svalbard after coal. Coming at a price of 1.9 billion Norwegian kroner, the cleanup of the Svea and Lunkfjell is perceived by some as failed symbolic politics or unfathomable economic or environmental logic. The closure of the Svea mine is contested and bound up with the fear of uncertainty. The Greenland, Sweden and Denmark—and, in the Faroe Islands, which, according to her, have ‘very tempting film material’ (ibid.).

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all-important question of ‘what comes after coal’ may be followed by: what interests and power relations are allowed to dominate the narrative? At stake is the imaginary of a naturalized coal mining past that has glided into a present where preservation initiatives and skilled knowhow are founding a timely future after coal. In a temporal model like this one, the central framework for negotiations of cultural memory is often through the functionalization of image reservoirs or archives (Nielsen Gremaud 2013). The voiceover in Naturrikdom thus enacts such a temporal model as the frame for how Herta’s visual depictions of Longyearbyen in the late 1960s can function as productive, co-creative units in the formation of collective perceptions of Svalbard, and hence as a reference point in negotiations of an ‘identity of place’ in the present (Brode-Roger 2022). Moreover, in reusing Herta’s footage and putting a different spin on it, we have tried to show how in a different context and framing, the same visual footage can contribute and construct different imaginaries and how our experiments in writing these, allow us to speculate about what other stories it could tell if manipulated by others. A focus on industrial remains and museum narratives might miss this. Telling the story of Svalbard’s coal company towns and settler communities can be post-rationalized as fulfilling Europe’s historical and economic demand for coal, or indeed as ways to claim and secure Arctic territory. Herta’s film footage easily fits into this narrative, whilst offering an enlivened impression of life in Longyearbyen at the time of its recording. Yet, visual culture has potential for instrumentalizing collective memory, hence we ponder the role Herta’s film footage may play in giving new meaning to the history of Norwegian coal mining after the last mine closes. Will it contribute to a typical territorial ‘scramble’ for arctic resources; to economic investment in an environmental showcase, laden with geopolitical consequences (Avango and Roberts 2017; Dodds and Nuttall 2015)? Or will the stories of the future that Herta’s film might be enrolled in telling be rendered with an environmental lens that sees the transition from the extraction of ‘black gold’ to a proclaimed post-mining era as a process of casting Svalbard as a place not only of innovation and expert knowledge, but also as ‘a place for the healing of nature’ (Ødegaard 2022: 18)? Could the film play a role in mobilizing a wilderness aesthetics willing to share some scars of the past? Herta’s films cannot do all of this. But in raising these questions we suggest that others certainly can, as we accentuate the importance of image archives in the constitution of the present collective at

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all times (Høst Seiding et al. 2020; Nielsen Gremaud 2013). Taking seriously the power of imaginaries when conceptualized ‘as socially transmitted representational assemblages that interact with people’s personal imaginings and are used as meaning-making and world-shaping devices’ (Salazar 2012: 864), we discover that imaginaries are perhaps not as ephemeral and fleeting as we tend to imagine (Davoudi and Machen 2022). In fact, the film medium’s historical appreciation as both representation and time technology, founded on modernist conceptualizations of both nature and history, makes it comprehensible that ‘future making’ in the Arctic is a core product of a techno-economical regime historically connected with imaginaries of nature and history. Put differently, nature has been sold to us through a proliferation of time-technologies in the twentieth century, but crucial moments of visual inscription in relation to the shaping of imaginaries emerge as moments of potential editing (la Cour 2021). In dealing with Herta’s motifs of Longyearbyen as a coal company town, like anyone else— artists, writers or scholars—we become editors who mediate between temporal narratives, as well as potentially creating them to be perceived as collective memory. Of course, this goes for the millions of hours of film footage shot in Svalbard since such filming has been technically possible: wildlife documentaries, family camcorder archives, news reports, TV series, tourist recordings. But in sticking to Naturrikdom and the matter of the analogue film medium, we highlight how past, present and future imaginaries of Svalbard are functions of constructing, circulating and experiencing particular media.

Conclusion In this chapter we have tried to think through and write about our chance encounter with the film Naturrikdom. We have also considered this process as a practice of editing in a process of change, and as a splicing not simply of sound and image but also of viewing context. Even if we may be the only people to have watched Naturrikdom for decades, affective knowledges reside in our watching of the film in the present, when foregrounding its productive and performative aspects (Kember and Zylinska 2015). Our voiceover experiments thus gesture towards how discursive analysis of the Arctic, as a constructed region, connects with a critical turn towards performativity and image practices, at once questioning the nature of things and the way we understand them. In

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a similar vein, the media archeologist Jussi Parikka has asked how social memory is to be understood ‘once memory is understood to be fundamentally premised on a multitude of temporal determinations, situations, and techniques’ (2017: 139). This question usefully summarizes what we are also trying to point to. As the myriad of consultations, commissioned reports and media speculation continue to shape such future imaginaries, might the use of (archival) imagery and film in telling stories, whenever they are situated, be more directly co-produced/created? In considering how Herta’s extraordinary portrayals of mining work alongside women and children and spatial infrastructures of Longyearbyen (with or without the original voiceover of Naturrikdom), will potentially feature in future representations of Longyearbyen’s past, we seek to emphasize the fact that imaginaries of Svalbard are embedded in the stories that they are being enrolled in telling insofar as they will always be located in specific practices, materialities and ideas.

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Film Source Frost (2006) Sleepwalker. Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iimPDE iMicA).

CHAPTER 5

The Arctic Imaginary as Reflected in the UK Television Series Fortitude Dina Brode-Roger

Introduction The setting of the UK television series Fortitude (2015–2018) is based on the real town of Longyearbyen, the main town of the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Ultimately, however, the fictional town of Fortitude is not actually a reflection of Longyearbyen or even Svalbard, but rather a reflection of how the UK-based producers imagined the place to be. In this chapter, I try to untangle this entangled projection: how a fictional place based on a real place, shaped by the imaginary of what this place is, is actually a reflection of the UK Arctic imaginary and the grounded situatedness of the people producing it in the UK. The Arctic has long been a figure of Western fascination—and imagination. And although the reasons for coming to Svalbard can vary greatly (see Martin Fiala’s chapter in this collection), the Arctic region is increasingly a focus of public discourse because of the impacts of climate change.

D. Brode-Roger (B) KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_5

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According to the Arctic Report Card (NOAA 2022), not only are temperatures increasing, but so is precipitation in the form of rain. These climatic changes are having a dramatic impact on the circumpolar region. Given that a part of the Nordic region lies within it, it is not surprising that there has also been increased representation of these themes in Nordic noir television series (Mrozewicz 2020). Fortitude, inspired by the popularity of Nordic noir in the UK, was filmed in Iceland for the first two seasons and then in Svalbard for the third and final season. This chapter explores the imagined vision of the Arctic portrayed in Fortitude, based on the real town of Longyearbyen, and asks the question why a UK production would choose that location. In this chapter I will first situate Fortitude within Nordic noir and the western Arctic imaginary. Next, I will discuss its Arctic location. In the third section, I will discuss nature and environmental themes in Fortitude; the fourth section looks at how Fortitude moves through various genres and plot lines. In conclusion, I will discuss how Fortitude’s use of the actual location of Svalbard reinforces the western Arctic imaginary and explore how the show can be read as a UK production.

Setting the Scene In order to understand the series, it is important to situate it within the context of the Nordic noir genre that influenced it as well as the Arctic imaginary that shaped the portrayal of the location. Situating Fortitude: Nordic Noir According to Engelstad (2018), the emergence of Nordic noir followed on the heels of noir and Scandi crime sometime between 2009 and 2011, after the film adaptations of the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsen. Whether thought of as a genre (Stougaard-Nielsen 2020) or seen more as a brand (Hansen and Waade 2017), the popularity of the police procedural in a Nordic setting is certainly high (García-Mainar 2020). For the purposes of this chapter, I will consider Nordic noir as a genre. The term here is meant to cover the whole range of police procedurals with Nordic settings. In addition to the location/setting, the characters, lighting and music create a specific, often melancholic, tone that is also an important element of the genre (Waade 2017).

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Set in a Nordic location, Nordic noir typically shows a relatively bleak landscape as a backdrop for a complex moral and ethical situation (Hayward and Hall 2021). Like other crime fiction, the storyline is generally shown from a police inspector’s point of view. What makes Nordic noir different from other police procedurals is its social commentary: often set in a nondescript, yet specific, local setting, the events always have a twist that creates tension and a morally complex situation. Nordic noir combines geopolitical themes (Saunders 2020) with local, at times granular, everyday, happenings grounded in a welfare state system, making the genre both politically conscious and socially critical (Mrozewicz 2020). This double story is one of the hallmarks of Nordic noir (Chow et al. 2020a), in which the plot is embedded in a broader context of discussion. As Glen Creeber, cited in Dodds and Hochscherf (2020: 45), says, ‘Although the crimes will eventually be solved, the moral, political and social problems that produced them are not. These are issues that audiences are left to consider long after the final climatic episode has come to an end’. Building on this, Dodds and Hochscherf (2020: 45) say, ‘By linking the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural with the private lives of the protagonists, the audiovisual dramas exemplify how the key concerns of today can have an impact on everyday life’. In the case of Fortitude, the UK was undergoing tremendous upheaval around the Brexit debates at the time of its filming, and the reverse appears to have happened. The constant shifts in genre and plot appear more symptomatic of the UK’s upheaval than of an intention to make an ‘exquisite corpse’ (or cadavre exquis, a work made by splicing together disparate styles in the manner of a surrealist drawing game). In other words, the local context of the production impacted what was produced. Unlike Occupied (2015–2020), where the basic premise and the plot line that built on it derived from speculation about the current geopolitical situation with Russia, Fortitude moves through different genres, as if trying to figure out where, or perhaps what, it is. In some ways, it may simply be the UK’s version of the ‘geopolitical uncanny’, a concept explored by Dodds and Hochscherf. In the early 2000s, Nordic noir became a popular genre in the UK (Chow et al. 2020b). Shows such as Wallander (2005–2013), the Millennium trilogy (2009–2010), Borgen (2010–2013), The Bridge (2011–2018), Occupied (2015–2020) and The Killing (2007–2012) were produced in Nordic countries and then adapted to other viewing audiences, including the UK’s. According to Hansen and Waade (2017:

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3), ‘the first season of The Killing is considered the game changer … and was rather successful on BBC4 in Britain, with an average rating of above 500,000 viewers, which is good for BBC4’. In this climate of enthusiasm for Nordic noir, Fortitude was launched. Commissioned by Sky Atlantic in 2013, the first series had 12 episodes. Written and produced by Simon Donald, the show starred Richard Dormer, Dennis Quaid and Sofie Gråbøl (who, not coincidentally, had also starred in The Killing ). The series is set in the fictional town of Fortitude, on an Arctic island owned by Norway yet far removed from the mainland. The town is loosely based on the real town of Longyearbyen, Svalbard. The first episode aired on 29 January 2015 and had 1.5 million viewers. The final episode (12) had just over 1 million viewers. Season 2 was commissioned for 10 episodes and premiered on 26 January 2017. But the final episode of the second season attracted only 113,000 viewers (stats from Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, listed in Wikipedia, n.d.). Season 3, the only season filmed in Svalbard (March 2018) had 4 episodes and premiered on 6 December 2018. The Fortitude poster (see Fig. 5.1) looks more Nordic noir than the series actually is. The lighting is darker than in the actual episodes, suggesting a melancholic atmosphere that viewers would read as Nordic noir. In addition, the way two of the four characters are looking at the camera creates the expectation that the show is character-based and that they will be developed as individuals—another hallmark of Nordic noir. Situating Fortitude: The Series Itself As mentioned above, Fortitude is a UK production, not a Nordic one, created by a UK team for a UK audience. It is, however, set in a Nordic location. Although superficially it appears to be a Nordic noir (a Nordic, in this case Arctic, setting; a convoluted plot line that points to societal issues; geopolitical power struggles, etc.), I will argue below that, although influenced by Nordic noir, Fortitude is very much a UK-based production. When the show was commissioned in 2013, the UK was just beginning to discuss what would become Brexit (see Prime Minister David Cameron’s Bloomberg speech on 23 January 2013 [GOV.UK 2013]). The time leading up to the referendum, held in June 2016, saw a series of official renegotiations as well as heated public debates (see Nigel Walker’s [2021] report for a timeline of events). The first season of Fortitude

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Fig. 5.1 Poster for the UK television series Fortitude (2015–2018) created by Simon Donald for Sky Atlantic. Season 1 (Copyright holder: Sky Atlantic)

was written and filmed during the initial discussions around leaving the European Union and growing euro-scepticism in the UK. Unlike most Nordic noirs (those created in the Nordics), Fortitude does not envision a Nordic location (the town of Fortitude) as being under threat per se, whether from an invasion from the East or a declining welfare state. Fortitude is portrayed as a place unto itself, an island in more than its geographical positioning alone. Ways and customs are different from the mainland and the inhabitants exhibit a certain cool distance from the ‘outsiders’ who come up to investigate the situation, playing on the periphery–centre issues that exist in Norway, although perhaps inadvertently. Given the growing euro-scepticism in the UK at the time, it perhaps showed an uncanny resemblance to the UK–EU tensions being felt by the viewers. In the third and final season (2018), this positioning is given a twist when the mastermind behind the extraction and development of the speculative cure for ageing appears to be the core manipulator of the entire plot. By the end, Elsa Schenthal (Aliette Opheim) has flown in from California, tried to extract what she desired

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(leaving death and destruction in her wake) and is being taken from the island to die elsewhere by Michael Lennox (Dennis Quaid). Cinematically, the final episode bookends the show with an image of a man handcuffed to a pylon on the edge of a fjord and left for dead. In the opening scene, this was geologist Billy Pettigrew (Tam Dean Burn) whom we later discover was left there by Sheriff Dan Anderssen (Richard Dormer) in retaliation for raping Elena Ledesma (Verónica Echegui). In the closing scene, the man is Sheriff Dan Anderssen. In Fortitude, the local police force (and some local inhabitants) trying to solve the murders are depicted as working outside of bureaucratic constraints, following their own ways of doing things and anchoring the location in a frontier/cowboy-town feeling. It is not so much the crimes that need to be solved, as their way of life, their world away from the world, that needs to be saved. The outside world—whether in the form of the central authority or individuals who come to Fortitude—is shown as either not understanding local ways or as coming to exploit something. The Arctic Imaginary (as Portrayed in Film and Other Visual Media) In the Western world, the Arctic is often portrayed as a barren, pristine place with few (if any) inhabitants. Combined with the pressing issues of climate change, the euro-modern imaginary others the region and places it in a victim position, in need of saving (Brode-Roger 2020) by an ‘outside’ (Western) hero. Productions such as Arctic (2018) directed by Joe Penna and filmed in Iceland, show the Arctic as an inhospitable place, where only the toughest can survive. In a classic man vs nature plot, Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen) is stranded in the Arctic after an airplane crash. As the sole survivor, he must decide whether to remain in the relative safety of his makeshift camp or to embark on a deadly trek through the unknown. The scenes are often in near white-out conditions, reinforcing the image of a harsh climate and situating Overgård in the iconic role of an Arctic Explorer-as-Hero. Other productions, such as Arctic Swell (2014), also show man vs nature but in a different way. Here, the Arctic location is shown as an adult playground, a place to challenge oneself and gain reward (a modern-day version of the Arctic explorer). According to SmugMug Films, photographer Chris Burkard and professional surfers Patrick Millin, Brett Barley and Chadd Konig:

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brave sub-zero temperatures in the Arctic Circle to capture moments of raw beauty in conditions that rank among the harshest in the natural world. The bitterly cold seas and wind exact a large price on their minds and bodies, but the reward – adventure, amazement, and self-knowledge – draws them closer together and pushes them to tackle the next frontier in surfing.

In the recent release Polar Bear (Disney 2022), filmed by the Svalbardbased company PolarX, the often beautifully shot film shows the lives of a mother polar bear and her two cubs as they navigate a changing Arctic wilderness. The voiceover would have us believe the mother bear is a self-aware, anthropomorphized ‘mom’ seeking the best for her children, deeply aware of and disturbed by climate change. The portrayal of the polar bears and the wilderness they are in has been carefully managed to make them look natural and in their ‘wild’ setting. None of the female bears are collared, for example—though in reality many females are collared for tracking by scientists (males are not collared because their necks are too thick to keep a collar on: it just slides off over their heads). In addition, the mother is not one bear, but a composite of many female bears. The landscape shows no human traces, of which there are many in Svalbard. The view of a pristine, untouched wilderness is carefully orchestrated, a product of many hours of selective filming and post-production work. In Orion’s Belt (1985), also filmed on Svalbard, the plot is one of man vs man with geopolitical overtones. More akin to the later Nordic noir series, this film shows political manipulation and humans struggling to find their way in a system that threatens to take them down. This film also uses many of the techniques seen in television police procedurals with characters who develop in complexity and dim lighting that creates tense atmospheres. Here, the Arctic is portrayed as remote physically yet of interest (and therefore central) geopolitically. As these examples show, the Arctic is often imagined and portrayed in Western productions as a place without people, a place where an adventurer can go and challenge himself (the person is often a white male). In the case of films like Orion’s Belt, even if populated, the people in positions of power are not the ones on the island, rather, the local people are pawns in a much larger game of political power that they may not—or cannot—be aware of. In most cases, it is not the people in the Arctic who are determining their own (or the land’s) fate but an outsider.

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Locating Fortitude Even though intertwined, I feel it is important to locate Fortitude in three ways: first, in terms of the Arctic setting which acts as a baseline; second, in terms of the town of Fortitude itself and third, in terms of the similarities and differences to the actual town of Longyearbyen that inspired it. The Arctic Setting of Fortitude Rotten Tomatoes (n.d.) describes the show as follows: Fortitude is a town in the Arctic that is unlike any other place on Earth. Surrounded by the picturesque polar landscape and filled with residents who form a tight-knit community, the town has never been the site of a violent crime. That changes, though, when a research scientist is killed, which leads to an investigation that prompts police officers to begin to suspect and mistrust one another. Members of the community also struggle to understand the terror that has been unleashed among them. While all this is going on, above-average temperatures result in record ice melt, which reveals secrets that have long been hidden underneath Fortitude’s frozen landscape.

Here, the fictional town of Fortitude is not only set in the Arctic, but also in a place ‘unlike any other on Earth’. The Arctic is portrayed as picturesque, a place where people live in harmony—even if deep down things are starting to awaken which will impact the community. Visually, the images in the series are often white and blue with stark, snow-covered landscapes. There is little nuance in the colour of light. Outdoor scenes are either predominantly white or shot at night. Even though the series moves through time, there is no real sense of seasons reflected in the landscape itself: it is timeless. As with the other productions discussed above, Fortitude shows a simplified, selective image of the Arctic, not its nuances. Setting the island in the Arctic establishes the town’s remoteness, which is fundamental for the storyline. Being remote, Fortitude has a different set of standards: some derive from the town’s Arctic setting (such as needing a gun to protect oneself from polar bears) while others come from the social infrastructure (everyone needs a job to be allowed to live there). The island setting creates a periphery–centre situation with

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mainland Norway. The island is independent—up to a point. Beyond that, there are people on the mainland who set rules and regulations and enforce them. The Arctic setting is also a driver of the plot. In Season 1 (S1), nature is shown to be ‘on the move’ (further discussed below) and is an integral element of what happens in Fortitude. In the first season, the setting is in many ways a character and perhaps even the main antagonist. Nature is portrayed as coming alive, with glaciers on the move, the awakening of the parasitic wasps, and nowhere to hide. The Fictional Town of Fortitude All police procedurals depict the investigation of a specific event in a specific locale, making local details critical. As in the vast range of crime literature, many television series are also set in real places—and if not, then they are often based on real places. Midnattssol (2016) and The Bridge (2011–2018) are good examples of shows with realistic plot lines emerging from details of their real settings. In these shows, the very nature of the problem, such as an abandoned mine with geopolitical significance in the north of Sweden with a local indigenous population (Midnattssol ), would give a very different story set elsewhere, as would a different set of neighbouring countries with a corpse (or rather, two halves of two different corpses) spread out across the border (The Bridge). In Fortitude, the town is based on a real location but is very much an imagined, fictional place. The series, which was at first shot in Iceland because it was cheaper than shooting in Svalbard, depicts the Arctic as a faraway, isolated place that is also an adult playground. In this environment, there is no centralized control: the feeling is of a frontier settlement, not a normal Norwegian town. The outback, cowboy image of a gun-slinger (Sheriff Dan Anderssen) reinforces this image. The local pub made of heavy wooden planks enhances this impression. The characters themselves describe Fortitude as pure, unsullied, bracing, stark and fierce—until everything gets poisoned and polluted. It is also interesting to note that, unlike many Nordic noir/Scandi crime series, the show often depicts snow and white-on-white conditions: the visual atmosphere is not one of darkness or melancholy. Darkness is used to show moments of tension, of action about to happen, but not to create a mood of despair or depression (see Waade [2017] for how

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melancholy is used in Nordic noir). Once again, Fortitude deviates from being a Nordic noir production even if inspired by the genre. As with crime fiction in general, the setting, themes and characters are closely tied. Fortitude is a small town: everyone knows everyone, and, as is sung in the title sequence, there is ‘no place to run’. As with many depictions of small towns, most of the characters pull together and face the outsiders as a bloc—even as they continue to have their own differences and secrets. The Arctic imaginary embodied in Fortitude anchors the plot more than any realistic details of the place it is loosely based on. As previously noted, some of the grounding details (such as needing a gun outside of town or needing a job/having the means to support oneself in order to live in town) are based on the reality of Longyearbyen, as is the mix of scientific research, tourism and extractive industries (the pylon in the bookending images from S1 and S3 is one such element), and as are details like the police uniforms and licence plates. But in other ways, the imaginary dominates the depiction of the place. It is interesting to compare Ice Town: Life on the Edge (BBC Earth 2016), which was a docuseries made up of interviews with people living in Longyearbyen. The poster for the show (see Fig. 5.2) situates the people in a non-specific place, yet one that is easily understood by a Western viewer as ‘Arctic’. The docuseries depicts the harsher aspects of living in Longyearbyen but not the parts of town that are more ‘normal’, including after-school activities for kids, an art gallery and vegan lattes. Both Fortitude and Life on the Edge promote a vision of the Arctic imaginary from a UK (euro-modern/Western) perspective. The choice of images, dialogue and plot lines are more a reflection of the culture producing the series than the place that is being depicted. The producers of Fortitude have created a world that uses aspects of the Arctic environment, most of which are aligned with a European imaginary of the region. In fact, I would argue that the series is not really about the Arctic. In much the same way that it draws on Nordic noir traditions, but veers away from actually being in the genre, the resemblance is superficial. Rather, the defining characteristic of Fortitude is the element of disturbing dissonance that pervades it. In this regard, it seems to echo (albeit perhaps unwittingly) the turmoil the UK was going through during the period leading up to Brexit, the time in which the series was being produced.

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Fig. 5.2 Poster for BBC Earth’s Ice Town: Life on the Edge (2016) (Copyright holder: BBC Earth)

Nature and Environmental Themes: A Setting with Agency? According to Mrozewicz (2020: 86), ‘nature has played a vital role in the construction of Nordic national self-conceptions’. It is therefore no surprise that nature plays a central role in Nordic noir. In fact, Nordic noir themes and characters are inextricably linked to the natural setting and one produces the others via a constant, iterative intra-relating (Barad 2007). The trailer for S1 starts with sweeping views of glaciers and snowcovered mountains, clearly anchoring the show in an Arctic setting. Quickly, the trailer moves from depictions of a quaint little town to the image of a man shooting his rifle while the voiceover says, ‘everyone’s always happy’. The opening of S1 cuts between a pristine and peaceful setting (kids climbing on a glacier, with one of them casually carrying a rifle over their shoulder) and a harsh and violent environment (a man, handcuffed to a pylon, is killed by a polar bear—or perhaps a gunshot?). The back and forth continues throughout much of the series.

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By contrast, the repeating title sequence, accompanied by the song Peeling off the layers by Wildbirds & Peacedrums, brings in another element. Here, the melting ice is shown as zoomorphic (or at least organic) with various images resembling the inner tissues of a living body (see Fig. 5.3). By the end of the sequence, the ice, now a living thing with sharp icicle-like daggers pointing towards the name ‘Fortitude’, appears as an agentic, antagonistic element, perhaps even a manifestation of Timothy Morton’s (2018) twisted dark ecology. In the end, however, it isn’t so much the ice itself, nor even the impact of climate change, which is the agentic element, rather what is released by the melting ice: the parasitic wasps. Once again, Fortitude shows a superficial resemblance to Nordic noir. The plot is influenced by the town’s location—but more in the ways that the action can unfold than in how the characters act and develop. Another way many Nordic noirs have linked nature, identity and plot lines is through environmental themes (Mäntymäki 2018). These themes are an inherent element of the setting, part of the bleak realism that contributes to the characteristic melancholy mood of the genre. In some cases, as in Jordskott (2015–2017), an ecofantasy crime thriller, it is directly linked to the extraction industry and nature is shown as an agentic element (Souch 2020). In other cases, as in Midnattssol (2018), it is

Fig. 5.3 Film stills from Fortitude trailer sequence ‘Peeling Off the Layers’ by Wildbirds & Peacedrums (2015) (Copyright holder: Sky Atlantic)

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portrayed as having a supernatural or mythical component, creating a familiar yet unfamiliar ‘uncanny’ element. In Fortitude, however, the natural setting does not portray a bleak realism. And, although the setting is essential to the story in that the people of Fortitude are isolated and living in a harsh environment, neither the natural element of the setting nor any potential environmental themes are deeply connected to the unfolding drama. In this context, it is also interesting to note the differences in how S1, S2 and S3 are filmed. The first two seasons shot in Iceland have less of a grounded, local, feel than S3 which was filmed on Svalbard. Part of that is likely to be due to the fact that, when filming in Iceland, one has to avoid filming trees to create an ‘Arctic’ setting, whereas in Svalbard, broader views of the actual (treeless) place can be shown. While Arctic nature itself may not be explored in Fortitude, the series does explore the idea of anthropogenically triggered ‘nature’ elements that gain a life of their own. For example, S1 opens with a scene of two kids out exploring the ice. They, unintentionally (dare one say innocently?), uncover a frozen mammoth and trigger the awakening of a swarm of parasitic wasps (although the wasps are not as clear in the first scene as they will come to be later). The use of climate change here is more as a background condition, it is not the main focus of the action or the plot. The main focus is on how these human-triggered events begin to seep into the town and create havoc. In S1 E5, Ronnie Morgan (Johnny Harris) talks about the ‘living ice’ and the glaciers that are ‘always on the move’. He explains to his daughter (one of the two kids who triggered the outbreak in the opening scene) that the glaciers have created the mountains and shaped the planet. He says that they can’t be stopped, that they destroy anyone who gets in their way. So, although this kind of scene would point to nature as having agency, the actual infestation and trigger is in the parasitic wasps, not in the glacier(s). The feeling of being small, of being out of control, is similar to Edmund Burke’s eighteenth-century description of what makes something a sublime experience in the face of nature as opposed to seeing the beauty of nature (Macfarlane 2003). In Fortitude, this feeling is shown both cinematographically, with a panoramic sweep out from the tent Ronnie is hiding in with his daughter, and through the dialogue. This feeling, this sense of the world running havoc over individual human lives such as his own, when all he really wants is to provide a good

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life for his daughter, resembles the way the UK was being portrayed in news sources as it was heading towards Brexit more than the way nature is typically portrayed in Nordic noir, with its bleak, even melancholic, and ‘non-spectacular’ landscapes (Mrozewicz 2020). In Fortitude, the Western imaginary of the Arctic (which developed through the travel tourism that came from the UK/European desire to explore the sublime) seems more to serve as a vehicle for expressing the mood of the UK at the time than a reflection of either the place it was based on or even the genre that inspired it. Ronnie, in trying to provide a good life for his daughter, however, has done so by following his own rules: he has taken a mammoth tusk and is trying to sell it. This is not a major plot point in the overall story but it does exemplify how different individuals in Fortitude try to better their own lives in egocentric ways. The theme of egocentricity plays out in most of the other plot lines throughout the series, in more or less dramatic ways. The most dramatic being perhaps the black-widow version of Elsa Schenthal (Aliette Opheim), the mastermind behind the medical experiments being conducted on the island, who kills first her lover (S3 E1) and then her (wounded) husband (S3 E3) to extract their spinal fluid for her own rejuvenation. But ultimately, most of the deaths in Fortitude happen through infection by a prehistoric parasitic wasp which alters the host’s nature, making them do things they wouldn’t normally do. Koistinen and Mäntymäki (2020) describe these altered beings as ‘zombies’ but I don’t feel that correctly captures the transition. The individuals aren’t dead, revived corpses. Instead they are altered, in the same way a disease can alter the mind or the body—akin to how vampires or werewolves are created in the paranormal genre. It is this ability to alter the body that Elsa is exploiting in her search for eternal youth. It is also a kind of (natural) bio-engineered cohabitation, a new being that is neither parasitic wasp nor human. And, ultimately, highly unpredictable and without human empathy. The infected people create a situation which is volatile and uncertain—an uncanny (and probably unintentional) reflection of the UK at this time.

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What Is Actually Going on in Fortitude? Although the series moves through its opening episodes with the possibility of the landscape being more than a setting, in that it can be seen as a catalyst for conflicts and events, the plot quickly dissolves into a suite of random-seeming events and multiple entangled threads. In many Nordic noir series the themes and events can be seen to have ‘grown out of the landscape’ (Roberts 2016: 374). In Fortitude, however, this isn’t the case. Instead, the setting stays in the realm of a backdrop, a place in which the action (and reactions, repercussions and developments) play out. As mentioned above, the title sequence and some of the early scenes hint at a much deeper agency in the landscape than actually materializes as the series unfolds. Interestingly, Fortitude doesn’t display the normal nature discourse in which humans control nature, but neither does it turn to a form of dark ecology in which nature comes back in a ‘toxic nightmare form’ (Morton 2018). As with many elements in Fortitude, the natural elements shift and meander as the show goes on. The hinted-at threat from the ice itself (whether linked to anthropogenic forces or not) never comes into being: instead the changes in the people come from the parasitic wasps that had been frozen in the ice. At the same time, the changes in those infected by the parasitic wasps create another element, a creature that is not so much a hybrid as a new being that challenges the typical human paradigm of crime dramas. Those who survive the infection are no longer the humans they once were, and yet they still have memories and the knowledge of their surroundings that they once did. In many ways they are a good depiction of what Tsing et al. (2017) call ‘monsters’. Their transformation introduces the potential for a deep critique of the ecological damage being wrought upon our world. However, though these monsters are a major driver of what happens, their nature isn’t really explored: they continue in their previous roles even while disrupting the normal functioning of the town of Fortitude. This infection, connected to the parasitic wasps that are themselves a reawakened element from nature, which infects everyone (including animals) could have been further developed into a revenge for Gaia (Lovelock 2006) situation. It is perhaps this potential plot thread that brings Koistinen and Mäntymäki to assert that Fortitude, draws on the bleak materiality of Nordic noir and the uncanniness of speculative fiction in featuring a hybrid cautionary narrative in which generic

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mobility allows for new expressions of societal and ecological critique through affective depictions of violence. (Koistinen and Mäntymäki 2020: 261)

For me, this plot thread is more of an unfulfilled promise, a version of Chekhov’s gun that should go off in the final act but doesn’t. Unlike Koistinen and Mäntymäki, I don’t believe that the show expresses a deep ecological critique, though it certainly could have. However, combined with its multiple other threads and directions (see genre jumping below) the show does stitch together an exquisite corpse: a patchwork of elements and genres that create the uncanny, off-kilter atmosphere that is the hallmark of the series—and an unwitting expression by the show’s creators of the tumultuous situation of Brexit that they were living through. Genre Jumping One issue in analysing the series is that the three seasons are of differing (and progressively shorter) lengths. S1 had 12 episodes, S2 had 10 and S3 only 4. In addition, outdoor scenes for S1 and S2 were filmed in Iceland while outdoor scenes for S3 were filmed in Svalbard. The biggest dissonance, however, is created by the way the series seems to jump between genres. As one featured review states on IMBD: ‘Season 1 was good. Season 2 was far-fetched and Season 3 was ridiculous. I felt like I did when LOST ended – all that for nothing. Started off well and then seemed to lose direction. Nice shots of the snow though!’ S1 starts off in a relatively traditional Nordic noir fashion, with what seems to be a quaint little town waking up to its darker side. It then shifts to a crime thriller/horror type situation (leaving behind the tension of Nordic noir while showing gory murders and bodies exploding because of the nests of wasps they are harbouring) before turning to a speculative fiction feeling. S1 is not so much a blending of genres within the episodes, as it is a multiplying of genres as the episodes go on—almost as if the episode writers wanted to bring it in different directions. S2 generally shows more elements of local life, such as with the introduction of fishermen (likely based on what was observed in Iceland when shooting S1). In addition, several supernatural and historical elements are brought in. An indigenous shaman, Vladek Klimov (Robert Sheehan), is introduced. He tries to control nature (or at least the manifestations

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that are creating problems in the human world) by attempting to rid the town of the parasite/devil incarnate that Sheriff Dan Anderssen has become. However, in making his tupilak, he is also a murderer. Vladek and Dan are both ‘homegrown’ entities, as are the parasitic wasps. In many ways, Fortitude self-implodes even while pulling together to keep out the outsiders. The final season (S3), shot in Svalbard, is the one most grounded in its location. It is in some ways also the most Nordic noir of the three seasons in that it brings in more character development than the previous seasons, with its focus on Michael Lennox (Dennis Quaid). Even so, S3 still deviates from Nordic noir in that the main directions for the plot(s) come increasingly from outside elements such as in the antagonist Elsa Schenthal with her mega corporation even while the plot line of the local ‘monster’, Sheriff Dan Anderssen, continues. People and Themes of Fortitude, Characters and Their Roles as the Plot(s) Jump(s) As has already been shown, there are many entangled and intra-related themes in Fortitude. An initial and significant theme builds on the awakening of various dormant elements, such as the parasitic wasps, that then have a transformative impact. At times this theme is connected to historical events, as in the flashback to World War II. It is also linked to supernatural and speculative events, as with the shaman. Woven throughout are instances of manipulation, exploitation and a scramble for power—including centre–periphery issues. The one constant is that things are not what they seem. And when they start to become clear, they change. The series, at times, plays on Dan Anderssen’s good Sheriff/bad Sheriff role. But to what purpose? The show starts with him taking justice into his own hands, the details of which are revealed as the show progresses. The man (Billy Pettigrew) who was being attacked by a polar bear and was then accidentally shot by Henry Tyson (Michael Gambon) turns out to have been tied to the pylon by Dan Anderssen in retaliation for the rape of Elena Ledesma (Verónica Echegui). After the event, Dan covers up the fact that Pettigrew was shot: had he revealed what had happened he would also have had to explain why he was tying him up out there in the first place. Whatever Dan had intended, whether to have Pettigrew killed by a polar bear or to tie him up as a lesson with the idea of

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freeing him afterwards, is never made clear. What is clear is that there are many, darker, things going on in Fortitude than Governor Hildur Odegard (Sofie Gråbøl) explains when she states that Fortitude ‘is the safest place on the world’ in order to develop her hotel project. Later in the show, we also learn that Dan is living a ‘lie’ in that he doesn’t know, although perhaps he suspects, that Henry is his father. Given Dan’s role as the main character of the series, and the way he often appears as the ‘core’ of the town, his unknown (hidden) parentage, his growing up in a situation of obfuscation, are also a reflection of the underlying issues the town (read: island) faces. Underscoring this, even things that seem innocent in the beginning, such as the children out playing on the glacier in the opening scene of the show, quickly turn into something else. The kids trigger the wasps, or at least the killings by infection (the mammoths were found before them, so they are not the first to come into contact) since the child Liam Sutter (Darwin Brokenbro) commits the first (innocent?) murder, that of Prof. Charlie Stoddart (Christopher Eccleston), the researcher who wanted to stop the hotel project. Are the children innocent? Is Stoddart? Either way, the event triggers a chain of reactions, and violence, between the inhabitants of Fortitude who begin to accuse each other of betrayal and infidelity and unveil secrets along the way. Entangled with these themes of nothing being as it seems, of elements just under the surface waiting to reawaken, is the theme of centre– periphery relations. Hildur’s role is connected with the ‘outside’ (since she reports to the central authorities in Oslo) and she wants to open the island up to others, by selling it to tourists. Ultimately, she dies at the hands of an outsider (Erling Munk, the new Governor). Munk (Ken Stott) is working with Dr. Khatri (Parminder Nagra) an agent of an external mega corporation with purely financial interests whose objective is to exploit the rejuvenating capacities of the wasps. The idea of exploiting the place for development is railroaded by the desire to exploit the place’s resources for an even bigger scheme. Dr. Khatri is a good example of the outside exploitation of Fortitude. She is paid to extract/develop the ‘cure’ for Elsa (unnamed throughout S2) and shows neither remorse nor doubt about what she is doing. She is paid to do a job and does it. When she starts to question her situation and wants to leave to save herself, she is killed. This seems a rather cold and two-dimensional portrayal of the ‘worker bee’ of big business (which is also portrayed in a ‘flat’ way). Unlike in a Nordic noir, there is no interest

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in her development or how/why she questions what she is doing. She is a plot point, that shows the manipulating, exploitative nature of ‘outside’ business interests. Although Nordic noir can be a blend of various genres (part of the argument Hansen and Waade make for calling it a brand), I would argue that the kind of shifts that occur in Fortitude are not so much a blending of genres but genre switches that occurred as the series was being filmed. This exquisite corpse approach makes the series hard to follow and was, for me, confusing at first. But once I considered the context in which the series was being made, it came to seem symptomatic of other, local issues that had much more to do with where the film was being written than where it was being filmed or where it was set.

How Do We Read This? So what, really, is going on with Fortitude? Although inspired by something from ‘outside’ (Nordic noir as seen from the UK), the fundamental approach remained grounded in the production team’s situatedness. As with all productions, their situatedness shapes their worldview, the story they tell and the way they tell it (see Dina Brode-Roger and Eva la Cour in this collection). For Fortitude this means being grounded in the UK, at a specific moment in time: that of the rise of Brexit. And, as with all reasons for choosing something ‘outside’, there will be a certain uncanniness to the production—whether created intentionally or not. In this case, I don’t think there was any intention to showcase the chaos and disruption being lived through in the UK. If anything, the intention was simply to capitalize on the popularity of Nordic noir and to exploit it for financial gain. Using the Svalbard archipelago as a source of inspiration for the setting means the action happens on an island, which naturally resonates for the British—especially when they are starting to grapple with a rise in euroscepticism. In addition, the Arctic location of Fortitude anchors the series in a remote place. Although few have been to the Arctic, the average Western viewer has some idea of what to expect, linked to an imagined idea of the Arctic which often revolves around notions of barren, empty spaces that are white, pristine and timeless. This imaginary provides a relatively blank canvas where genre jumping and entangled plot lines can play out in a convoluted dance of mirrors—reflecting perhaps more about the producers and their own time and place than about the setting. Fortitude

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is an island apart, a place where locals pull together—even while killing each other or watching as one of their own kills others. In Fortitude the themes combine to create an atmosphere where what was once safe, is safe no longer. Innocent children become murderers. Infidelity, betrayal and scrambling for power abound. Dark undercurrents that weren’t acknowledged before are exposed. The rape of Elena, a woman many men wanted to possess, echoes the way European polar exploration played out, with rugged white men conquering the Arctic and scrambling to claim the North Pole. Elena’s character is never truly developed: she is a victim, a catalyst for other things, in much the same way as the various scientific experiments on animals (and humans). In some ways, the death of Pettigrew, the first person murdered when he was tied to the pylon, exposes the ‘animal’ or primal version of humanity prevalent in Fortitude. And, in spite of the many instances of betrayal and treachery, the people of Fortitude still want to keep the ‘outsiders’ out. On 14 May 2019 the leader for The Economist, entitled ‘Oh **UK! What next for Brexit?’ read: Even by the chaotic standards of the three years since the referendum, the country is lost …. Mrs May boasted this week of ‘send[ing] a message to the whole world about the sort of country the United Kingdom will be’. She is not wrong: it is a laughing-stock. An unflappable place supposedly built on compromise and a stiff upper lip is consumed by accusations of treachery and betrayal.

In some ways, the image of Shirley Allerdyce (Jessica Gunning) killing her own mother by cutting open her stomach and vomiting into it (S1 E7) is a commentary on the UK at the time. Fortitude is in quite a mess, and as noted in the quote above, so was the UK. People who could usually be expected to stick together are sabotaging their own mother(land). Everything is dissolving into treachery and betrayal and no one seems to be able to lead the place (or country) out of the chaos.

References Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brode-Roger, Dina (2020) ‘Starving polar bears and melting ice: how the Arctic imaginary continues to colonize our perception of climate change in the

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circumpolar region’. International Review of Qualitative Research 14 (3): 497–509. Burkard, Chris (2014) Arctic Swell—Surfing the Ends of the Earth. SmugMug films (https://www.smugmug.com/films/chris-burkard [accessed 14 October 2022]). Chow, Pei-Sze, Robert A. Saunders and Anne Marit Waade (2020a) ‘Geopolitical television drama within and beyond the Nordic region’. Nordicom Review 41 (1) (special issue ‘Dark Screens: The Geopolitics of Nordic Television Drama’): 11–27. Chow, Pei-Sze, Robert A. Saunders and Anne Marit Waade (2020b) ‘Introduction: Dark Screens: the geopolitics of Nordic television drama’. Nordicom Review 41 (1) (special issue): 3–9. Dodds, Klaus and Tobias Hochscherf (2020) ‘The geopolitics of Nordic noir: representations of current threats and vigilantes in contemporary Danish and Norwegian serial drama’. Nordicom Review 41 (1) (special issue ‘Dark Screens: The Geopolitics of Nordic Television Drama’): 43–61. Engelstad, Audun (2018) ‘Framing Nordic noir’. In: Kim Toft Hansen, Steven Peacock and Sue Turnbull (eds) European Television Crime Drama and Beyond. Palgrave European Film and Media Studies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan: 23–39. García-Mainar, Luis M. (2020) ‘Nordic noir: the broad picture’. In: Linda Badley, Andrew Nestingen and Jaako Seppälä (eds) Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan: 157–174. GOV.UK (2013) ‘EU speech at Bloomberg’. Prime Minister David Cameron discussed the future of the European Union at Bloomberg. 2010 to 2015 Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government of the UK (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/eu-speech-atbloomberg [accessed 23 November 2022]). Hansen, Kim Toft and Anne Marit Waade (2017) Locating Nordic Noir: From Beck to the Bridge. Palgrave European Film and Media Studies Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hayward, Keith J. and Steve Hall (2021) ‘Through Scandinavia, darkly: a criminological critique of Nordic noir’. British Journal of Criminology 61 (1): 1–21. IMBD (n.d.) Fortitude (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3498622/ [accessed 11 October 2022]). Koistinen, Aino-Kaisa and Helen Mäntymäki (2020) ‘Affective estrangement and ecological destruction in TV crime series Fortitude’. In: Maarit Piipponen, Helen Mäntymäki and Marinella Rodi-Risberg (eds) Transnational Crime Fiction: Mobility, Borders and Detection. Palgrave Crime Files Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Lovelock, James (2006) The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & the Fate of Humanity. New York: Basic Books. Macfarlane, Robert (2003) Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination. London: Granta Books. Mäntymäki, Helen (2018) ‘Epistemologies of (un)sustainability in Swedish crime series Jordskott’. Green Letters 22 (1): 89–100. Morton, Timothy (2018) Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Mrozewicz, Anna Estra (2020) ‘The landscapes of eco-noir: reimagining Norwegian eco-exceptionalism in Occupied’. Nordicom Review 41 (1) (special issue ‘Dark Screens: The Geopolitics of Nordic Television Drama’): 85–105. NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) (2022) ‘Arctic Report Card 2022’. United States Department of Commerce, NOAA [accessed 15 (https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2022 December 2022]). Roberts, Les (2016) ‘Landscapes in the frame: exploring the hinterlands of the British procedural drama’. New Review of Film and Television Studies 14 (3): 364–385. Rotten Tomatoes (n.d.) Fortitude (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/for titude [accessed 11 October 2022]). Saunders, Robert A. (2020) ‘Landscape, geopolitics, and national identity in the Norwegian thrillers Occupied and Nobel ’. Nordicom Review 41 (1) (special issue ‘Dark Screens: The Geopolitics of Nordic Television Drama’): 63–83. Souch, Irina (2020) ‘Transformations of the evil forest in the Swedish television series Jordskott: an ecocritical reading’. Nordicom Review 41 (1) (special issue ‘Dark Screens: The Geopolitics of Nordic Television Drama’): 107–122. Stougaard-Nielsen, Jakob (2020) ‘Wallander’s dark geopolitics’. Nordicom Review 41 (1) (special issue ‘Dark Screens: The Geopolitics of Nordic Television Drama’): 29–42. The Economist (2019) ‘Oh **UK! What next for Brexit?’ (https://www.eco nomist.com/leaders/2019/03/14/oh-uk-what-next-for-brexit [accessed 23 November 2022]). Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (eds) (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Waade, Anne Marit (2017) ‘Melancholy in Nordic noir: characters, landscapes, light and music’. Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 12 (4): 380–394.

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Walker, Nigel (2021) ‘Brexit timeline: events leading to the UK’s exit from the European Union’ (Briefing Paper No. 7960 6 Jan 2021). London: House of Commons Library. Wikipedia (n.d.) ‘Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board’ (https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Fortitude_(TV_series [accessed 10 October 2022]).

CHAPTER 6

Arctic Views: Virtual Remote Experiences—Reflections from the Field Tyrone Martinsson

Introduction This chapter addresses imaginaries within connections to historic visual representations and contemporary visualizations of northwest Svalbard. The focus is on work related to transdisciplinary visually based research tracing data on glaciers and ice from 1596 onwards. That work spans several areas of historical progression in Europe’s relationship with Svalbard. The development of that research today includes a wide range of technologies and data for exploring stories of ice and trying to understand the transitions of the Arctic. These approaches merge humanities, arts and natural sciences with pedagogics and technology. Even in the short time frame of the past ten years, there has been a rapid development of powerful technologies that have opened entirely new ways of visualizing, and thereby imagining the north. This chapter reflects on how such developments affect and contribute to Arctic imaginaries as a

T. Martinsson (B) University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_6

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concept covering a number of different areas, in this instance scientific, geographical, technical and media imaginaries in particular. In 2011 a transdisciplinary research platform and long-term project monitoring the changing landscape in Svalbard’s Northwest Spitsbergen National Park was formed.1 Its focus area is the coast and fjords from Magdalenefjorden in the south to Holmiabukta in the north. Until the 1950s conditions in this area remained quite consistent with those registered over hundreds of years of observations and manifested in visual representations and written sources. In the past 30 years this has changed dramatically, as a result of a rapidly warming Arctic (Helgesen et al. 2015; Larsen et al. 2014; Steffen et al. 2015; Voosen 2021). Historical visual representations of Svalbard play an important role as a basis for a time series that provides information on vanishing ice. Supporting this is a vast and diverse archive of images from nineteenth- and twentieth-century science and travel with a visual legacy of ice showing the status of glacial landscapes. These sources also represent an indication of what viewpoints were prioritized by visitors and previous scientists when documenting the landscape. The frames of these viewpoints are good indicators of the aesthetic and cultural imaginaries that visitors brought with them over time (Martinsson 2022). Our work in Svalbard currently (2020– 2023) focuses on expanding the traditional method of rephotography in our visual-based research on climate changerelated to Svalbard by taking our methods further with extended reality (XR) technologies such as 360° and 180° video and 3D-models (both computer-based and as printed objects), drone surveys and virtual reality. These technological platforms are used to explore the emerging field of virtual remote research as well as full-dome XR storytelling about climate change in which immersive experiences of Arctic environments and specific sites, through their participatory technological application, merge research and research

1 A collaborative platform, developed over the years and funded for its latest project by the Swedish Research Council, that includes the Norwegian Polar Institute, UiT—The Arctic University of Norway, the Visual Arena Lindholmen Gothenburg, the Universeum Science Centre Gothenburg, the University of Plymouth, Stockholm University and the University of Gothenburg. In 2022, we did fieldwork as part of the project Extended Rephotography: immersive visualization of climate change funded by the Swedish Research Council. This project was an expansion of work started in 2012, also funded by the Research Council. The technological developments over the ten years of the project have been substantive, and XR technologies have opened up a new field of possibilities for data management, visualization and virtual remote research.

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communications. The two fields are a collaboration with its base at the Visual Arena Lindholmen Gothenburg that works with filmmaker and VR-storytelling specialist Gorki Glaser-Müller and Professor Lena Pareto at the public science centre Universeum in Gothenburg, where a visualization dome, ‘Wisdome Gothenburg’, funded by the Knut och Alice Wallenberg Foundation, is being built. The dome, with its capacity for immersive experiences through 360° film or 3D-productions all in 8K resolution, is currently on the cutting edge of what can be offered as a platform for visualizing and explaining research to a wide and diverse audience. This offers the next step not only in exploring visualizations of complex and urgent topics but also for exploring Arctic imaginaries through technoscientific developments. I have worked with visual technologies and the development of digital platforms since the 1990s, and today we have reached a stage in the development of technology that makes possible the use of these options for remote experiences and research in unprecedented ways. One of the great advantages of the technological development has been the capacity of digital platforms to allow all previous technologies to be included, from the early draughtsmen’s work, through the beginnings of photography, developments in stereo photography, digital imaging, 3D and animation to immersive XR technologies. This is a kind of expansion of as well as fulfilment of Bolter and Grusin’s (2000) early concepts of Remediation.

The Long Story In our work with visualization of climate change in Svalbard, based on a wide range of data and technologies, we looked for a concept for mapping glaciers in relation to time and storytelling. We finally appropriated and developed a method called ‘the long story’, which is a conceptual approach to geologist and artist Mark Klett’s concept and tool rephotography.2 The long story simply implies that works relating to climate change are undertakings that span history and the present and have no ending in the near future. The creation of such stories benefits from a

2 Mark Klett initiated the term Rephotography in the late 1970s when working on his collaborative work Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project. The term was developed and expanded from geologist H. E. Malde’s method of repeat photography (1973). Klett added a dimension of storytelling and aesthetics to Malde’s scientific method and, in the process, made it a transdisciplinary method.

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transdisciplinary approach where visual technologies are used to address complex passages of time and explore consequences as well as opportunities within visualization and research. The concept of the long story is partly inspired by our colleague Subhankar Banerjee, professor of art and ecology at the University of New Mexico, whose term long environmentalism describes the decades-long engagement needed to meet the challenges of climate change and for the environmental movement to be able to achieve progress. Long environmentalism, for Banerjee, is about sociopolitical issues in environmentalism and offers an approach to studying the effects of these issues through illuminating the past and highlighting resistance movements showing how communities respond to change, while pointing towards renewal and solutions. Time is a key concept, as it allows for the slow process whereby the peripheral and the radical move to the centre of things creating new opportunities and solutions (Banerjee 2017). Our concept, the long story, has been developed as a method of observation in time and space where technology supports and enables science, art and humanities in exploring new ways of telling, and of conducting research. The long story indicates that environmental challenges such as climate change or sustainable development must have long-term frameworks, and that these processes take place over years or decades rather than within short-term time frames. The complicated aspects of mediating climate change require models of engagement with an open-source structure, transparency in their processes and collaboration in their realization and documentation, so that research processes can be easily understood and continued by fellow researchers and future generations. XR technologies have extended and transformed Klett’s rephotography method and, perhaps through that, also linked us more closely to Banerjee’s concept, transitioning into a transdisciplinary research method offering an expanded toolbox for mediating climate change. Comparative methodology was key to rephotography and still applies to the expanded versions of that type of storytelling through immersive visualization based on large sets of visual data. The setting for this immersive visualization is full-dome XR storytelling.3 This chapter introduces the tools and the 3 The concept full-dome XR storytelling is being developed in collaboration with Professor Lena Pareto from Educational Sciences University of Gothenburg who holds a professorial position at the Universeum developing the research lab at Wisdome Gothenburg.

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concepts we are exploring (this being work in progress) in relation to interactive scientific and technology imaginaries.

Notes on Historical Observations Our work is based in Northwest Svalbard, which offers a visual time span of 200 years (photographs, sketches, drawings, paintings and maps) and over 400 years of written sources (expedition journals, diaries, publications and notes) creating a solid base for understanding the current situation in this Arctic area and helping us to envision the future. Climate change affects about four million people living in the Arctic region. Svalbard is unique, though, as no indigenous population has ever existed there. Our focus area is in the northwest corner of the island of Spitsbergen. The closest settlement is Ny-Ålesund, a Norwegian research community in Kongsfjorden north of Longyearbyen, the main town in Svalbard. In comparison to Kongsfjorden, little research has been conducted north of Ny-Ålesund. Magdalenefjorden (the site chosen for this text) has a unique history of archival sources dating back to 1596 when Svalbard was discovered by the Dutch. Since then, numerous artists, scientists, explorers and later tourists have visited the fjord. Considered as a site comprising everything unique to the islands and offering easy access, Magdalenefjorden soon became one of the most visited and important tourist destinations in Svalbard. Sysselmesteren has a ranger hut in the fjord monitoring the many ships and sailboats in the area. The many visualizations and descriptions of that particular fjord bear witness to the changing imaginaries of the place. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Svalbard was divided by interests in whaling in which the leading nation was The Netherlands. In 1919 the librarian at the Royal Library in the Hague, Frederick C. Wieder, compiled a still influential historical account of the cartography of Svalbard from 1598 to 1835. The book was published by The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Royal Dutch Geographical Society on the orders of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The timing of the book may not have been a coincidence as the drafting of the Svalbard Treaty and thereby Norway’s acquisition of sovereignty over the islands was then in progress. Wieder’s book is a clear political marker, without any hostility towards any nation, but presenting the facts of the early years of activities in Svalbard seen through the Dutch mapping of the islands. Wieder was assisted in his study by close readings of the

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works of Martin Conway, a British art historian who made one of the most important and still influential twentieth-century contributions to the study of the history of Svalbard. Wieder’s work is particularly important owing to his extensive catalogue of 287 maps. Wieder contextualizes this through a short history of the mapping of Svalbard beginning with some of the early descriptions of the islands made by the Dutch (Wieder 1919; Conway 1906). Wieder indicated that the primary tool of choice of the Dutch when claiming and visualizing the northern waters and Svalbard was the map. From the 1630s they started a structured process of mapping that would create the best maps of their time thanks to a strict rule of staying true to confirmed field observations. The maps became geographical imaginaries carrying unique data as well as territorial claims through their naming and proven extensive knowledge of place, telling the stories of successful expansion and Dutch control of far northern Europe. The Dutch cartographers perhaps started the development of a geopolitical imaginary still in place with shifting stories and focus as the maps developed along with the geopolitics of Svalbard. The oldest known map in which the name Spitsbergen occurs dates from 1612 and was published by Hessel Gerritsz in Amsterdam (Wieder 1919: 50). It took just a few years for Svalbard to become one of the geopolitical playgrounds of seventeenth-century Europe. In 1607 Henry Hudson visited Svalbard and from 1610 the English arrived more frequently and with them the hunters. In 1613 Gerritsz published Histoire du pays nommé Spitsberghe, the first book on Svalbard. That book included a second map important for the early mapping of Svalbard. The map created by Gerritsz was based on one that was originally drawn by the Englishman John Daniel, whom Gerritsz refers to as the basis for the map too. Daniel’s map was lost and has never been found. The same year that Gerritsz published his book and map of Spitsbergen, the whaler and hunter Robert Fotherby visited Spitsbergen in an English venture that also involved the explorers William Baffin (see Baffin 2010) and Thomas Edge. Fotherby in his notebook (Fotherby 1625) made the earliest surviving field drawings of whaling and hunting. The drawings are unique documents in that they were made on location. One of these sketches is a landscape view filled with animals marking Svalbard’s value as a natural resource. The landscape also shows a Svalbard that is more ‘soft’ and ‘green’ in contrast to the barren hard ice and mountain environments that otherwise dominate perceptions of the archipelago. In 1613 Fotherby also made a glacier walk which is one of the first documented descriptions of a close encounter

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with a glacier on Spitsbergen. In 1672 the German surgeon Friedrich Martens from Hamburg worked in the whaling in North West Spitsbergen. During his stay he recorded his observations of the land with its features and animals and published it in 1675 (English version 1694). Today this remains one the most important early printed sources available of a collected description of observations in the area before Cornelis Gijsbertz Zorgdrager’s book of 1720. Martens’s book reflects the knowledge and views of Spitsbergen current in his time and provides testimony from the field with a gallery of illustrations, originally made by Martens himself and, like Fotherby’s images, unique in their direct connection to field observations. In 1773 Constantine John Phipps’s expedition arrived in Spitsbergen. The goal of that expedition was to try to reach the North Pole. The expedition sailed up to northeastern Svalbard, reaching Sjuyøane. Among those who joined the expedition was the young midshipman Philippe d’Auvergne who made a number of sketches of views that the expedition passed. One of these was the glacier portrayed from Amsterdamøya at a location in the northeast part of Smeerenburgsletta where the expedition, according to Phipps, worked with its scientific instruments. This drawing, which appears on the same sheet as a map of the area made by d’Auvergne, is one of the earliest recordings of specific glaciers on Spitsbergen. D’Auvergne’s original sketch, now in the library collection at the University of Michigan, appears to represent Frambreen—to the right Retziusbreen can also be seen. In 1818 David Buchan’s expedition arrived in Magdalenefjorden seeking shelter in ‘Trinity harbour’, the cove at the bottom of the fjord (named in 1614 by Robert Fotherby). During their stay, expedition members recorded the bay in drawings and maps. The drawings give an indication of historic ice coverage on the mountain slopes in the fjord. The expedition had two draughtsmen, Charles C. Palmer and William Beechey (see Beechey 1843). Palmer made a panoramic view of the south coast from a ship. It took the form of an interesting watercolour drawing that pre-empted the vantage point of the first photographic panorama of the bay, taken by Swedish photographer Axel Goës in 1861. Goës travelled to Svalbard with Otto Torell’s scientific expedition. The 1861 photographs may be the first ever taken in Svalbard, but few prints and no negatives are known to exist today. The most interesting image from Goës is the previously mentioned panorama of the south coast of the fjord, only available as a lithographic print made from

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Goës’ photographs. However, the accurate details of the print demonstrate the capacity of the new visual technology compared to drawings and watercolours. The images from Torell’s expedition illustrate the transformation in representational tools that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the artist’s hand and eye to the camera and its operator. The artistic freedom of draughtsmen like d’Auvergne, Palmer and Beechey was complemented and eventually replaced by the accurate and instrumental recording by the camera. Though this transition took several decades, from 1861 just about every Swedish expedition to the Arctic included a camera, as can be seen in journals and books (e.g. the 1993 reference work of G. H. Liljequist). Today, draughtsmen’s representations of glaciers are both useful and enjoyable, but photographs play a more important role for constructing a visual argument to the effect that human-induced climate change has created a trend of vanishing glaciers.

From Real-Life Experience to Full-Dome Experience Magdalenefjorden has been one of our focus areas for the past ten years. The fjord is a key historical site in Svalbard and has been a destination for tourist operators since the start of tourism in the late nineteenth century. Its topography is almost a showcase of what Svalbard can offer with its various mountains, some with sharp peaks and glaciers and steep valleys in between, the poignant and characteristic sandy lowland of Gravneset, mountain slopes with lichen and moss-covered rocks, a safe haven in Trinityhamna and a long and rich history. Today this site is completely different from the days of Barentsz and the early whaling era or even the British documenting of the fiord in 1807 and 1818 (Fig. 6.1). Axel Goës’s early photographs are the beginning of a new way of representing Svalbard and offer a more accurate and recognizable view of the south coast than his predecessor Charles C. Palmer (1818) who worked with watercolour drawings. Across from Goës’s vantage point is Gullybreen. The glacier was named by Broke in 1807 due to a gully on the west side of the glacier front. Neither the gully nor the glacier as seen by Broke exists today. Where the glacier lay there is now a bay named Gullybukta (1988). Only a fraction of the original glacier is in contact with the sea. Soon it will be entirely land-based. The decrease in Gullybreen’s volume is visible in comparison with historic images of the mountain range where the glacier can be seen coming down from the high land that is still

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Fig. 6.1 Gravneset, Trinity harbour towards Waggonwaybreen, 2 August 2022. Gorki Glaser Müller working the 360° camera assisted by Peter Johansson holding a frame to create a focus point. Below: the historical view of the frame (Henriksen & Sten 1953) (Courtesy of Norsk Polarinstitutt)

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covered with a large ice mass from which several glaciers begin. Gullybreen has been one of the iconic glaciers in Northwest Spitsbergen since tourists started to arrive there in the late nineteenth century (Figs. 6.2 and 6.3).

Fig. 6.2 Magdalenefjorden, 1 August 2022, mountain slopes on the eastern side of the glacier bay. At the location of the viewpoint of the photographer in 1926. Gorki Glase Müller setting up the location for rephotography and 360° filming and Thomas Nydén holding the reference image from 1926 (Carl Müller & Son) (Photograph by Author)

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Fig. 6.3 Rephotography, 1 August 2022, Gullybukta from the vantage point of Carl Müller & Son 1926 (see below) (Photograph by Author; Historic Photo from Private Collection)

In around 1926 a photograph was taken from the slopes of the eastern mountain ridge separating the glacier from Gravneset. The photographer remains unknown but the image is credited to the firm Verlag Carl Müller & Son. This photograph is a centrepiece of our work on the glaciers in the fjord. One detail that makes this image uniquely useful is its inclusion of people in relation to the ice masses. Today we can follow the clearly visible trail towards Gullybreen’s historical mountain slopes—a

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trail made by the thousands of tourists who have followed the field procedure whereby you are taken ashore in a small boat at Gravneset where the landing is dry and easy. From the sandy beach of the landing site visitors then have several options: to stay on the beach and look at some of the relics from the whaling era, view the site of the burial ground if only from a distance; to walk towards Gullybreen, following a trail along the fence to the west of the burial ground and then crossing the flats towards the ridge with a short uphill walk through quite stony terrain before it cuts its way down the slope towards Gullybukta then following the sea towards the glacier. As you get closer to the glacier the walking gets easier on a flat sandy beach. The photograph from 1926 is taken from above the trail and care is required to reach the spot in the stony but stable terrain. Today the glacier is located so far up the bay that it takes quite a while to do the excursion. Across the bay from the rocky ridge is a remarkable place consisting of a large flat sandy plain with some hills pushed into place by the glacier a long time ago. This site has become a popular landing site even for larger vessels due to its relatively easy access. Starting at the beach on Gravneset we have explored the possibility of creating a virtual experience with XR platforms of the area with its different views. An immersive experience can simulate and extend a real-life experience but not replace it. There are, to begin with, clear limitations such as the lack of wind, smell and the options of touch and shifting grades of cold and warm sensations as you move through the landscape, all normally related to embodied qualities of being on location in real life. However, XR platforms do allow us to explore the narratives and performative powers of transmedial storytelling, from VR headsets to a full-dome arena, challenging audiences’ perceptions, attitudes and understandings relating to climate change. By experimenting with transformations and transitions in place (from physical location to the virtual landscape) challenging presence and distance, time (past, present, future), realism (documentary, factual and hybrid), narrative structures (predetermined-on demand, linear–hypertext) and interactive modes (presenter-led, audience-initiated and collaborative).4 Initial test runs have given us an indication of experience responses from the virtual visitors to Gravneset. Even though we have yet to add many of the possible features for expansion and focus in the stories told, being able to explore and interact with the virtual 4 Private conversation with Professor Lena Pareto within our current research project and development.

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version of the sites offers not only an expanded visual opportunity but a unique virtual embedded experience creating a feeling of presence and being there. The virtual spaces, offering a realistic experience of often harsh and challenging but equally vulnerable and fragile landscapes, can confront existing Arctic imaginaries generating settings for new understandings of the north. To enhance participatory experiences even further, the full-dome experience offers the possibility of placing the 360° camera within the dome recording the live experience of interacting with the virtual platform creating another layer as a setting for exploring scientific imaginaries. One of the problems we faced when editing and preparing data from the fieldwork aimed at the full-dome experience was that the dome was not yet available. Simple things such as not knowing what the films would look like when projected, particularly from the audience’s point of view, and how we would be experienced—for example, our size in relation to the screen and audience perception. To solve this Gorki Glaser-Müller initiated the construction of a 3D model of the dome where we could project and do test runs of films allowing us to see how they would work when used. The company constructing the dome provided us with the architectural drawings we needed and a model was built by 3D modeller Tanja Taivula Välimaa. This is extremely valuable and adds another layer to the technological imaginaries at work within the project. In a somewhat strange development, we are now working within an imaginary 3D-generated theatre representing a space about to host an even more powerful imaginary world. We use an intermediate technological solution to imagine what our immersive virtual representations of Svalbard will appear like when projected in full-dome mode. The VR headsets give us the possibility, if a somewhat raw one, of experiencing and understanding the dome. It challenges us though, as we have to play with our capacity to imagine the final results and experience, particularly in relation to scale, as the dome theatre is the size of an IMAX theatre. That, however, is the essence of XR technology: a set of tools that enhance visualization and storytelling (Figs. 6.4 and 6.5). In July 2022 we got permission from Sysselmesteren to work from within the closed area on the graveyard hill on Gravneset. Particularly we wanted to use a 360° VR camera to repeat the views taken by Wilhelm Solheim in 1936. His work is a 360° panorama taken from the monument on the north side of the plateau on the hill. Solheim’s images are among the best sources we have from the 1930s clearly showing the glaciers in the views. We had similar snow conditions in the landscape as in 1936

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Fig. 6.4 Rephotography, 2 August 2022, Magdalenefjorden, Gravneset, from Wilhelm Solheim’s 1936 vantage point. Below: Solheim’s historic view (part of a 360° panorama) (Photograph by Author; Historic Photograph Courtesy of the National Library, Oslo)

with only patches of old snow and the larger snowfields connected to glaciers or old ice covering the ground in the mountains. When building time series and comparisons, these types of similar conditions are valuable. When Solheim arrived in 1936 he was part of the Norges Svalbard-og Ishavs-undersøkelsers5 expedition working its way from Krossfjorden to Raudfjorden (Orvin 1937). In this case we knew Solheim’s exact camera 5 Norges Svalbard-og Ishavs-undersøkelsers (NSIU) in 1948 became the Norwegian Polar Institute.

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Fig. 6.5 Visual Arena 2023, screen with the 3D model of the dome created by Tanja Taivula Välimaa (Photograph by Author)

position, his vantage point (Klett el al. 1984; Klett 2010). The vantage point then holds the viewpoint, the latter a conceptual position answering questions related to the choice of views captured. Mark Klett referred to viewpoints in his early 1980s introduction to the concept of rephotography, an extension of the scientific method of repeat photography (Klett 2010; Malde 1973). Viewpoints are the core of rephotography, as the set of imaginaries and cultural views held by the photographer influence the choice of vantage points. Solheim’s work offers a perfect setting for visualization of the process of climate change impacts on the glacial landscape of Svalbard (Fig. 6.6). A lithograph of Magdalenefjorden made in 1878 by Franz Wilhelm Schiertz is a similar expression of the conceptual approach to a viewpoint Klett described as the core of rephotography. Schiertz’s drawing of Gravneset was done as part of a scientific expedition documenting the

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Fig. 6.6 Comparative views 2022 and 1878. The colour lithograph by F. Larsen below is from a drawing by F. W. Schiertz, 1878 (Photograph by Author; Image of Lithograph Courtesy of National Library, Oslo)

area and the gloomy content of his image reveals layers of possible interpretations of that site based on historic imaginaries expanding scientific documentation. Today no open graves with human remains in battered coffins exist at locations such as Magdalenefjorden, Amsterdamøya or Danskøya. However, images such as Schiertz’s lithograph add a visual and

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imaginative layer when experiencing these sites today where the remains of old coffins remind us of the reality of these places. It triggers the stories of historic geopolitical northern places and their transformations from hunting grounds via intensive extraction of natural resources to national park areas. A transition over time that encapsulates traces of earlier imaginaries of Spitsbergen creating landscapes with layers of stories that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, became part of the package on most cruises for introducing visitors to Svalbard (Martinsson 2022). Places like Magdalenefjorden are today protected as important natural and cultural heritage sites. Per Kyrre Reymert and Thor Bjørn Arlov have argued that cultural heritage can be immaterial in the form of, for example, place names on maps, which, in an extension of their reasoning, can be used in discussions of images, photographs and stories tied to specific locations or views, as a basis for an argument that a particular viewpoint in the landscape should be protected and, where possible, preserved. Immaterial cultural heritage thus links the stories of geographical locations with holdings in archives, libraries and museums, that become important for a conservation strategy that includes the collected artefacts of institutions and their links to physical locations in the landscape (Reymert and Arlov 2001: 14–17; Martinsson 2021). Current technological developments and the creation of virtual platforms offer a unique opportunity for relating to such protected natural and cultural heritage sites. Through immersive transmedial storytelling via VR headsets or a full-dome arena experience we have arrived at tools offering transdisciplinary platforms for virtual remote research, visualization and analysis of data extending narrative powers in order to arrive at conclusions for future relationships with Arctic places. A powerful dimension of immersive technologies and visualization is the way they offer users the chance to test ideas and imaginative perceptions of places hard to reach. Virtual visualizations based on reality are essential in creating an understanding of a changing landscape. We can see the impacts of climate change in locations in Svalbard in relation to their history and possible progression for the future. Immersive technologies allow users to ‘visit’ specific sites and navigate through passages of time to make their own ‘observations’ of a climate in transition. Within this kind of interactive storytelling visitors and researchers alike are offered layers of site-specific

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knowledge, research data, guided tours and stories to explore. The fulldome XR-storytelling platform in Wisdome Gothenburg creates a unique space for the developments of both new scientific and Arctic imaginaries. When we arrived in Magdalenefjorden during the summer of 2022, our aim was to initiate work on creating an immersive experience of the fjord. Using a 360° high-resolution camera we wanted to extend previous visual documentation we had done in the area: to transform the unique collection of previous research outputs of visual material— 10 years of research—into a domain-specific, climate-change XR platform for public science communication and remote research. The XR platform utilizes the latest technology of extended reality and a full-dome theatre for live delivery in order to develop methods and models for participatory and collaborative events for the public audience and research communities. The full-dome theatre Wisdome Gothenburg affords previously unexplored possibilities of developing the design and composition so that narratives based on factual and fictitious transmedial material can be encountered as collective and interactive virtual experiences of a full 360° immersive, surrounding virtual landscape.6 This contemporary virtual space offers a new platform for virtual remote research as well as an advanced arena for storytelling aimed at a public audience challenging and creating imaginaries of the Arctic.

References Baffin, William (2010) ‘The second recorded voyage of William Baffin’. In: Clements R. Markham (ed.) The Voyages of William Baffin 1612–1622. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 38–79. Banerjee, Subhankar (2017) ‘Long environmentalism: after the listening session’. In: Salma Monani and Joni Adamson (eds), Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos. London: Routledge: 62–81. Beechey, Captain F. W. (1843) A Voyage of Discovery Towards the North Pole, Performed in His Majesty’s Ships Dorothea and Trent, Under the Command of Captain David Buchan, R.N.; 1818; to Which Is Added, a Summary of All the Early Attempts to Reach the Pacific by way of the Pole. London: Richard Bentley.

6 The concept, research methodologies and visualization tools have been developed in close collaboration with Professor in Pedagogics Lena Pareto at the Universeum and Department of Education, Communication and Learning, University of Gothenburg.

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Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin (2000) Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Broke, Captain P. (1807) A Survey of Magdalena Bay: Spitzbergen [map]. Taunton: Hydrographic Office Archives, British Admiralty. Conway, William Martin (1906) No Man’s Land: A History of Spitsbergen from Its Discovery in 1596 to the Beginning of the Scientific Exploration of the Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fotherby, Robert (1613) ‘Narrative of a voyage to Spitzbergen in the year 1613, at the charge of the Fellowship of English Merchants for the Discovery of New Trades; commonly called The Muscovy Company: with a description of the country, and the operations of the whale-fishery’. In: Archæologica Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. IV Boston 1860. Transcribed and edited by Samuel F. Haven. Harvard University Library. Fotherby, Robert (1625) ‘A voyage of discoverie to Greenland, &c. anno 1614’. In: Purchas, S. (ed.) Hakluytus posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes: Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others, vol. XIV. London: Hakluyt Society: 61–81. 1906 reprint [pdf] (https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006665849 [accessed 4 July 2019]). Gerritsz, Hessel (1872) ‘Histoire du pays nommé Spitzberghe 1613’. In: W. Martin Conway (ed.) Early Dutch and English Voyages to Spitsbergen in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by B.H. Soulsby. London: Hakluyt Society, 1967 reprint. Helgesen, Leif Magne, Kim Holmén and Ole Arve Misund (eds) (2015) The Ice Is Melting: Ethics in the Arctic. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Klett, Mark (2010) ‘Three methods of presenting repeat photographs’. In: Robert H. Webb, Diane E. Boyer and Raymond M. Turner (eds) Repeat Photography: Methods and Applications in the Natural Sciences. Washington, DC: Island Press: 32–45. Klett, Mark, Ellen Manchester, JoAnn Verburg, Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus (1984) Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Larsen, John Nymand, Oleg A. Anisimov et al. (2014) ‘Polar regions’. In: Barros, Vincent R., Christopher B. Field, David John Dokken, Michael D. Mastrandrea, Katherine J. Mach et al., (eds) Climate change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Part B: Regional Aspects: Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1567– 1612 [pdf] (https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGIIAR5PartB_FINAL.pdf [accessed 4 July 2019]).

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Liljequist, Gösta H. (1993) High Latitudes: A History of Swedish Polar Travels and Research. Stockholm: Swedish Polar Research Secretariat: Streiffert Förlag. Malde, Harold E. (1973) ‘Geologic benchmarks by terrestrial photography’. United States Geological Survey Journal of Research 1 (2): 83–96 [pdf] (https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70160634 [accessed 4 July 2019]). Martens, Friedrich (1694) ‘Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland’ In: Narborough, John, Jasmen Tasman, John Wood and Frederick Marten (eds) An Account of Several Late Voyages & Discoveries to the South and North. Towards the Streights of Magelan, the South Seas, the Vast Tracts of Land beyond Hollandia Nova, &c. Also Towards Nova Zembla, Greenland or Spitsberg, Groynland or Engrondland, &c. London: Royal Society (no pages given). Martinsson, Tyrone (2021) ‘Repeat photography and archives: a humanitiesbased dialogue with the history of ice in Svalbard’. In: Spencer Acadia and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad (eds), Library and Information Studies for Arctic Social Sciences and Humanities. New York: Routledge: 199–226. Martinsson, Tyrone (2022) ‘Extended ways of experiencing climate change. From photography to virtual reality in Svalbard’. In Eva Maria Jernsand, Maria Persson and Erik Lundberg (eds), Tourism, Knowledge and Learning. London: Routledge: 77–91. Orvin, Anders K. (1937) Norges Svalbard og Ishavs Undersøkelsers Ekspedisjoner Til Øst-Grønland Og Svalbard i Aret 1936. Norges Svalbard- og Ishavsundersøkelser MeddeIeIse nr. 37. Særtrykk av Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift, Bind VI, Hefte 7. Reymert, Per Kyrre and Thor Bjørn Arlov (2001) Svalbard: en Ferd i Fortidens Farvann. Trondheim: Tapir. Steffen, Will, Katherine Richardson, Johan Rockström, Ingo Fetzer, Elena M. Bennett … Sverker Sörlin (2015) ‘Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet’. Science 347 (6223) (10.1126/ science.1259855). Voosen, Paul (2021). ‘ The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world’. Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science (https://www.science.org/content/article/arctic-warming-fourtimes-faster-rest-world [accessed 3 May 2023]). Wieder, Frederik Caspar (ed.) (1919) The Dutch Discovery and Mapping of Spitsbergen (1596–1829). Amsterdam: Royal Dutch Geographic Society.

CHAPTER 7

Arctic Imaginaries and Their Entangled Relationship(s) with Artistic Production on Svalbard Dina Brode-Roger and Eva la Cour

Introduction The Arctic conjures up many images for people. In today’s conjuncture with a focus on climate change, the Arctic is ever more present in Western discourse as the place where changes are happening the fastest. Although other images are also presented, the image of a lone polar bear on a small piece of drifting sea ice is a common, often emotionally charged, image that is used as an ‘icon of climate change’ (Tollman 2014: 249). Against this backdrop, we share an interest in and concern with different image and meaning-making processes focusing on Svalbard. We have both been involved in such processes—in Longyearbyen and/or back in our home bases—but in different ways, formed as we each are by

D. Brode-Roger (B) KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] E. la Cour University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_7

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different social positionalities and situated experiences. And yet we agree with the principle that knowledge production can only happen within our situated relation(s) to our surroundings, including the imaginaries we inhabit, consciously or unconsciously. This implies a fundamental concern with process, materiality and place, which further opens a political dimension regarding how the environment, and imaginaries of and in those environments, are both situating and situated. In seeking to unfold this shared concern in relation to how images of Svalbard are produced—by whom, where and how they function as images—we wish to foster critical reflections on the possible (and impossible) role of artistic practice in, of and in relation to a place like Svalbard. With a largely anecdotal and conversational approach, we draw on our respective Svalbard experiences, as well as from conversations with artist colleagues who consider how Svalbard imaginaries entangle with artistic image production. We understand imaginaries to be forceful in the creation, maintenance and decline of images and imaginations (Davoudi and Machen 2022) while at the same time being effects of the circulation and perception of images. Imaginaries, then, are collective (not individual) and co-constitutive of both discursive and material relations (ibid.; Salazar 2012). We hope that showing our situated perspectives in this dialogue format will highlight how imaginaries frame and shape artistic image-making practices, while at the same time, these practices have a shaping and making function for imaginaries. Consequently, this chapter is written from within our practice, not outside it. By using the ‘slow’ approach of letter-writing, we introduce a flow of thought that remains open to the ‘movement and mobility at the heart of thinking’ (Braidotti 2011: 1), while pointing to the complexity of how imaginaries entangle with artists’ role in imaginaries of Svalbard.

Introducing Ourselves and Setting the Scene We come from different disciplinary traditions, have different professional experience and training and have different experiences of Svalbard. Dina has lived full time in Longyearbyen for the past 3 years, working on her Ph.D. in cultural studies. Her focus has been on identity of place through a mix of traditional ethnographic methods on the one hand, and a daily practice of photography on the other. Dina uses photography as a visual method of inquiry. As part of her practice, she shares groupings of photos in a daily mood board on social media as well as pictures of embodied

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placement in her stories and everyday images on TikTok. In 2022, she was an artist resident in Ny-Ålesund and received the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize in Visual Sociology for her work on Skansbukta, Svalbard. Eva has been going back and forth to Svalbard since 2010, and although her many returns have provided her with in-depth relations, these are different to what Dina has experienced living in Svalbard full time. Trained as a visual artist, Eva initially came as an artist resident. However, after that first visit she soon returned to undertake fieldwork as a taxi driver, on the basis of which she produced a film and wrote a thesis in media and visual anthropology. Since then, field trips and friendships have made her not only keep coming back but also formed a prism through which she continues to explore geo-aesthetical relations artistically. The Arctic’s allure is such that hundreds of artists come every year. Being one of the most easily accessible places in the High Arctic, with an array of hotels and tourist packages, Longyearbyen is an attractive destination. For artists looking for a longer immersion, there are several residency programmes on the island (three in Longyearbyen and one in Ny-Ålesund) as well as specialized boat trips. These residencies cater to a wide range of participants, each having its own structure and mandate. The state-sponsored Norwegian residency centre, Artica, welcomes a variety of artists from many disciplines. However, each resident must be nominated by one of Artica’s key partners: Norwegian Pen, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) and The Queen Sonja Print Award. Each year, Artica welcomes approximately 10– 13 artists, all of them funded for their stay. In addition, in order to foster exchange and to bring the resident artists into the local community, Artica hosts a First Friday Creative Coffee open to all creatives currently in town. The Spitsbergen Kunstnersenter, which was part of Gallery Svalbard until December 2021, is currently run by Elizabeth Bourne, a local artist and photographer herself. The residency programme accommodates 30–40 residents per year. The Kunstnersenter also houses the arts and crafts centre, with studios rented to local artists. There is also a residency programme for performance artists, Arctic Action, run by Stein Henningsen, a long-term local who is also a performing artist. The performance artists do not come at specific times but rather whenever a project is supported/funded. They have, however, been regular over the years. Another regular venue for artists is the Arctic Circle Art & Science Expedition (a kind of residency programme), which brought in its first group

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of participants in 2009 to travel around the northwest quarter of Svalbard. This residency currently has 25–30 participants several times a year and is assisted by another local artist, Sarah Gerats. In addition, many amateur or professional photographers come on their own or as part of an organized photo expedition. Some local artists and photographers, such as Olaf Storø, make their living through their art, while others work day jobs on the side. In addition, there are creative professionals such as Jason Roberts, with his film production crew and polar logistics company, PolarX. They have worked for the BBC, Disney and the TV series Fortitude discussed in Dina BrodeRoger’s solo chapter in this collection. And, of course, there are all the Instagram-led images posted by everyone with any kind of camera or phone on various social media sites, a manifestation of the ‘experiential status’ (Zuev and Bratchford 2021: 145) of having been to the Arctic. In terms of cultural institutions in Longyearbyen, there is a stateowned gallery called Nordover (ex-Gallery Svalbard) that houses a large collection of Kåre Tveter’s paintings. There is a cultural centre (Kulturhuset) as well as a photo club, a film club, and people involved in various forms of performance art (theatre, dance, music and singing). There are two museums, one more general (the state-funded Svalbard Museum) and one specialized (the privately owned North Pole Museum). There are numerous festivals and a range of cultural activities from Oktoberfest to Polar Jazz to chamber music to a literature festival and so on. There are also new and emerging cultural arenas such as FOSSIL, the Makerspace and various shared workshop spaces in the planning. The number of artists and cultural activities may at first seem surprising for a town of 2,400 people located so far north, but the Norwegian state has actively supported culture with the aim of making Longyearbyen a more ‘normal’ Norwegian town. However, given the archipelago’s special territorial status, and the Norwegian state’s understanding of what that means (discussed below), Longyearbyen is not a normal Norwegian town (Brode-Roger 2023). With climate change increasing the interest of various states in what will happen in the Arctic, Longyearbyen is becoming a centre of Arctic geopolitics. In the context of all this, this chapter engages with experiences and thoughts on artists’ visual productions and artistic practices on Svalbard, and the infrastructures and imaginaries that support and shape them. And, conversely, on the role of the artist’s imagery in the making of imaginaries—on Svalbard or elsewhere. Drawing from our own professional

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training and practice, we seek to reflect this constant interplay as also an interplay between doing and thinking, reading, writing and reflecting. Hence this chapter is not structured in sections such as literature review, methodologies, theories and results. Rather, what follows was written as a correspondence situating our different perspectives, connecting with recent attempts at circumnavigating how the conventional structure of academic writing often disrupts, separates and stages that is actually going on.

Discussion Dear Dina, I am writing to you from my apartment in rainy Copenhagen, realizing that the small student group of German painters that I met with in Kassel earlier this year are on their way to Svalbard. I remember giving them your email, but I am not sure if they ever contacted you. I imagine them coming out of the airport overwhelmed by the view towards Isfjorden, and it strikes me how little they know about Svalbard. They are carrying out a long-term artistic research project that explores the impossibility of depicting the Arctic, while speculating on Arctic image politics. At least, the tentative title of their project is No image of the Arctic—the image as thesis? which I understand to signal how the historical role of the artist in lands distant from the European metropoles, is closely linked to the attempts of science to visually represent its findings, or to the use of representational practices (painting, drawing, etc.) as a tool in science (Ingold 2021). I am thinking of the artist painter undertaking long-term fieldwork, and explicitly of the La Recherche Expedition (1832–1834) and its Atlas Pittoresque that contains numerous lithographic depictions of Northern Norway and Svalbard. I remember seeing and being fascinated by them as examples of how epistemic conventions (of knowledge) and crafts (of depiction) have promoted the very idea of the Arctic landscape and its phenomena as pictorial and fixed (Cosgrove and Daniels 1989). This was at Gallery Svalbard during my first visit to Longyearbyen in 2010, when I participated in the Arctic Circle residency. With the invention of photography, the role of the artist painter in science of course changed. Not only because the camera was regarded as scientifically more accurate and objective, but also because it allowed photographs to function sequentially—as in actual films, but also to document change.

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I am explicitly thinking of environmental rephotography’s preoccupation with how Arctic landscapes are changing because of global warming, such as described in Tyrone Martinsson’s chapter in this collection. Anyway, sitting down to begin this correspondence on the agency of artists’ imagery in relation to Svalbard imaginaries, immediately made me meditate on the arrival of the German student group of painters, and how the legacy of the artist’s role in imagining the Arctic seems precisely reflected in the students’ project. I mean, the other part of their tentative title—‘the image as thesis?’—precisely points to how the very idea of the image is entangled with representational ideas of knowledge production. The colonial history of visual production in the Global West is interesting to me because it raises the question about what the value of the painter’s effort is in contemporary knowledge production, and how it is claimed. At least, it is interesting to think about artists’ role as image makers in the present compared to that of natural scientists, whose imagination seems to be more automatically credited with agency. I mean, how, when and where does the artist’s imagery have impact—and to what effect? Dear Eva, Greetings from a windy Longyearbyen! Beautiful delicate colours grace the skyline in the crisp air of fall here. So far, I have not heard from them. But I was contacted by a photographer recently. They were very enthusiastic, with a clear image of what this place is, shaped by a western Arctic imaginary, and how they would be the one to bring the face of the Svalbard local back to Oslo. Their work was so colonial in its approach, such a clear expression of the euro-modern mindframe in which they projected themselves as the heroes who would explain our local stories to the Norwegian parliament. As is all too often the case, they didn’t realize how offensive their approach was. So yes, how we imagine this place certainly impacts how we do our work and how we interact with others. What is interesting up here is that Longyearbyen is a settler community. And even more than that, it is an inherently mobile place (Viken 2008) with up to 20% of the population shifting out every year. Very few people grow up here, and even fewer spend their whole lives here. There is no deeply rooted, local understanding of what this place is that covers the majority of the population at any given time. Because the image of what this place is, of what the Arctic is, is so strong, most people arrive with expectations of what they will see and what they will experience. They expect ice and polar bears and

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many expect to be challenged physically. Few expect to have a gourmet meal or to be able to get a café latte or to buy vegan cheese at the local supermarket. The common Western imaginary of the Arctic is one that is barren and without people, harsh and unforgiving. Longyearbyen (the world’s northernmost town) is, however, a town-sized city with strawberries available year-round and a wide range of festivals and events to choose from. A recent photo on Instagram showed a tourist at the edge of town, facing the mountain known as Hiorthfjellet, with the caption ‘The harsh Arctic, could you survive it?’ The viewer can’t see that just a hundred metres away is a university centre and, a little further up the road, a coffee shop that uses Oatly… but for those of us who live here, or have been here, we know that. So, what is this image saying, really? It isn’t showing the Longyearbyen we know. Instead, it shows what the person taking the picture came to see, or perhaps came to feel (the challenge of pushing oneself in a harsh climate) or came to show. Either way, it was the production of an image in accordance with their imaginary. Dear Dina, I get the picture! And yet, doesn’t passionate enthusiasm always come with the risk of ‘getting it wrong’? I am reminded of my encounter with the chief curator of the prestigious international art exhibition, documenta 13, in Longyearbyen in 2012, and of being stunned by how high levels of reflectivity and criticality do not exclude the most basic questions and imposed assumptions. That said, I am sure that I have asked awkwardly basic questions too, and in several given situations. I think there is an interesting balance between allowing oneself to be seduced—to desire some sort of passionate curiosity towards a place—and handling the risk of being awkwardly naive. But at stake, then, is the willingness (or not) to ask oneself: Why this passion? How has it come about? What does it do? And for/to whom? Another thing that your anecdote addresses is how photographic practices too often act to frame a limited scene as ‘the landscape’ and, in doing so, too often fix an object–subject relationship. The viewer is located outside of the frame, so to speak: outside of the relationship being depicted. I come to think of the video piece No Man’s Land (2012–2013) by Helene Sommer. It is a great associatively driven account of Svalbard’s visual culture—at once a story about Svalbard and a filmic journey

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of preconceived images, myths, histories and first-hand experiences, comprising a mix of Summer’s own material with a range of sampled material from movies, documentaries, books and encyclopaedias. And what is evoked, seems precisely to be an inconsistency and discrepancy between seeing and knowing. Hm. I am also reminded of the Winter Event—Antifreeze (2009) by Katja Aglert. In this video piece, set somewhere on the shore of northwest Svalbard, Aglert attempts to demonstrate the melting of a piece of ice in her hand but is constantly disrupted by different things—technical, social, weather-related (and the ice melting performance has to be repeated). I thought of this video piece because it reveals in a simple manner the fundamental entanglement of temporal phenomena with geography. Of course, many artists, myself included, have worked with this invisible but omnipresent motif—ever since the land art and performance art practices of the 1960s, artists have attempted to include the materiality of artwork’s spatial and temporal contexts, and thereby to question the representational authority and function often ascribed to ‘the image’. This is why these practices are so important for contemporary art. They advocate an idea of the image as a situation, and that the landscape is both relational and contingent (and far from fixed). What is important here, is how the idea of the image as something that ‘happens’ brings up interesting questions with regard to the temporalities of imaginaries and their entanglement with our changing perceptibilities. Dear Eva, Materiality is certainly an important aspect of being here—or, really, of being anywhere. But we so often dismiss materiality in favour of reflections on it, or about it. We think of photos but not the devices that made them or the physicality of their being (here I am thinking of the very compelling work done in contemporary archaeology by Bjørnar Olsen, Tora Petursdottir and others). Or, perhaps even worse, we ascribe anthropomorphic reactions to them, making matter vibrant instead of accepting and thinking of ‘things qua things’ (Olsen 2013) and acknowledging an agentic materiality that is not ‘alive’. I guess that’s why I like focusing on everyday experiences. On the grounded reality of what is here—and using simple words to express it. Your description of the video Winter Event—Antifreeze, with the problem of ice melting and needing to restart the performance, triggered another thought for me. Often, people come up here and exclaim that

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they ‘are watching the ice melt’ or ‘the ice is melting in front of my eyes’—and although, yes, it is indeed melting, sometimes the melt they are seeing is part of a seasonal rhythm. The actual impact of that melt can only be seen as part of a temporal sequence, not an instantaneous, one-off event. And one which they either have not been here long enough to see for themselves (so they are reacting to the idea of it that they have heard about) or that they are mistaking a specific moment for a manifestation of the longer-term, larger-scale, impact. All glaciers melt in summer, and all sea-ending glaciers will surge and calve. But if you don’t know this, or only have the image of melting ice and dying glaciers that is so often portrayed on social media, how can you know which part is ‘normal’ and which part is due to climate impacts? The produced image we have experienced (elsewhere, before coming here) that we then hold in our memory while we are here, colours what we see and how we think of it. It has just occurred to me that this connects to ideas of Svalbard as a ‘terra nullius’, a no man’s land that is free for everyone to come to—and a place where they are free to behave however they like. Which might explain why some think of Longyearbyen as a ‘cowboy-town’. Which is an intriguing thought since I’ve often thought of the ‘cowboy-town’ comment as linked to Longyearbyen’s company town legacy (see Ulrich Schildberg’s chapter in this collection). But perhaps the imaginary of an open, empty space also plays into that image? Speaking of that empty (and often ‘pure, pristine’) space, I find it interesting that few people are aware of how many places in the circumpolar region were founded in order to extract coal. A substance we (as members of our euro-modern society) see as dirty and (often) obsolete. Few see the many and varied ways that the things we interact with on a daily basis have been touched by coal, whether it’s our press pot for coffee or our computers or our desire to shift to greener energy via windmills and solar panels. We don’t speak of the amount of coal needed to build our future green solutions even though one windmill needs 170 tons of coking coal to produce the steel needed for its construction. Instead, we speak of melting ice and starving polar bears thus deflecting the self-reflection we, in our euro-modern society, must do. An excellent book on our society’s development on the back of coal is Barbara Freese’s book Coal: A Human History (2006). Have you read it?

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Dear Dina, I haven’t read Barbara Freese, but I am familiar with and formed by the ecocritical and materialist perspective you are stressing. And I think it is worth trying to connect it to the question of temporality and how Svalbard imaginaries change, which brings me back to the question of their force—in producing, for example, the desires of the Arctic. I recall being rather aware of the risk of romanticizing emptiness when I first came to Svalbard. And yet I realize that this also was a defence mechanism: I kept my desire of travelling to Svalbard at a safe distance, by pursuing it as a critical stance. In fact, this is something I have been thinking about lately: how to engage with Svalbard as a place for narratives and fictions that—however constructed and discrepant—potentially expand the imaginable? I have explicitly thought a lot about the Norwegian government’s recent decision to pass a new law regarding local voting rights in Longyearbyen. Until recently, the right to vote was obtained after three years of residency in Longyearbyen. Considering the settlement’s transient and cosmopolitan composition, this was fundamental to its social fabric. Now, local voting rights have been linked to time spent on mainland Norway instead. This has triggered difficult emotions in me—of anger and sadness and I realize that they connect with the fact that the imaginary of Svalbard as a geopolitical utopia that I have been working with in my artistic practice is fundamentally challenged. Now, I am aware that the idea of Longyearbyen as a place where anyone can come from anywhere in the world and have a say is an imagined one. The idea of Svalbard as a freely accessible and open place is both naive and false. And yet, this is a narrative with interesting effects as far as it works to question how ideas of communality are imagined all the way through (Anderson 2016). Put differently: can narrating Svalbard as a place which is different from a ‘standard version’ of a national state territory (see Christoph Humrich’s chapter in this collection for more about this), hold a potential to produce reimaginations of the Arctic? And this even if most people on Svalbard are, in fact, white, healthy, European and well-off? Well, with the new law on voting rights this potential seems punctured … I don’t know. Basically, the new voting law discloses Svalbard to be more a condition than a bounded place (Heuer 2019). What is the agency in portraying Svalbard as an extraordinary place? And how to avoid exteriorizing exceptionality; imaginaries of an Arctic void? How to work against the artist’s historical

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role in seeking the authentic? Or, how to practise from within an awareness of the degree to which imaginaries of Svalbard are subject to, say, world-integrated capitalism (Guattari 2014)? Dear Eva, So, this seems like a confrontation between an imaginary projected onto Svalbard as a free place and the ‘reality’ of Svalbard (controlled by the Norwegian state). Living here and speaking with people here, there is an arc of understanding that comes over time. Part of it has to do with people becoming aware of the many and varied ways the Svalbard Treaty makes it unique and unlike a ‘normal’ Norwegian (or any other) town. In speaking with Lotte, the Director of Artica, tonight at an art event, she said one of the things she enjoys most about working with the residents is to see how their perceptions evolve over the period of their stay. They come with an idea of what this place is and then are confronted with the many ways being here doesn’t correspond to that image. For many, whether the vote is allowed or not won’t change their image production: many artists who come here don’t live here and neither know about the treaty nor how local laws are, or are not, the same as on the mainland. For those based here, they can continue to live here and do their art, if they so choose, they just can’t vote anymore. The new law is shocking in a place run by a democratic state but it doesn’t prohibit non-Norwegians from staying here. In an article I wrote recently, I argue that Longyearbyen has never been a normal town and Norway’s current interpretation of how to manage Svalbard’s special territorial status means that it won’t be (Brode-Roger 2023). For many who come to Longyearbyen, the real problem is that the town projects a certain normalcy (cafés, a library, an art gallery, etc.) but when no one, not even the Norwegians, can truly settle down here in a ‘forever’ home (there is less than 15% private ownership in Longyearbyen and apartments are almost always directly connected to a job) it creates alterities in understanding. The town is meant to be ‘a family town but not a lifelong town’ an oxymoron in and of itself, really. Of course, people are confused, how could they not be? Dear Dina, Yes. I am aware of speaking about an idealization of Svalbard from ‘the outside’. Also, I totally agree that any idealization of Svalbard as some kind of ‘free’ place is problematic. However, precisely for this reason I have, over the years, enjoyed how working with Svalbard as image, as site,

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as geopolitical infrastructure allows speculations upon different modes of image formation. To give an example: for my performative video piece Martin’s Eye, I asked an actor to read a utopian manifesto, imagining Svalbard as a ‘post-national zone and future testing ground for local, self-sufficient, experimental communities consistent with eco-cosmopolitan notions of planetary sustainable citizenship’ (the Arctic Dwelling Project). The manifesto was read aloud as if the actor was speaking to an assembly of researchers gathered in a theatre space. The intention was to stage the role of the expert, at once embodying the conference presenter and serving as an explanatory male voiceover. As such, the actor was directed to stand in front of the cinema screen by a lecture desk while a sequence of audiovisual recordings, shot during my participation in a boat expedition with Swedish scientists in 2016, was projected behind him. There was no audience in the space. Only two musicians, two cameramen and an editing station with two editors—all responding to the actor’s speech as much as to each other’s operations, the screen and the space. The outcome was a visual documentation montage, composed of audio-visual recordings shot in the cinema space, during the expedition and with the actor’s voice enacting a voiceover. So, yes, there are all kinds of Svalbard-makings happening far from the archipelago’s bio-physical realities (and films play a crucial role in these). But, as you say, many people coming to Svalbard don’t have the knowledge basis to experience it and hence reflect upon it. Well, in fact I guess most artists coming to Svalbard do know about the Treaty. But (how) does it impact their image production? Or, again, on what grounds do I speak of the new voting law (as Svalbard-making) rupturing my imaginative possibilities? I remember being in Svalbard’s Russian settlement, Pyramiden, in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea. Pyramiden was being operated by a mix of Russians and Ukrainians, but nobody talked about it. And yet the grass in the central square, once imported from Ukraine to soften the image of the Soviet-promoted settlement, was suddenly charged with a layer of tension as were my images of the grass. I haven’t been back since the invasion of Ukraine and the outbreak of actual war. But I know that this time it manifests on Svalbard, both with regard to interaction and access on the ground. This is what I hear from both Russian and Norwegian colleagues and something I read in Svalbardposten recently. Yes, I

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know I am opening a huge topic. But I find that you are addressing something important and fundamental to the entanglement of image-making and imaginaries, and their affective role in ongoing processes of knowing. How does the geopolitics of the war in Ukraine condition one’s ability to know Svalbard? That is to say: how to consider the effect of the location of an image on ideas and practices and how/which imaginaries come about? Again, I am speculating about tension, contradictions and disjunctures so as to indicate gaps for the negotiation and navigation of imaginaries. Dear Eva, Those are all good questions bringing with them a myriad things to think through! Working with photography, I realize that every photo is framed. In some cases, the framing is conscious, intended; in others, it is not. And, even when intended, a part of the framing is based on values and situatedness that are so integrated in the person taking the photo that they can’t see the many ways it infuses their framing. Everything we produce (in all forms) is framed by the lens(es) we have. Even something as simple as taking a pic with our phones is impacted by the device we hold in our hands and the technology it is using. I noticed a huge difference when I changed from my LG6 to my SG21 Ultra. There were pics I hadn’t been taking that suddenly I could take (certain types of landscape shot, for example). The mediated experience of the new phone changed what I was framing and how I was framing it. I just hadn’t been aware of it before. So how does the ‘framing’ of the Russian settlements play out? There are so many layers, as you mention. The ‘greening’ of Pyramiden being just one … but an interesting one. Did you know there was also a ‘greening’ of Longyearbyen? Done before all the concerns over the environment and protecting it, soil and grass were brought up here to make Longyearbyen ‘greener’ with no regard to the importation of invasive species. I have to admit when I first heard of the ‘greening of Longyearbyen’, which was in the 80s or thereabouts, I understood it as we use the term today and felt they had been very forward-thinking … until I realized it was literally a greening—with grass—not a greening in terms of sustainable or green energy. Which also shows how images and words get linked to ideas: ‘greening’ for me now means something it did not use to mean. Which brings me back to the question of how do we see what we see? Everything is framed by our position, our understanding(s) and our embodied situation. What is real, which facet is imagined, portrayed,

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perceived or not seen? In this context, I think it is also interesting to note a few specific artists I have encountered, because of their work on their own inner landscapes. One, a videographer, portrays their inner landscape through depicting Svalbard’s landscape. The other, a Norwegian bipolar artist, portrays their moods and questionings in their art, inspired by being up here/in the Arctic. These artists’ understanding of Longyearbyen, and indeed their reasons for being here, are quite different from my own. They are portraying something other than what most of us are portraying. Is it imaginary (because it is an inner landscape)? Is it real (even if no one else can see it)? Is what I see more ‘real’ than what they see or experience? Obviously not … and yet I can’t see their reality. We might be standing in the same place but we are seeing something different. And isn’t that true for all of us, always? Our perspectives shift like a figure on strings being pulled in different directions (Haraway 2016). But it is very hard to see our own framing especially when, as with the war in Ukraine, the way it is portrayed is different depending on the news source. From what I have encountered, the Russians and Ukrainians in Longyearbyen have a certain view of the war while those in Barentsburg have another. The framing in Longyearbyen is not the same as in Barentsburg. Dear Dina, Thank you for sharing all these reflections on encounters on the ground. A concern that I keep returning to is how imaginaries are conditioned, and how processes of knowing Svalbard hinge on social prerequisites— technology, but also all kinds of sensory details. This is why I love sound—which brings me back to the Arctic Circle residency in 2010: I had decided to limit myself and NOT bring a camera, but only a sound recorder and notebook. This quickly made it clear how, with a camera, one can turn one’s back on entire groups of people, whereas with a sound recorder one cannot. The sound of Gore-Tex pants constantly transgressed my orientation. My embodied experience of ‘doing’ film, then, impacts how I have come to consider Svalbard as a beautiful, yet very unreliable reality. I basically understand ‘reality’ as a temporal model, a temporal framework or a theme in depictions. This, however, emphasizes the realness of any image, as a productive and co-creative unit in the formation of a collective perception of a place like Svalbard (something discussed in the chapter by

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you and Samantha Saville). I am thinking of how Svalbard re-emerges at the level of my senses, every time I remember, retell, and resituate it as a site of inquiry. Or with the idea of ‘arresting images’ (Stewart 2003) in mind, when, at the level of my nervous system, presentations of Svalbard are entangled with temporalities of producing and living it (la Cour 2022). For me the question, really, is how to show ‘more’ than a nice image? This resonates with my preoccupation with mediation, when understood as a process of differentiation (rather than of separate entities coming into dialogue or dialectic interaction [Zhang and Doering 2021]), that shapes perceptive capabilities by and through material aspects of the imaginary (Davoudi and Machen 2022). Even when certain concrete images and circulating motifs become a reference point in perceptions of Svalbard, I am interested in how a fundamental lack in the representational discourse offers the possibility for affective knowledges to play a role. And I like to think that artistic practices explore such a gap of sorts, and thereby potentially instigate processes of ‘knowing differently’ in a wider and communal sense. Hm, I realize that this, in fact, is not unlike how we attempt to allow this correspondence, understood as a collaborative effort to affect our individual writings. The aim, I suppose, is precisely a different kind of image formation … an affective situation. Methodology as an affective force? Dear Eva, Absolutely. The way we work, whether the way we are writing now or the way we take or, should we say, make (Price 2015) photos, impacts the outcome and our understanding(s). As does the way we experience it in a specific time and place. And perhaps this kind of approach, in which the work, the exploration and analysis, happens as we produce (and therefore our practice and our production are undeniably entangled) is a way of disrupting things from within. I also find it interesting that here we are chatting about images and yet showing none. This too is interesting. Coming back to mediation: everything is mediated, isn’t it? For example, my Longyearbyen-specific practices, which range from poetic documentary to mood boarding to embodied placement, are all facets of this place as I see or experience them here on a daily basis. Of course, all photos only show one part of what is here and at times portray it in a way which skews the ‘reality’ (whatever that is). No photo is a true

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image (or representation) of this place, and every photo is a facet of it as seen through the photographer’s situated framing and the device they are using. This is true whether the person lives in Longyearbyen or comes for a short time. No framing (of an image, a theory or a result) is ever innocent, ever without a position. It is always a reflection of the person taking the photo or making the image or conducting the research. One of Norway’s most famous Arctic painters, Kåre Tveter, is someone who painted when not here. According to the Kåre Tveter foundation’s website, ‘Han verken malte, fotograferte eller tok skisser mens han var på Svalbard. Han samlet i stedet sine inntrykk og hentet disse fram når han kom hjem til sitt atelier’. So what then are the images he produced? They weren’t painted here, nor did he work from photographs taken while here. Instead, he absorbed impressions and worked with them once he was back in his own studio. For me, this is interesting. Here we have a ‘Svalbard painter’ who neither lived here nor painted here, yet he painted this place in a way that resonates for many Norwegians. His images perform the imagined idea of what Svalbard is. In fact, they do it so well that a collection of his paintings is on permanent exhibition here in Longyearbyen. For me, this situation brings up questions about what an image is of, what it shows and what it represents. And isn’t that what we are talking about here? Dear Dina, What you write about Kåre Tveter makes me want to go back to the idea of the fieldworking artist and researcher alike—the idea of going somewhere, to a field, and going back home to then work on the data, to conduct the analysis. There seems to be an interesting connection between how Svalbard—as ‘the Arctic’—has historically been constituted as an aesthetic object (Vola 2022) and ideas of fieldwork in both art and science historically. What I have in mind is how the crucial issue in relation to fieldwork is not simply the separation of space but the time axis between being ‘in the field’ and ‘back home’. The grand modern narratives of progress, development and globalization in a geography of fixed Euro-centric spatio-temporal ideas of hierarchical placement in a linear developmental relation are deeply problematic (connected as they are to the powerful spatial centre–periphery model and the juxtaposition of nature and civilization). But what does insisting that space is always in process entail for image-making practices? What does it entail to practise temporalities

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of fieldwork as ‘the possibility of a multiplicity of simultaneous paths’ (Massey 2005: 12)? I think the term mediation helps me to stay with these sorts of questions. More specifically: how can I work slowly in a place so mobile and rapidly changing as Longyearbyen? How can I work from within temporalities of indeterminacy and change during concrete field trips, residencies and travel experiences—fused with material encounters and circumstances. As I write this, I am thinking of a white-out during my last fieldwork experience with a group of Arctic Nature Guides, which required a complete change of plans, which, in turn, was what precisely led me to reflect on the temporal communalities with place, events, stories and people that emerge in relation to passing but engulfing weather phenomena. But how do I work through/from within these temporalities, say, ‘after the fact’ (with documentation, material and affective knowledges back home in the studio, for example)? One of the important issues that all these addresses is the risk of ‘extractivism’ of Arctic imagery. Despite all kinds of critical processoriented approaches, the artist’s agency in the (re)production and circulation of Svalbard imaginaries—along with the climate crisis—seems deep in contemporary capitalism’s contradiction (Dawson 2018). I am opening up an additional dimension of something we have already touched upon: the circulation and perception of artist’s imagery, and how these are also crucial in relation to a political/ideological dimension of the imaginary. Just like with everything else, artists’ economic profitization and property rights often trump the environmental and social crisis… even if artists are often used to signal the progressive opposite. Not least when it comes to artists’ imagery of/on/in relation to Svalbard. Dear Eva, Extractivism, of an image or of a resource, is certainly a hallmark of our euro-modern culture (Grossberg 2010). You bring up Doreen Massey’s work: I particularly like how she discusses the impact of how we conceive of space on how we then behave in and with it. This is true for explorers, artists, residents and tourists alike. How we perceive and understand the world directly impacts how we frame things. In many ways, my Svalbard (which makes me think of the #mittsvalbard hashtag), my images of this place, are about the intensity of being here. This intensity is intrinsically grounded here. In my photographic practice I work with images and image-making as a method of inquiry. The work is process-driven: as I take images and experience this place

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over time, my eye learns to see different things. I then reflect on the images I have taken, analysing them at the end of each day in my visual field notes. What was I seeing? Why did I stop there, at that moment, looking at that angle, at that grouping, that particular material dialogue (between built and natural environment, for example)? Is there a feeling or a theme that comes through? I need to take the time, after taking the pictures, to sit down with them and work with them, to see them as a whole, or as part of a dialogue, in order to start unpacking why I was taking them or to learn to read them. Sometimes it is in surprising juxtapositions that I learn something. Sometimes it is just reflecting on what I am seeing—or what I didn’t put in the frame when taking the pic. Because of the way I work, I feel there is a significant difference between working with the place you live in versus working with a place viewed from afar. Living and working here means everything I do is here, including the daily things like taking out the trash or doing laundry. Living here, I see this place every day. I take pictures of what is here, I don’t ‘imagine’ it from outside and I don’t look at pictures which are, no matter how many pics we take, only a fraction of what we see every day when we live in a place. I don’t need to bring out memories of a past experience or go through pics taken previously (unless I want to for some reason). I experience things now, here, in this moment. And take the photo I feel like taking right then and there. I am often out with friends who also do photography. But even when we are next to each other, our pics are different. Some of the differences come from the devices we are using, the colours the camera is recording or the lens we have in hand. But most of the differences are in framing, meaning in the way we see things, in the way we decide to crop the image (on the spot or after, once in lightroom or another programme). What we each see, what we each choose to make an image of, is personal to us. It is always influenced by that specific moment, that point in time, whether because of the way we were feeling, the device we were holding that mediates our way of seeing, or the way our own situated and embodied experiences have shaped our framing. Dear Dina, Reading your reflections on how you work, I recognize my own urge to formulate what I call a geo-aesthetical approach: this is not a matter of

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situating Svalbard in some larger context, but in sets of relations, mediations and organizations that reproduce understandings of Svalbard as an Arctic place. Again, perhaps this is why I love sound. Not that sound is more true than image. With the sense of seeing, so with the sense of hearing—it is contingent (Ingold 2021). This is also what you are writing. But with sound it is hard to step out of the frame, as we have already touched upon, but sound too has the potential to evoke memories and emotions that add a dimension to the immediately visible. This somehow brings me back to extractivism and the ethics and politics of working methods. If ‘to extract’ means to draw, take or copy out something that one has not produced oneself, then working against this very Western rationale must entail methodological reorientation. Hm, I come to think of a collaborative project between artist Floortje Zonneveld and the students of the Svalbard Folkehøgskole. After documenting individual reflections on their sense of home they made an audio-walk (A Year Without Trees 2021). Listening to this sound-based scrapbook of thoughts and memories while out walking in Longyearbyen, a layer is added to one’s reflections on the immediate surroundings. In recalling this project I wish to emphasize the level of practice involved in seeking methodological reorientation. This was also the aim of my Ph.D. research in artistic practice: a critical production of the Arctic from within an experimentality through which I eventually tried to formulate a geo-aesthetical approach (2022). Here, the Arctic Nature Guide on Svalbard connects with the film dramaturg as a model of practice (that shapes imaginaries of Svalbard), but also as an analytical tool for reflections on how the Arctic is infrastructurally produced; think of the web of both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ interactional relations that mediates climate crisis imaginaries (Davoudi and Machen 2022). Dear Eva, Although I haven’t worked with sound, I think my work has also been a way of trying to come to a critical understanding and rethinking of how we make sense of and perceive (and project) the world we are engaging with. Research in our euro-modern academic culture is often focused on the outcome. Even before starting a Ph.D. we are often asked to formulate our research question and many do a lit review first. But how can you know what literature and theories you are going to reflect on before you have even started the research? Why is it that the practice of doing

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research, whether taking photos or conducting focus groups, can’t be the driver? Those moments when you are working (‘in the field’ or in a studio) are actually moments of ‘outcome’ that impact each of us and the people and places and things we are in contact with. In a different way, this reframing of how we do research and what it means to be doing research, also disrupts the colonial hierarchy/academic structure we navigate in. By trying to get off the road, to see things from the side (Stewart 1996), we can expose our own framings (which have coloured how we do our work and how we understand it) and perhaps also give us some perspective on the culture that has produced us. I find it interesting how this back and forth discussion has brought each of us to formulate what the core of the work was that we conducted in Svalbard for our PhDs—you with the geo-aesthetic approach and me with a reflection on framing our framings. The fact that we both came back to our core findings actually underscores how we always frame things from where we are standing: how we frame things comes from how we perceive the world, how we imagine it and how we ‘understand’ it. We are shaped by our situatedness, by our culture, by our experiences, our training and our education. Today, I’m sitting inside watching the snow come down in the gentle blue light of the beginning of the Dark Season. I’ve been reflecting on Paul Connerton’s (1989) work on social memory and his distinction of three kinds of memory (personal, cognitive, habit). I find the habitmemory an interesting one in this context (where we are thinking about how we produce knowledge, how we understand things). It leads me to reflect on how one works when in a place (with local, embodied, everyday habits that inform one’s understanding) as opposed to how one works when outside the place and reflecting cognitively on it. Both can bring insights, but those insights will be different. One is based on local experience (seen through the individual’s prism of understanding) and the other is a reflection on an imagined (not embodied) place, as understood by the person reflecting upon it. And the reflections produced by those who come in and out of a place, perhaps as they remember and reflect back on an embodied experience (or even on a previous habit-memory) will also be different. In my own work, living here, I favour the embodied, everyday experience of place. How could I not? Especially when, all too often, people coming in are shaped by the imagined idea of this place and the way they will experience it (extracting understanding) and show it to the outside world.

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I guess that is one thing we haven’t talked about so much yet: who these produced images are actually for. They are rare for those of us who live here. More often than not, they are for people outside of the region. Which already says something about the image, situating it in a place ‘not here’, othering the subject and creating an imaginary. Perhaps we can discuss this in a future exchange?

References Aglert, Katja (2009) ‘Winter event—antifreeze’ (http://katjaaglert.com/WinterEvent-antifreeze-2 [accessed 4 May 2023]). Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. (2016) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Artica Svalbard (2022) ‘A year without trees’. Artica Svalbard – Podcasts on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-year-withouttrees/id1441002735?i=1000550077390 [accessed 4 May 2023]). Braidotti, Rosi (2011) Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press. Brode-Roger, Dina (2023) ‘The Svalbard treaty and identity of place: Impacts and implications for Longyearbyen, Svalbard’. Polar Record 59 (6): 1–11 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0032247422000365). Connerton, Paul (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cosgrove, Denis and Stephen Daniels (1989) ‘The iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments’. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (2): 196–198. Davoudi, Simin and Ruth Machen (2022) ‘Climate imaginaries and the mattering of the medium’. Geoforum 137: 203–212. Dawson, Ashley (2018) ‘Biocapitalism and de-extinction’. In: Richard Grusin (ed.) After Extinction. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press: 173– 200. Freese, Barbara (2006) Coal: A Human History. London: Arrow Books. Guattari, Félix (2014) The Three Ecologies. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Grossberg, Lawrence (2010) Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Heuer, Christopher P. (2019) Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image. New York: Zone Books. Ingold, Tim (2021/2010) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.

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Kåre Tveter foundation (n.d.) tveter100ar.no (https://www.tveter100ar.no/ [accessed 23 October 2022]). la Cour, Eva (2022) Geo-aesthetical Discontent: The Guide, Svalbard and Postfuture Essayism. Gothenburg: Art Monitor. Massey, Doreen (2005) For Space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Olsen, Bjørnar (2013) In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. Plymouth: AltaMira Press. Price, Derrick (2015) ‘Surveyors and surveyed’. In: Liz Wells (ed.) Photography: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge: 75–132. Salazar, Noel B. (2012) ‘Tourism imaginaries: A conceptual approach’. Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2): 863–882 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2011. 10.004). Sommer, Helene (2013) No Man’s Land (https://www.helenesommer.net/nomans-land/ [accessed 4 May 2023]). Stewart, Kathleen (1996) On the Side of the Road. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stewart, Kathleen (2003) ‘Arresting images’. In: Pamela Matthews and David McWhirter (eds) Aesthetic Subjects: Pleasures, Ideologies, and Ethics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Tollman, Vera (2014) ‘The uncanny polar bear: activists visually attack an overly emotionalized image clone’. In: Brigit Schneider and Thomas Nocke (eds) Image Politics of Climate Change. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag: 249–272. Viken, Arvid (2008) ‘The Svalbard transit scene’. In: Jørgen O. Bærenholdt and Brynhild Granås (eds) Mobile Places. London: Ashgate: 139–154. Vola, Joonas. (2022) ‘Aesthetics’. In: Marjo Lindroth, Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen and Monica Tennberg (eds) Critical Studies of the Arctic: Unravelling the North. Cham: Springer International Publishing: 15–36. Zhang, Jundan Jasmine and Adam Doering (2021) ‘Special issue: The interface of culture and communication’. Tourism Culture & Communication 22 (2): 105–113. Zuev, Dennis and Gary Bratchford (2021) Visual Sociology: Practices and Politics in Contested Places. Cham: Palgrave Pivot.

PART III

Heritage and Environments

CHAPTER 8

Svalbard’s Urban Imaginaries Peter Hemmersam

Introduction Throughout the last century, the public or general perception of the Arctic was coloured by a fascinated exotification of a hostile landscape and an ‘othered’ population. Powerful neo-colonial meta-narratives and place imaginaries about the Arctic as a geographical margin (Shields 1991) obscured local conditions and the day-to-day experiences of locals in the settlements and cities across the region. Today, the Arctic is urbanizing fast, and while the overall population is relatively stable, migration from smaller, rural settlements to larger cities is a trend across the region (Heleniak 2020). Individual desires to increase job and educational opportunities and the lack of availability of other amenities are among the forces driving this trend. This concentration of people may result in gradual urban growth in diversified and amorphous cities, essentially indistinguishable from sprawling urbanized landscapes elsewhere in the world. However, these locations may also develop unique, locally based and distinct design and urban planning patterns. Significant differences exist between the growing cities of the Arctic and those found elsewhere,

P. Hemmersam (B) The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_8

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and the Arctic territories have distinct urban design and planning histories. The very different settlements on Svalbard that were planned and built by private and state-owned enterprises from opposite sides in the Cold War divide provide insights into this complex and diverse history. This chapter explores the underlying, articulated and unarticulated ideas and urban imaginaries that have structured designers’ and planners’ approaches to city building in the Arctic over the last century. It starts with the period after World War II when the present settlements in Svalbard were planned and built, and continues to outline the development up to today. The architecture of a place can be considered and decoded as a set of signifiers—as outlined in the introduction to this book. Such an exercise can provide insight into the historically layered urban landscapes of the Arctic. Looking at the current form of these cities as the result of interacting structural and political histories does not imply disavowing notions of a unique Arctic architecture and urbanism. Instead, it allows for critical interrogation of the implicit and explicit value hierarchies and hegemonic assumptions underlying such evolving imaginaries. The appreciation of the materiality and mindset of architects and planners not only provides for a productive engagement with the past and the present but also forms a basis for managing future growth and development. Imaginaries continuously act in the forming of communities and futures in the North. They matter in the contestations surrounding contemporary urban policy and planning. Some imaginaries are contingent and short-term, while others form a more long-term continuous basis for the actions of designers and planners proposing urban futures in the archipelago. Articulating urban imaginaries helps further critical professional, political and public discourse around the future forms and functions of communities in Svalbard and elsewhere in the Arctic region. Little has been written on the urbanism of the Arctic in recent years (Nyseth 2017), and the purpose of this chapter is to explore how urban imaginaries are, and have been, in play in one particular location and what those imaginaries are. Svalbard’s complex political development history has resulted in contrasting urban landscapes. The strikingly different urban designs within a limited geography on Spitsbergen Island allow for a comparative exploration of the evolving, overlapping and diverging urban imaginaries that have affected the settlements’ urban planning and design. The urban landscapes of these communities can be read as historically layered expressions of social and political conditions and aspirations tempered by technical potentials and restrictions. This

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comparison of two architecturally very different settlements allows for identifying diverging design rationales related to distinct ideological and sociopolitical settings. Observing layered change in terms of architecture and planning measures over time helps distinguish priorities and policies that reflect changing imaginaries. Outlining this complexity of planning and architectural approaches over time contributes to complicating and nuancing the contentious designation of the Arctic, its landscapes, and its peoples as unique and outside the mainstream trends and discourse in urbanism. The chapter briefly presents the urban planning and political-economic history of Pyramiden and Longyearbyen, both located along the central fjord system of Spitsbergen Island. In a recent study, Remco de Koning and Akkelies van Nes (2018) suggest that these settlements provide good examples of communist and capitalist city forms. Studying these two cases, however, these urban researchers focus on ‘internalist’ logics of spatial structures with attention to movement and spatial hierarchies. In so doing, they largely disregard the historical context of the planning and production of these locations. This chapter analyses architectural form and iconography to uncover the contrasting forms, contestations and limitations of Arctic place imaginaries. This analysis leans on externalist approaches to the study of urban form that highlight the cultural, political and economic production of space (Gauthier and Gilliland 2006). The term ‘urban form’ is used here to designate the systemic relationship between buildings and urban space. In this chapter, the systematic relationship includes the iconography and design of buildings and landscapes. Urban Imaginaries The Arctic is a geophysical region as well as an imaginary. Arctic cities and settlements are built forms as well as social constructs and expressions of ideas about community, economy and politics. Planning and architecture are future-oriented practices that rely heavily on normative conceptualizations of the good city. Such conceptualizations may depend on spatial imaginaries that are reproduced and circulated as texts, images and built architectural structures. According to professor of urban planning Simin Davoudi (2018: 101), spatial imaginaries ‘are performed by, give sense to, make possible and change collective socio-spatial practices. They are produced through political struggles over the conceptions, perceptions,

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and lived experience of place’. In cities, spatial imaginaries are representations of place that, over time, come to be taken for granted and are often not well understood in urban policies and planning. They are, nevertheless, central to formulating urban policy and strategic urban planning and are globally expressed in ‘urbanisms’ like ‘the green city’ and ‘the smart city’. Nick Dunn (2019) warns that there has been a significant narrowing of urban policy thinking around the ‘smart city’ paradigm in recent years, which illustrates the political and social agency of such imaginaries. The narrowing or naturalization of urban or spatial imaginaries may obscure political and power inequalities and cultural dominance. According to urban theorists Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meißner (2019), such narrowing conceptualizations should be critically interrogated. Davoudi suggests that after Edward Said’s (2003 [originally published 1978]) book on the fabrication of orientalism in Western culture, scholars have primarily been concerned with the social construction of spatial imaginaries. In contrast, the role of places and landscapes in constructing imaginaries has received less attention. Architectural historian Anthony King (2007) casually mentions that ‘the city’ is not a ‘thing’ but exists through representations, ideas, and in discourse. By contrast, most architects and planners would likely see the objects and functional and representational spaces of the city first. Furthermore, anthropological perspectives on inhabited locations often consider space to have social agency. For instance, Kirsten Hastrup, researching Arctic communities, argues that ‘whether it is arctic or tropical, mountainside or rain forest, a daycare or a laboratory, the physical space leaves imprints in a community, not just as a backdrop to social life but as an active part of it’ (2003: 25; see also Rapoport 1994; Schweitzer et al. 2017). Returning to urban imaginaries, Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender (2007) propose that, rather than pursuing generalized synthetic models for the city through urban theory, such imaginaries should focus on perception and imagination. This shift in focus is necessitated, they argue, partly by the impossibility of totalizing accounts of the boundless and dynamic modern city. Exploring mental representations between the physical city and perception from an architectural perspective, Kevin Lynch (1960), at the height of technocratic modernism, proposed cognitive maps or ‘images’ as shared meaningful constructs that reflected the form and structure of the city. However, Lynch’s mental images concerned the perception of the existing urban environment, while the urban imaginary also promises normative urban futures.

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Starting in the 1980s, the critical regionalism school of architectural theory promoted locally rooted regional architecture as a contrast to abstract modernist spatial planning and design (Frampton 1983; Tzonis and Lefaivre 1990). Reflecting this theoretical proposition, local culture and place-specific qualities became increasingly dominant themes in urban design and architectural thinking. Imaginations of the ‘local’ came to operate as resistance to the globalized homogenization of cities and urban culture. Articulations of a particularly harsh climate, rough and inaccessible landscape, and distinct northern culture came to play a significant role in the conceptualization of architecture and urbanism of the Arctic. Architectural theorist Jill Traganou (2009) suggests that preconceived notions of space and place ‘travel’ with the architects and their ideation to new locations. Bringing such conceptual ‘luggage’ with them, designers and planners operating in Arctic territories have, like other experts and decision-makers, subscribed to imaginaries of the region and its people, such as the Arctic as ‘premodern’, ‘empty’, etc. (see e.g. Keskitalo 2004). Such imaginaries are contested—not least between residents and outside planning experts. However, distinctions between locals and southerners are not necessarily clear-cut, and, as Mathias Albert suggests in the introduction to this book, the differences between ‘imaginaries “of” and imaginaries “in” Svalbard’ are often blurred as imaginaries are reproduced globally and locally as well. Nuancing the opposition between the local and the universal, Traganou also points out that architecture is always ‘multi-sited’ and never just a linear product of inherent place specifics. Arctic Urbanism and Architectural Ideas Governments and corporations have imagined, planned and built cities in the Arctic for more than a century. Throughout this period, southern states expanded their economic interests and development policies to the Indigenous lands and resource territories of the North, and there is a long story of suggesting and constructing ideal communities in the region (Hemmersam 2021). Planners designed settlements to attract and house miners, workers and southern administrators. New cities and settlements were also, in many cases, intended to facilitate Indigenous acculturation to modern urban culture through measures such as education, wage labour and Western welfare city-style housing. Looking across the urban plans proposed and executed in the circumpolar north, it becomes clear that planners, decision-makers and architects based in southern metropoles

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shared distinct urban imaginaries, social ideals and spatial schemas. Midcentury modernist planners and architects approached the ‘development challenge’ of what they considered a premodern and isomorphic space by developing ideal prototype communities for situations with little local resistance. However, while some new city designs explicitly reflect global mid-century modernist planning ideals, others were distinctly adapted to, or formed for, the Arctic environment and community. In international architectural culture, the British-Swedish practitioner Ralph Erskine is still regarded as the quintessential ‘Arctic Architect’ (McGowan 2008). In 1959 he proposed a prototype ‘sub-arctic habitat’ evocative of late-modernist architecture and urban design (Erskine 1961). The soft architectural language of this prototype urban design model focused on climate-sheltered and liveable outdoor spaces to attract southerners to northern resource settlements. Initially, he developed his model for northern Sweden, but the government of the Northwest Territories later invited him to introduce his planning model to Arctic Canada. He envisioned the proposed sub-arctic habitat as a meeting place between Western colonizers and urbanized Indigenous people, illustrating the social engineering undertaken by northern governments in the postwar decades. He insisted on the generation of tolerable outdoor spaces for interaction between these groups as the primary architectural motif. However, rather than architecturally exploring or articulating local or Indigenous cultural sensitivities or preferences, he rhetorically focused on technical responses to what he perceived as the climatic challenge of northern city building—a decidedly southern perspective on the territories of the North. Erskine’s powerful Arctic urban imaginary has been criticized for colonialist insensitivities and an essentialist modernist analytical reduction of culture and place to a climatic and physiological calculus (Liscombe 2006; Marcus 2011; McGowan 2008). He did not consider his urban proposal to be restricted to any local geography. It was a universal prototype that reflected the abstract construction of this global mega-region as a bounded space apart from the Westernized and modernized urban world and in need of development. Extending Erskine’s legacy, Norman Pressman (1985), an advocate for the Winter Cities movement, suggested that Arctic urban planning must balance two considerations: on the one hand, it should make life in the North comfortable, while on the other hand, it should not overprotect people by isolating them from the landscape. This normative but less form-centred conceptualization

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of the design of northern cities and urban spaces has found widespread adaptation in urban policies across the Arctic region today. Urbanism in Svalbard The first settlements in Svalbard were the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury whaling stations that were eventually abandoned when resources became depleted. In the late nineteenth century, international entrepreneurs and companies made numerous land claims to start mining operations. Only in the early twentieth century were more concerted efforts made to construct all-year-round settlements for larger groups of miners. Norwegian, Swedish, British, Dutch, American and Russian mining enterprises built all-year-round settlements in the decades leading up to the 1920 treaty that granted Norway sovereignty over the territory while allowing access for citizens and businesses from signatory countries. The main settlements in Svalbard were Pyramiden, Barentsburg, NyÅlesund, Longyearbyen and Grumantbyen. The three currently inhabited settlements have expanded and contracted over the years, and miners are now a small minority. Russian-operated Barentsburg is still a mining town, but various policies have been adopted to try to transform its economy and find new employment for its shrinking population. Ny-Ålesund is an international research station staffed by seasonal crews, while Longyearbyen, the largest settlement in the archipelago, is a diversified town and administrative centre with a drastically downscaled mining operation and a semi-permanent population. Longyearbyen—An Ordinary Town Throughout its century-long history, Longyearbyen has been conceptualized through a series of place imaginaries outlined by Ulrich Schildberg in this book, from company town to ‘normal’ community to post-industrial tourist attraction. In 1900, the coal company Kulkompaniet TrondhjemSpitsbergen started mining, and in 1906, US businessmen John M. Longyear and Frederick Ayer established Longyear City as an industrial outpost. In 1916 Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani AS (SNSK) took over the American operation. The settlement was bombed and largely destroyed during World War II and subsequently rebuilt on a larger scale. This reconstruction happened with little formal urban planning, and the town consisted of utilitarian, low-rise barracks and industrial sheds

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elevated on piles to avoid permafrost degradation. The remaining buildings and industrial remains from this period are still characteristic features of Longyearbyen’s urban landscape. Over time, the primary mine head moved around the Longyeardalen Valley several times, and new housing and other facilities were relocated or built nearby. It is still possible to track the migration of the town centre in the scattered structure of the town’s older buildings. These different locations have since developed into distinct districts, such as the government administration quarter to the west with the church and governor’s office, the student housing district to the south and the contemporary housing area to the east. The Norwegian government opened a new and larger airport in 1975 and nationalized SNSK in 1976. In the following years, the future development of Longyearbyen became an explicit concern of the Norwegian government, which introduced public social amenities that transformed the mining town into a Norwegian welfare community, and families moved to Longyearbyen (Arlov 2001). An illustrative example of the change towards becoming an ‘ordinary’ Norwegian town is the transformation of Lompen, the old miners’ baths and changing rooms into an ordinary-looking shopping centre and library. Reflecting the change from a utilitarian and industrial company town consisting of modest prefabricated wooden accommodations and service buildings among the industrial structures, SNSK decided in the early 1980s to introduce a colour plan for both old and new buildings. The coherent earthy colouration scheme was part of a plan to transform the visual identity of the town and is still in use today in the architect-designed new structures that have become the norm (Seltveit 2001; Smedal 2001) (Fig. 8.1). SNSK built the first single-family housing in 1968 and constructed semi-detached houses in the late 1970s to supplement the one and twostorey communal workers’ accommodation from the postwar decades. The new dense and low housing helped create a ‘Norwegian small town’ (Brekke 2001). Over time, additional housing has been constructed on the rising terrain east of the town centre and the river plain to the east, mostly row houses and small apartment blocks. These newer buildings are also almost exclusively built and clad in wood, a favoured construction material in Longyearbyen’s climate. In recent years, new residences for the now over 2000 inhabitants and students have been constructed on the river plain west of the town centre. Several houses and institutions designed by respected Norwegian architects have gradually transformed the town’s previous drab and industrial appearance. Reflecting the speed

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Fig. 8.1 The central commercial district of Longyearbyen with houses from different periods. The coal ropeway towers serve as a reminder of the town’s industrial past (‘Longyearbyen colourful homes’ [2006] by Peter Vermeij/ Svalbard Global Seed Vault is licensed as attribution only. https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Longyearbyen_colourful_homes.jpg)

of transformation in the town, a private architectural office (LPO) with five staff operates out of Longyearbyen. The contemporary town centre is clustered around the pedestrian street and the central square outside the shopping centre. Here, you find shops, a library, a cultural centre with a cinema, a kindergarten, a clinic, local council offices, the post office, etc. Many of the structures in the central area were designed by Øivind Maurseth and resemble those found in any other small Norwegian town. The University Center in Svalbard (UNIS), located between the town centre and the harbour, first opened in 1995. The Svalbard Science Centre, which includes the Svalbard Museum, expanded the complex in 2006. A deadly avalanche in 2015 caused local planners to reconsider the safety of the existing housing

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areas. Current urban planning focuses on harbour expansion and redeveloping the industrial areas between the university area and the sea while relocating industry to the former coal storage site near the airport. According to former community planner Hilde Bøkestad (1998), the urban structure of Longyearbyen is fragmented and is characterized by (1) a lack of outdoor meeting places, (2) a lack of awareness of the intermediate spaces between indoor and outdoor and (3) a lack of a coherent or unified architectural approach. This characterization is 25 years old but still provides a meaningful analysis of some of the persistent features of the town’s urban landscape. The relative absence of privatized outdoor areas provides an open structure that allows snowmobiles free (if somewhat controlled) movement outside the formal road network. Snowmobiles are parked seemingly randomly and in groups among various other equipment and materials throughout the settlement. A distinct feature of Longyearbyen is the overground utility duct network that connects all buildings to the town’s technical services. Pedestrians and snowmobiles traverse these pipes by stairs and ramps. Using Kevin Lynch’s approach to mapping the mental image of the town through interviews and other kinds of engagement with residents, students from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design found that the east–west road along the shore and the north–south road through the settlement are the primary linear structuring components of the town (Fournier and Rigal 2019). They also found that the pedestrianized town centre and the old administrative core on the hill to the west were the central nodes that structured the locals’ perception of the urban landscape. Three primary structural or iconographic layers reflect different stages of Longyearbyen’s development. The first relates to the early company town history—from its camp origin in the early twentieth century to its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. The coal transport infrastructure that intersects the city is still largely intact, and the ropeway central that directed coal from different mine heads towards the harbour is still the most prominent architectural landmark of the town. Other elements from this period include low wooden barracks and representative structures designed by architects, such as the governor’s mansion of 1949–1950 and the community centre ‘Huset’ of 1951. The second significant layer reflects the policy changes in the 1970s that aimed at transforming Longyearbyen into a regular Norwegian welfare town. The construction of the new airport and the provision of family housing are central to this phase of its urban development. The school (1972) and the sports hall are

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prominent examples of the new welfare architecture that followed mainstream Norwegian local community development policies. Environmental imaginaries changed in the late 1990s, eventually leading to mining restrictions (Robin et al. 2014). National and local politics responded by reconsidering the purpose and challenges of the town located in a fragile Arctic environment. At the time, Cold War rivalry had diminished, and the global geopolitical significance of Svalbard had changed in character. Arctic partnership building through the Barents collaboration framework and environmental stewardship became central governance perspectives in the territory. The third architectural and iconographic layer incorporates the changing vision of Longyearbyen as a locus of climate-change research and policy development and a site for international visitors—whether politicians (Espiritu 2018), researchers at UNIS or tourists. This layer reveals the economic diversification and business innovation that has taken place and includes tourism infrastructure such as hotels, restaurants and shops. The expressive design of the new addition to the university complex that includes the museum by celebrated Norwegian architects Jarmund and Vigsnæs illustrates how architecture supports the construction of the town as an Arctic attraction. This architectural practice has designed tourist-oriented structures such as the Turtagrø Hotell in southern Norway. The structure is a visually striking angular airfoil designed to accelerate wind and avoid snow build-up around the building. It thus visually narrates the extraordinary climatic conditions of the town and, together with the world-famous Svalbard Seed Bank, provides Svalbard and Longyearbyen with a globally mediated presence. Today, the government considers the further development of Longyearbyen a central aspect of its overall Svalbard policy (Government of Norway 2016). The goal is to adapt and develop the town incrementally as the industrial base and employment opportunities change. To maintain the population of this geostrategic outpost, Longyearbyen needs to be an attractive place to live, with a family profile and diverse employment possibilities. The existing harbours will be extended. According to the government, however, the settlement should not grow beyond its current size and encroach on the surrounding natural areas. Tourism activities should be developed inside and in close proximity to the town. In this way, this vital economic activity should not compromise environmental management priorities.

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Pyramiden—A Socialist Model Town The construction of Pyramiden echoed Soviet policies for industrial urbanization and territorial economic development, which led to the planning of industrial cities across the entire union. It formed part of a narrative of the technological triumph of Socialism in adversarial conditions of the Far North. Designed by government-owned and Leningrad-based Lengiprosjakht (Fløgstad 2007), Pyramiden was a model town located in a territory otherwise controlled by a Western Cold War adversary, and officials and inhabitants were proud to show off the town to Norwegian visitors. Elin Haugdal (2020), Julia Gerlach and Nadir Kinossian (2016) have documented the strong visual reminders of Soviet communist culture, including mosaics, statues, signs, banners and images of political leaders. The distinct urban design of Pyramiden makes it the primary example of Soviet-era planning in Svalbard, compared to Barentsburg, the only inhabited Russian settlement today. This town is much less recognizable as a unitary urban design and does not have nearly the same mediated iconographic presence that attracts tourists who wish to experience the Soviet nostalgia represented by the abandoned ghost town of Pyramiden (Fig. 8.2). Located 60 kilometres northeast of Longyearbyen, Pyramiden was first established in 1910 by a Swedish company and named after a nearby mountain with a distinct triangular profile. The Soviet Union bought Pyramiden in 1926, and the state-owned Trust Arktikugol mining company planned and built the mining settlement from 1931 onwards. From the mid-1930s, the mine supplied coal to the newly established industrial cities of the Kola Peninsula in Russia’s northwest. In 1950, reconstruction of the settlement started after the destruction of World War II, and coal production recommenced in 1956. The central axis of the reconstructed town echoed the monumental Soviet classicism of the Stalin-era, described by Vladimir Paperny as ‘Culture Two’—a ‘spatial expression of a new centre-based system of values’ (2011: xxiv). The postwar architecture of the self-contained town further reflects the community planning models introduced during Khrushchev’s regime that started in 1953. The union-wide policies for urban modernization introduced in this period implied large-scale industrialization and standardization of housing construction. Planners organized industrial cities and urban districts according to the microraion (microdistrict) residential neighbourhood unit. In this model, which was applied all around

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Fig. 8.2 Lenin looks out over the central urban space of Pyramiden. Many wooden residential houses with ornaments from the immediate postwar period were later replaced with taller brick-clad buildings (Photograph by Elizabeth Bourne)

the Soviet Union, modernist apartment blocks clustered around green spaces. The residential units included preplanned services, schools and kindergartens. Similar models were also introduced in the new towns that were planned and built on the outskirts of Western cities, although on a smaller scale. In the Soviet Union and much of the Eastern Block, this model and the associated architecture eventually became the defining image of the Communist city. While adaptations to this model were made in Pyramiden, such as using bricks rather than the preferred prefabricated concrete panels, the overall urban structure and architectural style would have been recognizable and familiar to workers arriving from across the Soviet Union. Jan Kavan and Barbora Halašková’s mapping of Pyramiden’s development history reveals that the spatially dominant central axial space, complete with a centrally located Lenin bust, was established in 1948. In addition to the industrial and technical structures, the town comprises

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around 30 residential buildings organized on an orthogonal grid. Many of the original postwar wooden buildings were later replaced by multistorey structures clad in locally produced brick, giving the town a different appearance from nearby Longyearbyen. The accommodation blocks for workers, functionaries and their families are similar in design to residential structures constructed elsewhere in the Soviet North. An advanced utilidor system of overground insulated pipes supplied water, heat, electricity and telecommunications around the town. The visually dominating cultural palace from the 1970s is located at the end of the east–west urban axis. The town’s recreational facilities included a library, theatre and sports facilities such as a swimming pool, an ice hockey rink and a football stadium. Further, it had a bar, a dining hall with a giant Soviet-style mosaic, a kindergarten for the administrators’ children, a hotel/dormitory and a post office (Andreassen et al. 2010; Evjen 2004). To make the settlement an even more striking contrast to the Arctic surroundings and thus more familiar to the arriving southern workers, soil and seeds were imported to make green lawns and grow vegetables in greenhouses (Hagen 2001). The town was to be as self-sufficient as possible. It had a dairy farm, greenhouses and buildings for chickens and pigs, and the presence of women and children was part of the plan to present the town as a ‘complete’ community from the start. However, despite these many features, Pyramiden was never planned to be a proper family community with a permanent population (Evjen 2004). The town served as a prestige project and political statement indicating the intentions of the Soviet Union towards the territory (Norwegian Commissioner of Mines, unpublished reports, 1934–1966, referenced in Robin et al. 2014: 13). This intention remained a central motivation for expanding and maintaining the existence of Pyramiden in the postwar decades (Andreassen et al. 2010; Haugdal 2020; Nilsen 2018) and mirrored Norwegian policies for Longyearbyen. At its peak in the 1970s and 1980s, Pyramiden was home to well over a thousand people (Haugdal 2020), more than double the current number of residents in the remaining Russian settlement in Svalbard, Barentsburg. Over its operational period, the mine produced nine million tons of coal, but the mining operation was never profitable (Kavan and Halašková 2022). Pyramiden was abruptly abandoned in 1998 and is today a ghost town with empty buildings and crumbling infrastructure encroached upon by wildlife and vegetation. However, a small number of workers and guides operating a

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small tourist operation and hotel now populate the town. Current development plans involve landscape management, tourism, research facilities, and management of the town’s significant cultural heritage value (Trust Arktikugol and LPO arkitekter 2014). In summary, the town has three distinct iconographic layers. The first consists of the postwar urban plan and the left-over wooden buildings from the immediate postwar reconstruction of the town. The second consists of the brick and concrete structures of the 1970s and 1980s when the town’s population peaked. Larger residential structures replaced older houses, and significant institutional buildings, such as the cultural palace and sports hall, belong to this layer. The final distinct iconographic layer is the current ruined state of the buildings and infrastructure. The abrupt abandonment of the settlement has preserved the 1980s character of the town’s architecture and interiors. Ruination has commenced, although it is proceeding slowly, in the dry, cold climate. The interpretive context pertaining to this layer has changed significantly. The Soviet iconography, which includes architecture and monuments, is being recycled, mediated and circulated widely through digital and print media. It facilitates a nostalgia-based form of tourism that supplements the nature and climate-change tourism in the rest of the archipelago. Arctic Imaginaries and Urban Form in Svalbard Despite evident differences, Pyramiden and Longyearbyen share features that reflect their Arctic location, such as buildings raised on piles to protect them from permafrost and an open urban landscape. However, these similarities often have very different underlying explanations. In Soviet city planning, urban openness was a result of ideology and the communal ownership of land, while in Longyearbyen it reflects a company town history. National Arctic mythologies helped attract southern workers to exotic locations in both cases. Both towns were built and developed to provide familiar environments and be attractive places to live and work. In the Soviet Union, young people were encouraged to venture North to help ‘build Communism’. In contrast, the dominant Arctic narrative among Norwegian arrivals concerned the individual pioneer trappers and the associated outdoor life that the archipelago offered. Pyramiden and Longyearbyen were both reconstructed after the destruction of World War II, but had radically different urban planning and development histories. For political reasons, both places were

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planned and built according to the dominant urban policy and design doctrines of the respective states to accommodate southern staff and workers for shorter or longer periods. While the social democratic state of Norway and the Communist system of the Soviet Union shared a belief in planning in the postwar years, the Norwegian development logic in the following decades was neither capitalist nor Communist (Sejersted 2011). The community planning of the 1970s and 1980s did not imply a comprehensive restructuring of Longyearbyen to conform to ideological ideals. Instead, the development of the town happened incrementally and through a logic of recursively correcting or adjusting the community layout according to contemporary needs. While housing in Pyramiden consisted of large communal structures and dining halls where free food was served, individual family homes were constructed in Longyearbyen as early as the 1960s. This change in Longyearbyen, away from being only a mining community, reflected a desire to diversify the economy and make the town feel like a ‘normal’ Norwegian community. While Pyramiden represented a formal and deliberate example of a planned community, the planning of Longyearbyen reflected an evolved idea about planning as primarily a procedural rather than a design-based undertaking. While the monumental and axial design layout of Pyramiden closely reflects the ideological and political motivations of the postwar decades, the messier appearance of Longyearbyen requires more diligent work to disentangle. Here, two significant changes in place imaginaries—from a company town to a typical town in the 1970s and 1980s and again to an environmental management, science and tourism-based economy in the 2000s, resulted in a complex iconographic layering. The most significant iconographic layering of Pyramiden relates to its abandonment and gradual renaturalization, which has allowed speculations about future use by various actors. While architecturally powerful, the abandoned and ruined character of the settlement may, following Professor in cultural geography Tim Edensor’s thesis on industrial ruins, offer a conceptual openness for new meaning and purpose that is ‘liberated from the everyday constraints which determine what should be done and where, and which encode the city with meanings’ (2005: 4). At the same time, the ‘recycled’ Soviet imagery of the settlement also has the potential to ‘freeze’ future development potential relating to tourism when it is precisely linked to this association with a particular past.

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Contemporary Longyearbyen gradually emerged as an ‘ordinary’ place, in contrast to the axial monumentality of Pyramiden. Today, Longyearbyen is a functioning town, while Pyramiden is almost empty of people. Following Edensor’s logic, Longyearbyen’s everyday and humdrum character could make it harder to reimagine an alternative future for the town. However, both settlements are adapting to new spatial imaginaries— away from industrial mining towards environmentalism, built cultural heritage management and tourism (Robin et al. 2014). Pyramiden has been changing rapidly in recent years and now has a small population engaged in restoring and developing the town as a destination. The town’s formal urban design and Socialist iconography are mediated and marketed as an urban image. The messy appearance of Longyearbyen is less appealing to tourists than Pyramiden’s visual and architectural qualities that, coupled with a post-Soviet nostalgia, make it a precious tourist magnet. In contrast, Longyearbyen has functioned as a base for nature tourism. Here, the local government is actively seeking to reduce its builtup footprint to acquire a more urban quality and reduce wear on the landscape (Svalbard Lokalstyre 2022). Through urban planning measures, the town is looking to become a lively, attractive and compact destination, which would contribute to minimizing tourism’s negative impact on the Arctic landscape. Developing a striking and beautiful urban image with enhanced mediation potential could be part of such a strategy. It is unclear what the environmental governance regime that has developed over recent decades means for the future of Svalbard. Despite the seemingly ‘frozen’ appearance of Pyramiden and the ‘ordinary’ character of Longyearbyen’s urban spaces, Svalbard’s settlements are not permanent, fixed objects; they evolve and adapt over time. Structures are reappropriated for new purposes and acquire new meaning. What were once utilitarian industrial structures are becoming tourist icons. The urban landscapes of Svalbard are changing; thawing permafrost and geo-hazard warnings necessitate climate adaptation measures. New local concerns merge with a global reappreciation of the meta-region as a locus for climate change. At the same time, the Arctic is becoming a less unique and more ‘ordinary’ place that is easy to visit for many people. Urban planning and policy ideas and concepts are imported from elsewhere. Thus, Longyearbyen aspires to become one of the ‘capitals’ of the Arctic and a central node for global trade, regional politics and Arctic culture. Urban imaginaries are just as powerful when enacted from the outside as when called upon to project futures from within Arctic communities.

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Also, place imaginaries are continuously in production—they are never final or static. The history of Svalbard’s towns and the contrasting and shifting imaginaries of place they reveal are instructive in understanding how urban imaginaries emerge, transform and affect city planning and policy.

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Espiritu, Aileen Aseron (2018) ‘Spectacular speculation—Arctic futures in transition’. In: Janike Kampevold Larsen and Peter Hemmersam (eds) Future North: The Changing Arctic Landscapes. Abingdon: Routledge: 26–46. Evjen, Bjørg (2004) ‘Bergverkssamfunn i Arktis’. In: Eivind A. Drivenes, Harald Dag Jølle and Ketil Zachariasson (eds) Norsk polarhistorie. Oslo: Gyldendal: 113–175. Fløgstad, Kjartan (2007) Pyramiden: portrett av ein forlaten utopi. Oslo: Spartacus. Fournier, Raphaël and Berenice Rigal (2019) ‘Mapping: urban development history’. In: Peter Hemmersam, Janike Kampevold Larsen, and Andrew Morrison (eds) Future North: Svalbard, Pamphlet Series. Oslo: The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo Center for Urban and Landscape Studies: 58–59. Frampton, Kenneth (1983) ‘Prospects for a critical regionalism’. Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 20 (1983): 147–162. Gauthier, Pierre and Jason Gilliland (2006) ‘Mapping urban morphology: a classification scheme for interpreting contributions to the study of urban form’. Urban Morphology 10 (1): 41–50. Gerlach, Julia and Nadir Kinossian (2016) ‘Cultural landscape of the Arctic: “recycling” of Soviet imagery in the Russian settlement of Barentsburg, Svalbard (Norway)’. Polar Geography 39 (1): 1–19. Government of Norway (2016) Svalbard Meld. St. Report to the Storting (white paper) 32. Oslo: Government of Norway. Hagen, Dagmar (2001) ‘Botanikk og byfornyelse: å plukke blomster med bulldoser’. In: Arne O. Holm and Thor Bjørn Arlov (eds) Fra company town til folkestyre: samfunnsbygging i Longyearbyen på 78° nord. Longyearbyen: Svalbard samfunnsdrift: 155–163. Hastrup, Kirsten (2003) ‘Introduktion: Den antropologiske videnskab’. In Kirsten Hastrup (ed.) Ind i verden: en grundbog i antropologisk metode. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel: 9–34. Haugdal, Elin (2020) ‘Photographs of the Soviet settlements on Svalbard’. Nordlit (45): 104–138. Heleniak, Timothy (2020) Polar Peoples in the Future: Projections of the Arctic Populations. Stockholm: Nordregio. Hemmersam, Peter (2021) Making the Arctic City: The History and Future of Urbanism in the Circumpolar North. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Kavan, Jan and Barbora Halašková (2022) ‘The rise and fall of Pyramiden: the story of a town in a wider geopolitical and environmental context’. Polar Record 58 (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/polar-record/ article/rise-and-fall-of-pyramiden-the-story-of-a-town-in-a-wider-geopoliti cal-and-environmental-context/4D1DF3F5AA14F3E83309F26F2405F3FC [accessed 5 May 2023]).

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Keskitalo, Carina (2004) Negotiating the Arctic: The Construction of an International Region. Abingdon: Routledge. King, Anthony (2007) ‘Boundaries, networks, and cities: playing and replaying diasporas and histories’. In: Alev Çınar and Thomas Bender (eds) Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press: 1–14. Lindner, Christoph and Miriam Meißner (eds) (2019) The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries. Abingdon: Routledge. Liscombe, Rhodri Windsor (2006) ‘Modernist ultimate Thule’. RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review 31 (1/2): 64–80. Lynch, Kevin (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marcus, Alan (2011) ‘Place with no dawn: a town’s evolution and Erskine’s Arctic utopia’. In: Rhodri Windsor Liscombe (ed.) Architecture and the Canadian Fabric. Vancouver: UBC Press: 283–310. McGowan, Jérémie Michael (2008) ‘Ralph Erskine, (skiing) architect’. Nordlit (23): 241–250. Nilsen, Thomas (2018) ‘Pyramiden—a Soviet ghost town in Arctic Norway’. Journal of the North Atlantic & Arctic, October (https://www.jonaa.org/ content/2018/10/18/pyramiden [accessed 5 May 2023]). Nyseth, Torill (2017) ‘Arctic urbanization: modernity without cities’. In: LillAnn Körber, Scott MacKenzie, and Anna W. Stensport (eds) Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 59–70. Paperny, Vladimir (2011) Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pressman, Norman (1985) Reshaping Winter Cities: Concepts, Strategies and Trends. Waterloo, ON: University of Waterloo Press. Rapoport, Amos (1994) ‘Spatial organization and the built environment’. In: Tim Ingold (ed.) Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Abingdon: Routledge: 460–502. Robin, Libby, Dag Avango, Luke Keogh, Nina Möllers, Bernd Scherer and Helmuth Trischler (2014) ‘Three galleries of the Anthropocene’. The Anthropocene Review 1 (3): 207–224. Said, Edward W. (2003) Orientalism (reprinted with a new preface). London: Penguin Books. Schweitzer, Peter, Olga Povoroznyuk and Sigrid Schiesser (2017) ‘Beyond wilderness: towards an anthropology of infrastructure and the built environment in the Russian North’. The Polar Journal 7 (1): 58–85. Sejersted, Francis (2011) The Age of Social Democracy: Norway and Sweden in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Mark B. Adams. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Seltveit, Alf (2001) ‘Users’ comment’. In: Grete Smeldal (ed.) Longyearbyen i farger – og hva nå? [Longyearbyen in colour – status and challenges]. Bergen: Eide: 66–67. Shields, Rob (1991) Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. Abingdon: Routledge. Smedal, Grete (2001) Longyearbyen i farger – og hva nå? [Longyearbyen in Colour—Status and Challenges]. Bergen: Eide. Svalbard Lokalstyre (2022) ‘Lokalsamfunnsplan 2022–2033’ (https://www.lok alstyre.no/getfile.php/5037225.2046.paqllwpmqntumt/2022.5.6+Lokalsamf unnsplan+vedtatt+10.5.2022.pdf [accessed 5 May 2023]). Traganou, Jilly (2009) Travel, Space, Architecture. Farnham: Ashgate. Trust Arktikugol and LPO arkitekter (2014) Arealplan for Pyramiden. Planbeskrivelse. Oslo: LPO arkitekter. Tzonis, Alexander and Liane Lefaivre (1990) ‘Why critical regionalism today’. Architecture and Urbanism 236: 23–33.

CHAPTER 9

Imaginaries of Company Towns on Svalbard Ulrich Schildberg

Introduction While most ‘historic’ towns have developed in an evolutionary way, new towns were often founded for a special purpose by a specific state, company or person. Among these new towns, ‘company towns’ constitute a particular type. They were built and managed by companies for a particular purpose; for example, that of housing the workers of a mine. In such cases, the lifespan of the town was bound to the lifespan of the mine. Likewise, towns were bound to the sites where natural resources (such as coal or iron ore) were exploited, which meant they would often be located in remote regions like the Arctic. They were closely tied into an imaginary of the ‘extractivism’ of natural resources and an accompanying colonization of the wilderness. ‘Extractivism’ means the exploitation of natural resources without giving anything back to the place where they are exploited (Sörlin 2023: 4). Company towns are ‘single-purpose towns’ dependent on a single industry or company and as such are usually ‘locked into’ a specific path of

U. Schildberg (B) Institute of Geography, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_9

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development. It is crucial for them to create new paths and evoke associated new imaginaries of their future if they want to continue existing even after the underlying prime source, such as a mine, has been closed or fully exploited. On Svalbard, a range of company towns can be found. Longyearbyen in particular, as the biggest settlement on Svalbard, is at a turning point, with Norwegian mining probably set to end in 2025. Among the settlements in Svalbard, Longyearbyen faces a special challenge to find new imaginaries for sustaining and ‘reinventing’ itself. In the following section, I will define the various types of company towns and look at the factors that determine their development. How are they ‘coping with closure’ (Neil et al. 1992)? I will look at the placerelated imaginaries which underlay the founding of company towns and the (emergent or already existing) imaginaries that are pointing them towards their future. The chapter will particularly focus on Longyearbyen. Its guiding imaginary has always been that of a town that was ‘built on coal’, as well as a symbol of Norwegian sovereignty in the Arctic. The question here is ‘how to imagine Svalbard without coal’ (Ødegaard 2021). Could Longyearbyen, in this context, be a sustainable Arctic model town (for the aspects of architecture and town planning in this context, see Hemmersam 2021 and his chapter in this book)?

Company Towns A Typology of Company Towns Company towns are ‘mono-industrialized communities, created and operated by a company’ (Morisset and Mace 2019: 9). Depending on their main purpose, they can be variously described as, ‘single-industry towns, resource towns, mine towns or rail-towns’ (Lucas 1971). Very often these towns were not part of the normal administrative system and did not, for example, have either an elected city council or a mayor. Smaller settlements were seen as ‘industrial villages’. Conglomerates of industrial towns could form an ‘industrial landscape’ (Trinder 1992). The first company towns were founded in the early nineteenth century in England and in the US at the transition from artisanal to industrial production. Famous examples were Saltaire and Port Sunlight in England, or Lowell, MA and Pullman Town, IL in the US. Company towns could be ‘colonies’, which were new and additional parts of already

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existing towns like many of the mining and steelworking colonies in Germany (for example ‘Margarethenhöhe’ or ‘Eisenheim’), or they could be separate settlements situated on the periphery with no connections to pre-existing settlements. Company towns also differed significantly in terms of architecture and urban design, ranging from the monotonous rows of terraced houses in industrial England, through towns designed in accordance with the ‘garden city model’ (Howard 2015), to ‘ideal cities’ like the ‘socialist model town’ of Pyramiden on Spitsbergen. However, many of these towns, including Longyearbyen, evolved in an unplanned way. Different kinds of home ownership were possible. Ownership of houses and land might lie with the company, which was the case in Longyearbyen. This could be seen as a means of disciplining the workers, since housing was linked to the work contract. Homes might also be owned by the workers as in many American company towns. This could promote workers’ loyalty to the company, yet also restrict their mobility if they lost their jobs. From the 1950s onwards, the need for further company towns diminished. Thus, the era of company towns ended and the founding of towns in socialist countries like Eisenhüttenstadt in the German Democratic Republic were the last to occur. There was no need for further company towns. Company Towns in Remote Regions Natural resources like coal or iron ore are often situated in very remote regions such as the Arctic. Therefore, mining-company towns are often located in places normally unsuited for urban development. Remoteness necessitates importing virtually everything from building materials to food, with workers often coming from different countries. Examples of very remote company towns, now abandoned, are the coal mining town of Qullissat in Greenland and the copper town of Sewell in Chile. These regions rarely exhibit features of an ‘industrial landscape’ or even a strongly interconnected ‘technological mega-system’, such as what exists in the Swedish region of Norbotten (Luciani and Sjöholm 2018) and comprises the mining towns of Kiruna, Gällivare and Malmberget and a network of railways and power stations. The remote location of most company towns is the reason that inhibits the location of processing industries nearby. Remote company towns really are ‘single-purpose’ towns.

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Imaginaries of Company Towns Imaginaries are important for urban development and regional economic development (Hassink and Gong 2020). Mining-company towns especially are dominated by the imaginary of coal as ‘humanity’s triumph over nature’ (Reese 2006: 10). In Longyearbyen, this is visibly expressed in the miners’ monument located in the pedestrian zone. With the inscription ‘vi bygde Longyearbyen’ (meaning ‘we built Longyearbyen’) the coal miners proclaim their self-esteem. In other mining regions, an entire culture is based on this imaginary, which tends to remain active even after the original source is long gone, such as in former mining regions like the German Ruhr. Even in times of crises and mine closures, this imaginary can underpin the cohesion of (former) mining communities (Reese 2006: 244). Another imaginary framing the (self-)understanding of company towns is that of colonization. In Canada, company towns served the purpose of colonizing the mostly uninhabited North (Hemmersam 2021: 12; Dinius and Vergare 2011). The same happened in Sweden with the founding of towns like Kiruna or Malmberget. In the early Soviet Union, a special authority ‘Glavesvmorput ’ (Hemmersam 2021: 49) was responsible for developing more than 500 settlements along the Arctic Coast. While one could also see the establishment of company towns on Svalbard as colonization of a sort, strictly speaking it was not, as colonization generally involves some kind of displacement or subjugation of a local indigenous population (and that never existed on Svalbard). Company towns do not follow an evolutionary path as the old cities of Central Europe did. They were founded by a company, a government or an entrepreneur—like John M. Longyear in the case of Longyearbyen. The driving forces behind such endeavours were diverse. Early company towns in England were founded by paternalistic entrepreneurs, who wanted to ‘build the working man’s paradise’ (Crawford 1995). Their motives were not unselfish: by creating a kind of ‘gated community’ for workers and their families, they kept them away from the temptations offered by the big, dirty industrial cities and their slums (cf. Coketown in Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times (1854 and 1986: 36). These structures consequently offered high standards of architecture, accommodation and sustenance, following the ‘garden city model’. However, most of these towns were simply founded for economic reasons. Mining towns especially were only meant to last until the

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resources to be exploited were depleted. In many cases they looked more like camps than towns. As a result, towns such as Longyearbyen were geared to the needs of industry and basically had no aspirations to either architectural beauty or social welfare. The Economic Background to the Development of Company Towns The wealth and development of regions and towns is strongly influenced by their situatedness within a regional economic landscape. Of course, economic development is largely dependent on external factors beyond the immediate influence of a local community (Power et al. 2010). This is particularly true of company towns in remote regions such as the Arctic. The so-called ‘core–periphery model’ (Friedmann 1966; Kruse 2013) describes their situation, with the towns on the periphery dominated by decision-making in cores or centres far away. Even today the fate of Longyearbyen and other communities on Svalbard is largely determined by decisions taken by governments located in Oslo or Moscow, and even the two still existing mining companies on Svalbard, Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK) and Trust Arktikugol (TA) are state-owned enterprises. Sometimes, distant towns become something like ‘centres in the periphery’ (Avango and Hacquebord 2009: 35), with Longyearbyen, for example, serving as a centre for other settlements on Svalbard like NyÅlesund. Longyearbyen could possibly also be called a ‘centre’ within the wider Arctic by now, as it has administrative functions, serves as logistical hub and offers many facilities for such a small town. Following Avango and Brugman’s analysis of Svea (2018), the development of coal mining company towns can be explained as a sequence of ‘phases’: – During the initial phase, companies explored the coal resources and ‘occupied’ their claims1 ready for exploitation. Companies built temporary stations and camps consisting of huts and tents. – After successful exploration, in the subsequent establishment phase the exploitation of coal began and some of the former campsites turned into permanent settlements (with many of them, such as

1 In this context, ‘occupation’ means the marking of a territory by signs and fences in order to file claims.

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Advent City, also quickly disappearing again when mining operations proved unproductive). – The consolidation phase then marked the development of settlements into towns with their accompanying physical and social infrastructure. To cover the variety of company towns, these phases can be supplemented by others referring to their downsizing, decline or complete transformation. Needless to say, the transitions between these phases can take different forms, and the history of individual towns does not necessarily follow a linear path, or move in only one direction: there are ups and downs in the development of company towns, and these can be observed on Svalbard as well (see again Avango and Brugmans 2018 with regard to the example of Svea). Since mining-company towns are dependent on the exploitation of natural resources such as coal or iron ore, they are also subject to specific path-dependencies and ‘lock-ins’ (Martin and Sunley 2006). This means that an economy or a community is locked into a specific developmental path which is hard to get out of. Mining can be such a path. If this path ends, the economic development and economic basis of a community ends as well. This can then also lead to the end of the existence of a community as such. ‘Coping with closure’ (Neil et al. 1992) when mining comes to an end thus represents a particular challenge for company towns based on mining. The lifetime of such towns is bound to the lifetime of the mine, which in turn is tied to the availability of resources, to technological developments and to world market conditions. For example, whaling on Svalbard ended with the eradication of whale populations and the introduction of new hunting technologies. Therefore, the abandonment of a company town is almost as probable as its founding. But ‘building back’ is hardly ever planned beforehand by any company. If a company town falls into decline, it is usually the government’s responsibility to cushion social hardships. Subsidies are paid to the company to keep a site in production. Other measures include the mitigation of the social consequences of closing and the creation of new jobs. This constitutes a typical ‘top-down’ strategy with the involvement of the state. Mono-structured or old industrialized regions rarely have the means to restructure themselves in an economically viable way relying on their own resources only. A precondition for the success of such a ‘bottom-up’ strategy would usually be that

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the local or regional economy is sufficiently diversified to allow for the development of the so-called advantages of agglomeration (Kulke 2017: 292). In these agglomerations, self-reinforcing processes arise and clusters (Porter 2008) of either horizontally or vertically interlinked industries develop. It almost goes without saying that such a strategy, often to be found in old industrial regions like the Ruhr Area in Germany, poses far more significant challenges for small and remote locations such as Svalbard. There exist several coping strategies for the predictable event of a mine closure, some of them have been implemented on Svalbard: – The town’s economic base is strong and versatile enough to create a new economic path, or to diversify the existing path by its own means (bottom-up strategy). – The process of economic change is implemented from a ‘core’, that is by government intervention (top-down strategy). – A completely new path is created, as was the case in Ny-Ålesund, which was turned from a mining town into a scientific base. – The town is abandoned in the process of closure. The site can be demolished and returned to nature (Svea) or may be kept as a ‘lost place’ (Pyramiden). Sometimes the whole population is resettled elsewhere (Qulissat and Disko-Ø, Greenland).

The Case of Svalbard and Longyearbyen The History of the Exploitation of Natural Resources on Svalbard Svalbard is a classic ‘resource-frontier-region’, which is one of the imaginaries of this remote archipelago, situated at the utmost edge of the populated world. This was also the driving force for the development of settlements. The economy and colonization were based on the exploitation of natural resources. First whaling and hunting, then mining, and finally tourism and research. Whaling was started in the seventeenth century mainly by whalers from the Netherlands and Britain. The exhaustion of the whale population in the Barents Sea and a change in whaling technology from land-based stations to factory ships led to the decline of the industry in the nineteenth century. The whaling period had nearly no effect

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on the further development of Svalbard, except for the fact that the whalers reported the existence of coal there (Arlov 1996). During the whaling period it was irrelevant who owned the land since whaling took place at sea and only small and temporary land stations were needed. Mining had the biggest influence on the development of Svalbard, although it was limited to the Western coast of the island of Spitsbergen. The impact on the landscape was relatively slight due to the small size of the mines. Only the area around Adventfjorden with its system of mines and ropeways could initially be identified as something resembling an ‘industrial’ landscape. However, the rumours about the immense resources of coal on Spitsbergen were totally overblown (Klees 1925), perhaps in order to attract adventurers and speculators who began to claim possible mining sites, also leading to an increasing interest in Svalbard from a range of countries, most notably Norway, Sweden, Russia and Britain. After some smaller exploitations met with little success, commercial mining commenced and thus the initial phase was begun in 1904 by the British ‘Spitsbergen Coal and Trading Co.’ on the northern shore of Adventfjorden in Advent City. However, only 4000 tons of coal were extracted, and the mine was closed in 1908 (Arlov 1996). The American engineer John M. Longyear was more successful when he founded the ‘Arctic Coal Co.’ (ACC) and began mining in 1906. In this early phase, mining was operated mostly by foreign companies like the Dutch ‘N.V. Nederlandsche Spitsbergen Companie’ (NeSpiCo), which started mining in Grønfjorden, while Swedish Companies were active in Billefjorden and Van-Mijen-Fjorden. Russian mining operations started in Colesbukta in 1913. The early mining period was dominated by the imaginary of a ‘No Man’s Land’ (Conway 1906). For the mining companies, this status had advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the companies had to pay no taxes, were not obliged to pay standard wages and were not bound to any labour regulations. On the other hand, there was the absence of any order and legal certainty, especially in the case of strikes and disputes about mining rights. This phase ended when the Svalbard Treaty came into force, marking the beginning of the phase of ‘establishment’. The Treaty and an Annex to the Treaty regulated the settlement of mining claims which were to be registered with a commissioner from the neutral Danish government. They were fixed in the ‘utmålskart ’ (beneficiaries chart), which is still

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valid today. Article 8 of the Treaty obligated the Norwegian government to enact a mining code (Bergverksordeningen) and to establish a mining authority (Bergmesteren). The code regulates the exploitation of minerals, mining property, safety regulations and the ‘protection of the workers’ (Article 26 and following). Article 27 states that ‘the employer is bound to furnish his workers with healthy and proper dwellings’. The employer was also obliged to provide for a ‘meeting hall’ and ‘a proper collection of books in a language known by the workers’. ‘Further instructions concerning the manner of building and the fitting of the houses’2 would be issued later. These articles were effectively the first building code for the company towns on Svalbard. After the Treaty came into effect in 1925 the landscape of mining companies changed. Small unprofitable mines were closed, while others were sold. The Dutch sold their modern mine in Barentsburg to the Russians, as the Swedish did their mine in Pyramiden. But the most important transition was the takeover of the American mines in Longyeardalen and the Swedish mine in Svea by Norway. In the end only three state-owned companies remained: the Norwegian companies ‘Store Norske’ and ‘Kings Bay’ and the Russian ‘Trust Arktikugol ’. The next phase of ‘consolidation’ began after World War II when modern mines were opened by SNSK in Adventdalen (Gruve 3, 5, 6 and 7) and in Svea, and by the Russians in Pyramiden. But just as in other European mining regions, the decline began in the 1960s with the closing of the mines in Grumantyben in 1962 and Ny-Ålesund in 1963 (in the latter case because of a fatal mining disaster). This downsizing of mining was interrupted by a short boom between 2000 and 2006 also known as the ‘Store Kullrushet ’ (big coal boom; Mikkelsen and Solberg 2009), when the modern Svea-Nord mine started operations. This was the only time that SNSK ever made any profit. But this intermezzo could not stop the decline. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian government decided to close the mine in Pyramiden. The downsizing of Norwegian mining was more controversial. At first, the Norwegian government approved the opening of the modern Lunckefjell mine near Svea, but it never began operations. Then in 2016 the government ordered the dismantling of the new mine. The last mine in Adventdalen, Gruve 7, was planned to be closed in 2023, but in 2022 this 2 Quoted from English translation of the mining-code at (https://app.uio.no/ub/ujur/ oversatte-lover/data/for-19250807-3767-eng.pdf [accessed 29 November 2022]).

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was postponed at least until 2025 due to high coal prices and a long-term supply contract with a German chemistry company.3 What were the motives of the mining companies and the entrepreneurs and what imaginaries lay behind them? Most of the mining pioneers like Longyear were driven by the profit motive. They speculated with their claims and probably never had any intention of running long-lasting mining operations. Adventurism often played a role. Nonetheless, they increasingly also became perceived as representatives of their countries. The nations involved, especially Norway and Sweden, as well as Britain and Russia, wanted to supply their emerging industries with cheap energy, but also attempted to underline their claims to the archipelago with mining operations. Why did many mining operations fail, however? The disadvantages of mining on Svalbard, such as the harsh Arctic conditions and the limited time for shipping in the summer, always outweighed the advantages, like the good quality of the coal and the technically relatively easy ways of exploiting it. Most companies underestimated the external costs like transport and maintaining the infrastructure in such a remote mining region. Also, personnel costs were higher than on the mainland. The companies had to pay higher wages to attract and keep the workers and to supply them with necessities like housing and food. They also underestimated the Arctic conditions and the remoteness of Svalbard. No industrial cluster with suppliers and processing industries developed either. It could also be argued that, more recently, the closing of the mines was also influenced by political considerations seeking to promote an imaginary of a ‘green Norway’. The other ‘industries’ on Svalbard like tourism and research are also based on the exploitation of natural resources, the scenic beauty of the Arctic and the scientific relevance of the archipelago, especially its geology.

3 https://www.snsk.no/nyheter/7845/store-norske-forlenger-gruvedriften-pa-svalbard (accessed 20 September 2022).

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Settlements on Svalbard The development of settlements on Spitsbergen4 was a consequence of mining. During the whaling period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries only a few land stations on the west coast of Spitsbergen were built by English and Dutch whalers to process whale blubber (Hacquebord and Avango 2009: 26). The stations included furnaces for processing the blubber as well as some tents and wooden houses for the workers and sailors when the ships were at anchor. The biggest was Smeerenburg (‘Blubbertown’) on Amsterdamøya, though its actual size was overblown in some stories (Nansen 1922: 256).5 As documented in the excavations of the LASHIPA-Project6 it consisted of only about 16 buildings (Hacquebord 2012). By 1642 Smeerenburg had already been abandoned because the whalers went elsewhere, namely to the Antarctic Sea. Therefore, the whaling stations never advanced beyond the initial phase and had no influence on the further development of settlements on Svalbard. The settlements built during the time of ‘occupations’ in the late nineteenth century, such as Brucebyen at Billefjorden, were only camps, despite sometimes carrying ‘byen’ (Norwegian for village or town) in their names. They existed only temporarily and consisted mostly of tents. The placename ‘(Ny)London’ given to a mining camp for a marble quarry on Blomstrandhalvøya in Kongsfjorden pointed to the imaginary of building a big town (NPI 2013: 272) as did other place names. It was built in 1911 and closed in 1932. Some of the houses were moved to nearby NyÅlesund. But none of these camps developed beyond the initial phase. Most were inhabited only during the summer, although sometimes the houses were guarded by hunters during the winter. When industrial mining began at the turn of the century, the first permanent settlements were built and the establishment phase began. One of the first permanent settlements was Advent City on the northern shore of Adventfjorden, built in 1904 by the British ‘Spitsbergen Coal and Trading Co’. The

4 Except for some weather-stations, such as on the island of Hopen, there are no permanent settlements on the other islands of Svalbard. 5 According to the English discoverer William Scoresby, Smeerenburg was alleged to be a real town with thousands of inhabitants (Scoresby 1820: 148; see Nansen 1922: 258). 6 ‘Large-Scale Resource Exploitation in Polar Areas’, a research project by the Arctic Center of the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

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name ‘city’ showed the imaginary of building something ‘big’ and permanent. But the company failed to build up a sustainable network of clients, workers and suppliers (Kruse 2013), and after the closing of the mine the remaining buildings were moved to nearby Hiorthhamn (NPI 2013: 22), where they are still standing. This mine was also operated only for a short time from 1917–1921 by the Norwegian A/S De Norske Kulfelter Spitsbergen (NPI 2013: 183). Today it is one of the best-preserved villages on Spitsbergen and the houses are used as holiday homes by the inhabitants of Longyearbyen. As is common practice in many company towns, the places were named after the founders and owners of the mining companies. However, most of these settlements were good examples of company towns reaching the establishment phase but failing to progress further. On Spitsbergen, the settlements that reached the ‘consolidation phase’ were Ny-Ålesund, Pyramiden, Barentsburg and Colesbukta, Svea (gruvan),7 and, last but not least, Longyearbyen. These differed significantly in the ways in which they adapted to the changing economic conditions after the end of mining. Ny-Ålesund at Kongsfjorden is known as the northernmost settlement in the world (78°50‘N)8 and became famous as the starting point for polar expeditions such as Andrée’s failed balloon flight in 1897, Amundsen’s failed flight of 1925 and Nobile’s and Amundsen’s successful crossing of the North Pole in the airship Norge in 1926. Therefore, NyÅlesund always had the imaginary of the ‘gateway to the North Pole’. However, originally Ny-Ålesund was one of the first planned company towns on Svalbard built in 1917 on a rectangular layout by the (still existing) Kings Bay Kul Company A/S. In 1918 the town already had 300 inhabitants and was planned with its still existing houses in the Norwegian country style as a ‘family town’ (Reymert 2016: 24) for a mining community (‘samfunn’) (Hauan and Reymert 2013). After the closing of the last mine in 1963 the town changed to become a ‘science village’, calling itself ‘the most important research station in the Arctic’.9 It is still operated by the state-owned Kings Bay AS ‘a company where the state seeks the most efficient possible attainment of public policy goals’. The company

7 Sveagruvan was the name in Swedish times. 8 Qaanaaq in NW-Greenland is situated at 77°29´N, while Alert in Canada (82°30‘N)

and Station Nord in NE-Greenland (81°43´N) are military bases. 9 https://kingsbay.no/about-us/ (accessed 16 January 2023).

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‘contributes to maintaining Norwegian communities in the archipelago in accordance with overarching Svalbard policy’. The strategy behind that is to become ‘the world leader in facilitating scientific research and research-driven cultural heritage-management in the Arctic’.10 In accordance with these guidelines the town is to be maintained ‘as a community and Norwegian settlement’ as well as a ‘green and sustainable research station’ (Kings Bay 2021). Special attention is paid to the conservation of its cultural heritage. A very special place is the former mining village of Svea which lived through many ‘ups and downs’ (Avango and Brugmans 2018).11 It was founded in 1917 by the Swedish ‘Jernkontoret ’ (‘ore office’), not only to supply Swedish blast furnaces with coal, but also to strengthen the Swedish position in the discussion about the sovereignty of Svalbard (Avango 2005: 370). However, after the Svalbard Treaty came into force in 1926, the mine was sold to SNSK, mainly because the Norwegian government wanted to prevent the Russians from taking over another coalfield (Avango and Brugmans 2018: 58). Industrial mining started after World War II and reached its climax with the brief coal rush in the early twenty-first century, when the new Lunckefjell mine, intended to secure the future of mining, was built. However, the mine never went into operation due to the declining price of coal. After the closing of the mines the Norwegian government decided to dismantle all buildings and installations except for some protected buildings from early times. The whole industrial landscape was to return to the time before mining and the area would become a national park, as described in the ‘Afslutningsplanen’ (closing plan).12 Demolition work finished in 2022. It was done in part by the former miners themselves. One can assume that all this was done not just for reasons of environmental protection and to fulfil the ‘postmining narrative of returning to nature’ (Ødegaard 2021), but also to feed the supposed imaginary of Norway as ‘green country’ and prevent other nations from exploiting their mining rights under the regulations of the Svalbard Treaty. Svea never had a permanent population. The workers were flown in for 14-day shifts. But even though Svea was not their 10 https://kingsbay.no/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Kings_Bay_strategy_2021% E2%80%932024.pdf. 11 In Swedish times it was called ‘Sveagruvan’. 12 https://www.snsk.no/miljoprosjektet/om-miljoprosjektet

2022).

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‘hometown’, the miners had a strong emotional relationship to the place, as documented in songs and movies.13 The alternatives of preserving Svea or giving it a new purpose as a place for tourism or research never seemed to be realistic options. In addition, the plans of a group of architects14 to relocate some of the buildings to Longyearbyen failed, except in the case of the translocation of the former airport tower.15 The imaginary of a pre-industrial landscape was created, and visual references to 100 years of mining were nearly extinguished. Ødegaard (2021) calls this a ‘social drama’ and a ‘postmining utopia’. The Russian mining settlements Pyramiden and Barentsburg reflected the imaginary of Soviet model communities, although they were originally founded by Swedish and Dutch companies. The urban plan of Pyramiden (Andreassen et al. 2010: 57) is still visible with the central axis and the strict separation of functions: houses for officials on one side and for workers and their families on the other. The quality of the architecture is high, especially in the buildings for social purposes. The canteen is built in a traditional Russian style while the sports centre and the cultural palace are built in the style of ‘modern brutalism’. Pyramiden could be called a real ‘town’ because it always tried to be self-sufficient with greenhouses and stables for the cattle. Actually, the owner Trust Arktikugol is trying to revive the Soviet imaginary and the imaginary of a ‘lost place’ by offering stays in the newly reopened Soviet-style hotel16 (see Fig. 8.2 in Hemmersam’s chapter in this collection). In contrast to nearly abandoned Pyramiden, Barentsburg is still an active mining community, although mining is in decline. The design of Barentsburg is oriented to the topography. The ‘old town’ consists of wooden houses built in the Russian style on the hillside, connected by a long set of steps. This part of the town is in a state of decay. The ‘new town’ with two big apartment blocks and the modern sports and cultural centre is situated on the ‘upland’. Like Pyramiden the town is still owned and managed by Trust Arktikugol and the real ‘mayor’ seems to be the Russian Consul General. The mine is still active, but the Russians

13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x7hNzcX1eM. 14 https://www.lpo.no/sok?q=Svea. 15 https://www.svalbardposten.no/flyplass-haehre-entreprenor-svea/flytarnet-fra-sveatil-sentrum/494088 (accessed 2 December 2022). 16 https://www.goarctica.com/pyramiden (accessed 25 September 2022).

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Fig. 9.1 Barentsburg, Svalbard 2022 (Photograph by the Author)

are trying to promote Barentsburg as a tourist attraction and research site (Fig. 9.1). Longyearbyen The initial phase of Longyearbyen started in 1906 when the settlement was founded by the American engineer John M. Longyear. He wanted to participate in the industrialization of Scandinavia by building up an ore- and coalmining complex in Norway (Hartnell 2009: 56). But his attempts to open the Sydvaranger iron ore mine near Kirkenes in northern Norway failed. He travelled to Spitsbergen on a German cruise ship, looking for the ideal place to open a coal mine. He found such a place at Adventfjorden and established the Arctic Coal Co. (ACC). Here, he built up a system of mines, infrastructure (jetty, ropeways, railways, power station) and a settlement, consisting of a row of barracks for 300 miners. Of course, his primary interest was to make profit. He saw mining as a short-term investment only, hoping to get a higher price for selling an operating mine than just a claim to the land (Hartnell 2009: 80).

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But he also had a vision or imaginary that is expressed in the title of the history of ACC: America in Spitsbergen—The Romance of an Arctic Coal Mine (Dole 1922). He wanted to establish an example of American entrepreneurship in the Arctic (though not one resembling the model of the paternalistic entrepreneur so often found in other company towns). However, Longyear failed. He was not able to build up a network of suppliers and customers and faced resistance from the newly formed independent Norwegian government,17 without receiving any compensating support from the American government. As the mine never made a profit it was sold in 1916 to the Norwegian SNSK and the town of Longyear City was renamed Longyearbyen. The ‘establishment-phase’ of Longyearbyen lasted from 1916 until World War II, when SNSK expanded the mines and the town. Longyearbyen was never a planned town. The settlements followed the mines anti-clockwise through Longyeardalen (Reymert 2013: 10). The oldest parts of the town were Skjæringa and Gamle Longyearbyen situated near Gruve 1. Sverdrupbyen followed later. This development is still visible in the design of the town though most buildings were demolished during World War II. The consolidation phase lasted from 1945 until the 1970s. Two new districts, Nybyen and Haugen, were built. New mines (Gruver 3, 5, 6 and 7) were sunk in Adventdalen. However, the town stayed in its old place and the workers were transferred to the new mines by bus. Starting in the 1970s, and continuing until today, a transition phase began in which Longyearbyen started to change from a company town to (at least in aspiration) a ‘normal Norwegian community’ as explained in the book ‘Fra Company Town til Folkestyre’ (Arlov 2001). In order to become more economically viable and to reduce the reliance on subsidies, SNSK concentrated on mining, while other activities were outsourced to private companies or the state. An early form of local self-government was installed which led to nearly complete local democracy (‘Lokalstyre’) in 2002. Important key events in this phase were the opening of the airport in 1975, which ended the isolation of the island and the opening of the university centre UNIS in 1993, which marked the transition to a ‘science city’.

17 In 1905 Norway dissolved the union with Sweden and became an independent kingdom.

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This change in the character of the town is visible in its design and architecture. The endeavour to change from a (male-dominated) workers town to a family-town is expressed in the colourful ‘spissehus ’. Also, new living-quarters, like Lia, a shopping centre, a new hospital, new hotels and other facilities were built (Fig. 9.2). The imaginary of a mining-company town is fading, though some relics, like the entrances to the mines, the ropeways with the cablecar centre ‘taubanesentralen’, and especially the nearly abandoned mining village of Nybyen (about three kilometres outside the centre of the town) provide highly visible reminders (Fig. 9.3). Nowadays the city is at another turning point. The consequences of climate change, resulting in more landslides, floodings and avalanches, as well as the planned end of Norwegian mining in 2025 present the city with new challenges. However, in contrast to many other mining-company towns and old industrialized regions that fell into decay after mine closures, Longyearbyen remained stable. There was no decline in population or

Fig. 9.2 Family homes (so-called spissehus ) in Longyearbyen, Svalbard 2022 (Photograph by the Author)

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Fig. 9.3 Nybyen, Svalbard 2022 (Photograph by the Author)

jobs. On the contrary: the population has stabilized at about 2500 and the number of jobs levelled at about 2000. There has been a change in the composition of the population and the workforce, though. Between 2010 and 2020 the number of jobs in mining fell from 410 to 96, or from 19% of the workforce to about 4%, while the number of jobs in tourism, leisure and retail increased from 341 to 468 at the same time. In science and research, the number of jobs grew from 194 to 496. While most miners were Norwegian, the changes in the labour market also led to the proportion of foreigners in the local population increasing to approximately 30%. However, due to the change in the economy, the gross domestic product (turnover) fell from approximately 5.5 billion NOK in 2008 to about 3.8 billion NOK in 202118 as a result of the loss of high-paid jobs in mining.19

18 https://www.ssb.no/en/virksomheter-foretak-og-regnskap/virksomheter-og-for etak/statistikk/naeringer-pa-svalbard (accessed 15 May 2023). 19 All figures from: https://www.ssb.no/en/sok?sok=Svalbard (accessed 15 May 2023).

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What are the imaginaries for the future of Longyearbyen? Will there be a new path of economic and social development and a new ‘pioneer-phase’? Demolition, as at Svea, or continued existence but as a ‘ghost town’ like Pyramiden are not realistic options, as Longyearbyen will continue to be the symbol of the Norwegian presence on Svalbard. But, due to the laws of regional economy, Longyearbyen has no chance of endogenous development. It is too small and too remote to gain the advantages of agglomeration. The town is not self-sufficient and depends on external trade for nearly everything, except, until now, energy. The high rate of population turnover due to limited-term contracts in tourism, science and administration prevents the formation of a stable urban society. Imaginaries for the future of Svalbard and especially Longyearbyen are laid down in the ‘Lokalsamfunsplan 2022–2033’ (Local community plan’, Longyearbyen Lokalstyre 2022). This plan builds on the national goals for Svalbard, documented in regular reports to the parliament (‘Svalbard- or stortingsmeldingen’).20 It contains the goals to be implemented in more specific plans like the spatial plan (‘arealplan’; Longyearbyen Lokalstyre 2016), or plans for energy or economic development. The national goals primarily aim at the preservation of Norwegian sovereignty by maintaining a Norwegian family community (‘samfunn’), fulfilling the Svalbard Treaty and preserving the Arctic wilderness and environment. The strategy for Svalbard is a part of the Norwegian Arctic strategy (Nordområdestrategi) (Utenriksdepartementet 2017) ‘between geopolitics and community development’ (‘mellom geopolitikk og samfunnsutvikling ’). The ‘North’, which includes the northern part of the mainland, the Arctic islands, and the Barents Sea, is a part of Norwegian identity and with its resources a basis for Norwegian prosperity. The goals of the Samfunsplan are very general and are based on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Longyearbyen is supposed to be a unique, sustainable, safe and creative Norwegian community. It is also seen as an Arctic model community and an experimental field for living in the Arctic. This is called ‘testinajon’ in the Samfunsplan. On the one hand, the uniqueness of Longyearbyen is emphasized. On the other, it is to become more and more 20 https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/379f96b0ed574503b47765f0a15622ce/ no/pdfs/stm201520160032000dddpdfs.pdf (accessed 6 December 2022).

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like a ‘normal Norwegian community’. The economic development plan (‘handlings-og økonomiplan’, Longyearbyen Lokalstyre 2019) sees the economic future after the expected end of mining in science and research, quality tourism and Arctic technology like deep-sea-mining. Longyearbyen is also seen as a gateway to the Northern seas, especially the Northeast Passage or an ice-free shipping route across the North Pole. The local government (‘lokalstyre’) translates these goals into practical actions. These include the planned improvement of the town centre, the creation of new areas for commerce and the opening of the town to the Fjord. But there are also measures to make the town more resilient to the consequences of climate change, such as the recently finished protective wall against landslides, the relocation of homes to safer areas or the conversion of power supply from fossil to renewable energy. Interestingly, the coal company SNSK continues to play a major role as a developer of real estate projects, in preserving the industrial heritage, in eliminating the consequential damages of mining and in developing strategies for using renewable energy. Do these imaginaries provide a sustainable future for Longyearbyen? The town is quite a long way from having become a ‘normal Norwegian family community’, as about a third of the population are foreigners and about half of the people are living alone in single households. In 2020 about 33% of the population moved in or out.21 The town still depends on support from the mainland, especially subsidies from the Norwegian government. Local democracy is still limited by the responsibilities of the Sysselmester (governor). In a sense, one could say that Longyearbyen is based on a contradiction: built on coal, it now has to deal with many of the consequences of a climate change (also) induced by burning coal. Nonetheless, in contrast to many other company towns, Longyearbyen seems to have a chance of ‘coping with closure’. However, it is not only finding new purposes that seems to underline the formation of new imaginaries in this respect, but also the incorporation of the preservation of the town’s industrial heritage in this context. The conservation of the mining legacies is explicitly mentioned in the development plans for Ny-Ålesund and Longyearbyen. They form 21 In 2020 the population of Longyearbyen and Ny-Ålesund was 2448. During this year 414 people moved in and 394 moved out (https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/table/ 07124/tableViewLayout1/).

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the identity of these towns and can also themselves be tourist attractions. All ‘traces of human activity in the physical environment’ dating from before 1946 are protected automatically by the Svalbard Environmental Law (Svalbard Miljøloven 22 ), among them the legacies of early mining like the buildings in Ny-Ålesund and mining sites like Brucebyen or Hiorthham. In addition, a ‘cultural heritage plan’ (‘kulturminneplan’) has been set up by Sysselmesteren in cooperation with Riksantikvaren (Sysselmannen 2013). It contains about 200 objects and sites, a quarter of them industrial monuments from the whaling and mining eras. But only the physical legacies are preserved. Svalbard Museum also tries to preserve the remembrance of working and living conditions in an ‘oral history project’. Visible mining legacies in Longyearbyen are mostly reduced to buildings that stand somewhat incoherently in the modern town. The consequences of climate change like coastal erosion are threatening monuments like the old coal loading installation in Hiorthham, and, in face of ongoing discussions, the future of Nybyen is still uncertain.

Conclusion Normally, the life of mining-company towns ends with the closure of the mine. Mostly they are too small and too remote to find new paths for economic development. Considerations about the future start too late and often no endogenous forces exist to promote a transition. Only under specific circumstances is there a possibility of a ‘locking out’ of the mining path dependency. Most of the time this is only possible with the external help of the state. The various company towns on Svalbard exhibit the full spectrum of possibilities for coping with mine closure, ranging from total abolition as at Svea, to continuation as a ghost town with an attraction for tourists like Pyramiden, to transition to new purposes as in the case of Ny-Ålesund. Longyearbyen is different as it did not fall into decline when mining went into crisis. There was no decline in population, but a change from miners to scientists, administrative staff and people working in the tourist industry. This is also visible in the design of the town, where the miners’ houses are being replaced by faceless hotels and flats so that the town is losing its imaginary of a ‘resource-frontier town’. The reasons for 22 https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/svalbard-environmental-protectionact/id173945/ (accessed 15 May 2023).

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that are that the Norwegian state and the state-owned mining-company SNSK have been the main actors in the development of the town, and the state in particular was driven not only by economic factors, but also by political considerations. The process of change started very early with the changing of the imaginary from a mining-company town to a Norwegian family-town. This was supported by the establishment of a kind of local democracy (‘lokalstyre’). Now, with the end of mining in sight, new imaginaries are emerging that focus on ideas of a sustainable and ‘green’ Arctic model community, environmentally friendly tourism, science and research, and the logistical advantages that make it serve as gateway to the Arctic. However, Longyearbyen will never be a ‘normal community’. Its imaginary was, and will continue to be, built on the extraction of natural resources: first coal and, in the future, it will be ‘tourism as new coal’ (Sokolíˇcková and Eriksen 2023: 72). This new economy in the Arctic periphery will depend on support from a distant ‘core’, in other words, subsidies from the Norwegian taxpayer. Therefore, Longyearbyen will remain a ‘state-company town’. The imaginary of Longyearbyen is a contradiction: it was built on resources which are now threatening its existence. In normal terms, Longyearbyen is no place to live, but it will continue to exist so long as it is politically necessary.

References Andreassen, Elin, Hein Bjartmann Bjerk and Bjønar Olsen (2010) Persistent Memories: Pyramiden a Soviet Mining Town. Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press. Arlov, Thor Bjørn (1996) Short History of Svalbard. Tromsø: Norsk Polarinstitutt. Arlov, Thor Bjørn (2001) Fra company town til folkestyre. Longyearbyen: Svalbard samfunnsdrift. Avango, Dag (2005) Sveagruvan - Svensk gruvhantering mellan industri, diplomati och geovetenskap 1910–1934 (Berghistorika skriftserie no. 44). Stockholm: Jernkontoret. Avango, Dag and Peter Brugmans (2018) Opp og ned i 100 år: Sveagruva 1917– 1927. Longyearbyen: Svalbard Museum. Avango, Dag and Louwrens Hacquebord (2009) ‘Settlements in an Arctic research frontier region’. Arctic Anthropology 46 (1–2): 25–39. Conway, Martin (1906) No Man’s Land. London: Alpha Editions (reprint). Crawford, Margaret (1995) Building the Workingman’s Paradise. London: Verso.

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Dickens, Charles (1986, German edition) Harte Zeiten/Hard Times. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel. Dinius, Oliver J. and Angela Vergara (eds) (2011) Company Towns in the Americas. London: University of Georgia Press. Dole, Nathan H. (1922) America in Spitsbergen: The Romance of an Arctic Coal Mine. Boston, MA: Marshall Jones. Friedmann, John (1966) Regional Development Policy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hacquebord, Louwrens (ed.) (2012) LASHIPA History of Large-Scale Resource Exploitation in Polar Areas. Groningen: Barkhuis. Hacquebord, Louwrens and Dag Avango (2009) ‘Settlements in Arctic frontier regions’. Arctic Anthropology 46 (1–2): 25–39. Hartnell, Cameron (2009) Arctic Network Builders: The Arctic Coal Company’s Operations on Spitsbergen and Its Relationship to the Environment. Houghton, MI: Michigan Technological University. Hassink, Robert and Huiwenk Gonk (2020) ‘Regional resilience’. In: Audrey Kobayashi (ed.) International Encyplopedia of Human Geography. Amsterdam: Elsevier: 351–355. Hauan, Marit Anne and Per Kyrre Reymert (eds) (2013) Ny-Ålesund – fortellinger fra gruveliv på Svalbard. Tromsø: Tromsø Museums Skrifter. Hemmersam, Peter (2021) Making the Arctic City. London: Bloomsbury. Howard, Ebenezer (2015, reprint) Gartenstädte von Morgen. Gütersloh: Birkhäuser Bauwelt Fundamente. Kings Bay AS (2021) Kings Bay AS Strategy 2021–2024 (published on www.kin gsbay.no). Klees, C. (1925) ‘Ausbeutung und wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Kohlevorkommen Spitzbergens’. Glückauf 61 (40): 1251–1257. Kruse, Frigga (2013) Frozen Assets. British Mining, Exploration, and Geopolitics on Spitsbergen, 1904–53. Groningen: RUG Groningen Circumpolar Studies. Kulke, Elmar (2017) Wirtschaftsgeographie. Paderborn: Utb. Longyearbyen Lokalstyre (2016) Arealplan for Longyearbyen planområde 2016–2026 (https://www.lokalstyre.no/arealplan-2016-2026.486570.no. html [accessed 12 June 2023]). Longyearbyen Lokalstyre (2019) Handlingsprogram og økonomiplan 2021–2024 Budsjett 2021 (https://www.lokalstyre.no/handlingsprogram-oekonomiplanog-budsjett.486569.no.html [accessed 12 June 2023]). Longyearbyen Lokalstyre (2022) Lokalsamfunnsplan 2022–2033 (https:// www.lokalstyre.no/lokalsamfunnsplan-2022-2033.6526895-504407.html [accessed 12 June 2023]). Lucas, Rex (1971) Minetown, Milltown, Railtown. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Luciani, Andrea and Jennie Sjöholm (2018) ‘Norbotten’s technological megasystem as a heritage discourse’. AMPS Proceedings 15 (2): 292–348. Martin, Ron and Peter Sunley (2006) ‘Path dependence and regional economic evolution’. Journal of Economic Geography 6 (4): 395–437. Mikkelsen, Knut and Mariann Solberg (2009) Det store kullrushetindustriell omstilling i Arktis. Oslo: Gyldenhal. Morisset, Lucy and Jessica Mace (2019) Identity on the Land. Montréal: Patrimonium. Nansen, Fridtjof (1922) Spitzbergen. Leipzig: Brockhaus. Neil, Cecily, Markku Tykkyläinen and John Bradbury (1992) Coping with Closure: An International Comparison of Minetown Experiences. London: Routledge. Norsk Polar Institutt (2013) The Place Names of Svalbard. Tromsø: NPI Rapportserie nr.122. Ødegaard, Cecilie Vindal (2021) ‘Sosiale drama på Svalbard: tilbakeføring til natur of fortellinger om en ny tid’. Naturen 145 (2–3): 138–147. Porter, Michael E. (2008) On Competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Power, Anne, Jörg Plöger and Astrid Winkler (eds) Phoenix Cities. The Fall and Rise of Great Industrial Cities. Bristol: Rowntree. Reese, Barbara (2006) Coal – A Human History. London: Arrow Books. Reymert, Per Kyrre (2013) Longyearbyen – Fra company town til modern by. Longyearbyen: Sysselmannen. Reymert, Per Kyrre (2016) Ny-Ålesund - The World’s Northernmost Mining Town. Longyearbyen: Sysselmannen. Scoresby, William (1820) An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and a Description of Northern Whale Fishery (2 vols.). Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co. Sokolíˇcková, Zdenka and Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2023) ‘Extraction cultures in Svalbard: from mining coal to mining knowledge and memories’. In: Sverker Sörlin (ed.) (2023) Resource Extraction and Arctic Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 66–87. Sörlin, Sverker (ed.) (2023) Resource Extraction and Arctic Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sysselmannen på Svalbard (2013) Kulturminneplan for Svalbard 2013– 2023 (https://www.sysselmesteren.no/contentassets/a68fc9647eaa4c72bcfee 9835f448a96/sysselmannen_kulturminnepl_2013_web-2.pdf [accessed 12 June 2023]). Trinder, Barrie (1992) The Making of the Industrial Landscape. Gloucester: Sutton Publishing.

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Utenriksdepartementet (2017) Nordområdestrategi-mellom geopolitikk og samfunnsutvikeling (https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokume nter/strategi_nord/id2550081/ [accessed 12 June 2023]).

PART IV

Living Imaginaries

CHAPTER 10

A Collective Imagination of the Future of Svalbard Communities Lisbeth Iversen

Introduction Svalbard is home to the people living in the world’s northernmost communities. The archipelago is experiencing rapid climate change, flux in its population and uncertainty with regard to planning, housing and future jobs. Climate change is turning the Arctic, including Svalbard, into one of the most radically altered parts of the world. The Norwegian climate action plan for 2021–20301 states that, in Svalbard and the Arctic, we are seeing dramatic changes and there is nowhere on earth where warming is happening at a faster rate. Since 1971, Svalbard has experienced a warming of 7 °C in winter. This is resulting in substantial social and cultural impacts, threatening residential areas and cultural heritage sites and monuments, as well as business development and tourism (Stoddart and Smith 2016). The town of Longyearbyen is Svalbard’s main 1 Meld St. 13 (2020–2021) (regjeringen.no).

L. Iversen (B) The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_10

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Norwegian settlement and the main case examined in this chapter. Uncertainty as to what the future of Longyearbyen and Svalbard might look like under these changing conditions has been the reason for some of the many questions raised by actors there. The Norwegian government’s overall Svalbard policy2 states that the islands should exemplify the strongest environmental protections in the world, but it is debatable how the national policies and framework are being put into practice and whether or not the national approach is in alignment with the imaginaries underlying or guiding policies, people’s experiences and imaginaries at the local level in Longyearbyen. Urban imaginaries are here seen as a platform for exploring a multiplicity of meanings in a city or town, as well as future visions and imaginations. The making and remaking of public culture are based on a variety and complexity of narratives, visions and imaginations that develop and exist within the city, merging as results of the experience of the city as lived through by its various residents. The background to my discussion of the urban imaginaries and future imaginations underpinning or guiding planning and policies in Svalbard has been my participation in interdisciplinary projects like INTAROS,3 a Horizon 2020 project, the UAK4 project and the CAPARDUS5 project that has Svalbard as one of its case studies. The work has been based especially on community-based monitoring (CBM) programmes and citizen science (CS) projects (Danielsen et al. 2021). In addition, I have addressed sustainable planning, development and co-creation approaches through my public sector PhD work at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, AHO. The interdisciplinary collaboration brought about through the establishment of Svalbard Social Science Initiative (SSSI), working to bridge the gap between social science, natural science and society, has also been important in providing a critical lens to examine the subjects and subjectivities of urban imagination embedded in the politics of urban planning and development and urban future imaginations in Svalbard, especially with respect to Longyearbyen.

2 Meld. St. 32 (2015–2016)—(regjeringen.no). 3 https://www.nersc.no/project/intaros. 4 UAK: Useful Arctic Knowledge—Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center. 5 https://www.nersc.no/project/capardus.

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Results over the duration of the research have continued to resituate the material in time, navigating between national and local planning frameworks and various imaginaries and policy documents. This is related to how the actors are reconfiguring themselves in a new urban context framed by major change forces (Moore-Cherry 2015) and in Svalbard by new national policies and regulations. In this chapter, I discuss whether there is any evidence of a collective imagination or co-creative effort to form an overarching future imaginary for a sustainable Longyearbyen and Svalbard, or whether the current status is not rather a collection of conflicting imaginaries and failed attempts to coordinate future goals. Sustainability is here defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.6 I start with a short introduction to the framework of urban planning imaginaries and sustainability goals from the global to the local level. I then reflect on a variety of policies, urban and future visions and discrepancies in plans and policy documents which are supposed to guide and coordinate sustainable urban development and anchor future collective imaginaries. This is followed by reflections on Svalbard and the environmental protection imaginary of the Norwegian authorities. I continue with an analysis of Longyearbyen as a community or communities, based on people’s experiences of the town, between the imaginary of ‘Norwegianness’ and experiences of ‘otherness’. Further I look at whether and how the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are being addressed in the light of increasing tourism and internationalization, follow up with a discussion on the revisions of protection plans for the national parks in Svalbard, a topic much debated there over recent years. At the end of the chapter I look at future imaginaries of Longyearbyen, envisaged, among other things, as a showcase for green transition and sustainable development, before the final discussion and conclusion.

6 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-fut ure.pdf.

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Urban Planning Imaginaries, from the Global to the Local Scale Global political, ecological and technological transformations and new media innovations are influencing the state of urban imaginaries research, and the role of urban imaginaries in shaping global-urban futures (Lindner and Meissner 2018). Planning is a central task in the development of cities and places, often based on visions and imaginaries of a preferred future. Collaboration and citizen participation in these processes have become increasingly complex and challenging (Hanssen and Falleth 2014). More tailor-made approaches have been requested and tested (Agger 2012), although collaborative planning has been acknowledged for years (Healey 1997). Participation and co-creation approaches are claimed to be providing viable expertise for planning, governing and managing the environment, for example in cultural heritage management, by contributing broad knowledge and in-depth understanding (Nyseth and Viken 2015; Nicu et al. 2021), as well as collective visions and goals. Over the last decade CBM and SC programmes have seen substantial international growth, based on the approach of linking top-down and bottom-up perspectives and initiatives, and viewing them in the light of overall policies (Eicken et al. 2021; Danielsen et al. 2021). Although the planning and management of local resources, nature and cultural heritage are often guided or steered by the authorities in top-down planning processes, there is a need, which is especially relevant to Svalbard, for updated scientific and technical knowledge, local knowledge, experience and involvement to be able to generate well-informed and sustainable decisions (Eicken et al. 2021), as well as common visions. Co-creation and broad participation have thus become important approaches, and the shift has, among other things, been called the ‘Third Way’, leading towards the ‘Welfare Society’ as a replacement for the ‘Welfare State’ (Giddens 1998). The idea is that co-creation might liberate resources and make processes more inclusive, leading to collaboration in finding solutions to mutual challenges and creating public value and future visions and imaginaries together. Still, the processes can sometimes be highly unpredictable and the outcomes are far from certain (Guribye 2017; Ulrich 2016). Co-creation has partly been evolving as a result of the criticism caused by the long-time domination and legacy of natural science in planning and the broader environmental discourses, both as knowledge producers

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and governmental instruments. This is especially relevant to the Svalbard context. While traditional scientific research continues to be seen as the authoritative basis for decision-making, planning, resource allocation and service provision, growing awareness has emerged of the need to integrate more diversified ways of knowledge production (Guribye 2017; Ansell and Torfing 2021; United Nations 2015; WHO 2016). Research, communities of practice and local experiences have all been argued to provide viable expertise for the governing and management of, for example, the environment and cultural heritage (Nyseth and Viken 2015; Nicu et al. 2021). Still, questions are raised about whether the co-creation of knowledge can provide holistic and sustainable visions, solutions and decisions (Torfing et al. 2019; Ulrich 2016), or simply serve as a buzzword for matching the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainable Development Goals and the Agenda 2030 Internationally the need for collaboration on new urban imaginaries and a sustainable future was reinforced by the Paris Agreement, based on a development of the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were adopted by 196 parties at COP 21 in Paris in 20157 following the adaptation of Agenda 2030. This was the first international attempt to create a framework for common sustainability goals (Dankel et al. 2023). It can also be seen as an effort to co-create overarching imaginaries for a better future, on the basis that our actions have both local and global impact, as people and landscapes are closely connected at local to global scales (Steffen et al. 2015). The goals need to be both downscaled or ‘localized’ and implemented within the specific local context (Delgado-Serrao and Ramos 2015). ‘Localization’ is a term used by the UN as a tool to operationalize the SDGs. Implementation and validation at the local level is not a straightforward process, as the 17 SDGs will reveal tensions, dilemmas resulting from competing interests as well as the conflicting priorities and imaginaries and the need for evaluation schemes (Fukuda-Parr and McNeill 2019), also seen in Svalbard research. Nonetheless, the goals are still considered to be useful tools for a holistic approach to securing sustainable development.

7 https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement.

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Providing broad knowledge and science data for better ‘real-world’ decision-making could be achieved through the coordination of research efforts to cross-weave knowledge and share results. In my Svalbard research an understanding of the UN SDG 17’s ‘Partnership for the Goals’ has been crucial. SDG 17: ‘Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development’ and SDG 17.17: ‘Encourage and promote effective public, public–private, and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships’, have been guiding principles. The focus on co-creation to reach key public values aligned with the SDGs and human rights has been increasing in planning and urban development imaginaries (Ansell and Torfing 2021; WHO 2016). Efforts to identify attempts at downscaling the UN SDGs, and the principle of participatory planning and development stated among others by the EU in 2016 (Bouche and Luc 2019) has been guiding my work. One example of this approach in the international planning discourse is ‘The New European Bauhaus initiative’8 which connects the ‘European Green Deal’9 to our living spaces. ‘It calls on all Europeans to imagine and build together a sustainable and inclusive future that is beautiful for our eyes, minds, and souls’. It is seen as a creative and interdisciplinary movement in the making. Changing perspectives and new urban imaginaries are highlighted to implement the green deal and digital challenges through transformative approaches down to local level. The Nordic Council of Ministers followed this up with a joint Nordic Smart City Vision to develop a Nordic ‘human-centred and collaborative smart city model’, a model for the digital shift, building on ‘societal values of trust, equity, and collective rights’, adopting design, architecture and urbanism as a starting point. Other policy documents point towards change and innovation for future urban imaginaries and dynamic models and cocreation for public innovation to adapt to global change forces (InFuture 2019). Although implemented in the Norwegian planning and building act, it has not secured implementation in the overall planning and urban imaginaries of Svalbard, as Svalbard law and the Svalbard Treaty frame

8 https://new-european-bauhaus.europa.eu/index_en. 9 https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/european-

green-deal_en.

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planning and imaginaries of present and future urban development initiated by the Norwegian authorities in Svalbard. The planning and building act is, however, still used by the local council in Longyearbyen as a guiding approach in planning processes.

Svalbard---A Variety of Policies, Urban and Future Visions There will always be as many urban imaginaries as there are citizens, and never one narrative that can grasp the totality of a city or town. To explore cities or towns demands an understanding that they ‘are not only material but practised, represented and sensed. Each of these dimensions is filled with infinite possibilities for a city to be, to be experienced and to become’.10 This is also the case for Svalbard. To bring in the experiences and voices of many actors has therefore been essential in my work. What Svalbard is and has been, and for whom, is a challenging and debatable topic, as highlighted by among other Roald Berg and Klaus Dodds in this collection. Over the last few centuries, Svalbard has been through changing epochs of human activity from an early discovery and exploration phase, periods of hunting and of natural resource extraction and mining activities. Longyearbyen has been undergoing a transformation in recent decades from a company town into a modern community town based mostly on research and tourism (see Ulrich Schildberg’s chapter in this collection). In addition, climate change is especially challenging in Svalbard. A comprehensive analysis of how the climate has changed and the projections until 2100 was published in 2019 in the report ‘Climate in Svalbard 2100’.11 Globalization, shifting political relations, geopolitics, migration, rapid social and economic developments, mitigation, resource extraction, land use management and tourism are other important challenges (Evengård et al. 2015). The Covid 19 pandemic added to the challenging context of planning, monitoring and development in Svalbard, as well as how to imagine a sustainable future. In towns and cities, people have the opportunity to make sense of, respond to and imagine change, often developed and defined by the interaction between different social groups, values, policy 10 https://www.urbanimaginaries.com/. 11 https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/globalassets/publikasjoner/M1242/M1242.pdf.

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frameworks, laws, symbols, institutions and organizations (Sartre 2010). I will look closer at how this changing framework has been affecting the various actors in Svalbard, as well as the imaginaries of plans, policies and visions of the future in the following sections. Through analysis of planning and policy documents and action research, it became obvious that a paradigmatic shift towards an imaginary of anthropocenic consciousness has been developing. Global warming and other changes are framing planning processes, development polices and ongoing discussions related to the future of Svalbard. This was reinforced by two severe disasters in 2015 and 2017 when avalanches hit housing areas in Longyearbyen, causing damage to homes, and several casualties. In 2017, the Norwegian government decided to stop coal mining and close the Svea mine, and eventually dismantle the mining infrastructure, a signal of a shift in the overall visions for Svalbard. National goals and guidelines for planning and development are first of all maintained by the Svalbard Environment Protection Act (2001)12 which outlines a goal for Svalbard to be ‘one of the best-managed wilderness areas in the world’ and maintain an almost untouched environment in terms of connected wilderness, landscape, flora, fauna and cultural heritage. The Act is the most important instrument for the authorities in addition to legislation for planning areas and local communities, together with the overall Svalbard Policy13 and the policy signals in ‘Experience Norway – a unique adventure’.14 The national policies state that environmentally sound housing, research and business and commercial operations must be provided within this framework. Tangible heritage is recognized and strictly protected if built before 1946. Environmental protection should be achieved through cautious and knowledge-based use, but scientific knowledge and the precautionary principle are still the foundations of overall planning and regulations. Ecological and societal transformations are happening at a pace and to an extent unknown in other parts of the world, creating challenges to planning, tourism, ecosystems, mobility and the necessity for the protection of the natural and cultural heritage in Svalbard (AMAP 2011; Hollesen et al. 2018; Nicu et al. 2021).

12 https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/svalbard-environmental-protectionact/id173945/. 13 https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/meld.-st.-32-20152016/id2499962/. 14 https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/meld.-st.-19-20162017/id2543824/.

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Svalbard and the Environmental Protection Imaginary of Norwegian Authorities—Nature Over Culture Through the research projects and pilot testing, and collaboration in the SSSI network, we have focused on, among other things, natural and cultural heritage practices in Svalbard, using an ethnographic approach and a value-theory lens to analyse the interactions between policy, practice, ethics and discourse (Saville 2019). It is clear that the precautionary principle has not solved issues like monitoring and gathering of data across sciences and tourist operators to support cultural and natural protection management. In 2013 the Governor launched a plan for cultural heritage management in Svalbard,15 but lack of time and resources led to few actions by the authorities. In the field of cultural heritage protection and management knowledge-based approaches and collaboration across actors and institutions have long been recommended (Hagen et al. 2012), but this is not the case for Svalbard. Cultural heritage is stated in the overall Svalbard policy to be a basic part of the environment. It is seen by many actors as a basic prerequisite for the exploration of wildlife and nature and an inseparable part of the terms environment, nature and wildlife. The national imaginary underpinning the Svalbard policy, to leave cultural heritage to be surrendered to climate change and natural forces, has not taken into account the accelerating processes of climate change and the importance of cultural heritage to society and tourism. UN SDG 11.4, which seeks to strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage, demands broad knowledge and up-to-date information on threats that they face, resilience to these threats as well as on the condition of sites and artefacts. This is not addressed in the national policy documents. Locally in Longyearbyen, the loss of cultural heritage has been claimed by many actors in our projects to affect people’s well-being, and offer less value to tourists and the local communities. This was also discussed at the CAPARDUS workshop and field trip in Longyearbyen in August 2022. Participating researchers argued that a paradigm shift is taking place with respect to cultural heritage management, as well as ongoing discussions about on-site preservation approaches, an issue also confirmed by other researchers (e.g. Hollesen et al. 2018; Martens 2016; Sesana et al. 2021). 15 Kulturminneplan for Svalbard 2013–2023 (https://www.sysselmesteren.no/conten tassets/bffbcd7fa7ae42ad8c6c22f047b360b3/kulturminneplan-2013---2023.pdf).

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Lack of registration of cultural heritage in Svalbard as well as challenges relating to cultural heritage management were confirmed by a representative of cultural heritage management at the governor’s office in a seminar hosted by the Directorate of Cultural Heritage in March 2022.16 The necessity of collaborating with other actors and working in new ways was emphasized, amid discussions on how to manage the registration of items of cultural heritage, how to protect and what to protect. The new approaches involving restoration and the use of the former power plant in Longyearbyen through the FOSSIL project could be seen as one example of a shift in the main approach or imaginary of leaving sites and artefacts to natural processes or demolition (Brode-Roger 2022). The imaginaries that have underpinned the various phases of development of the towns in Svalbard, as explained by Ulrich Schildberg in this collection, are also strongly based on physical buildings and artefacts, as well as cultural heritage. International institutions have long insisted that cultural heritage serves as a bridge between the past, the present and the future. It highlights cultural, social and geographical diversity, bridging different epochs. Cultural heritage also reveals various viewpoints and narratives about people and places, as well as being an instrument for historical and scientific studies and an important source of collective memories.17 Collaboration between several cultural heritage projects and local actors in Svalbard has been strengthened, and digitalization strategies have been presented to map, monitor and preserve sites in order to reach the new goals of Norway’s cultural environment policy.18 This states that cultural heritage relates to environmental, social and economic sustainability, in contrast to the overall Svalbard policy imaginary of nature over culture. Knowledge, experience and engagement are central values underpinning the future role that the cultural environment can play according to the national cultural environment policy, also represented in three new national goals. The opportunity to get involved in and assume responsibility for the cultural environment is seen as essential. Second, through integrated land use and social planning the cultural environment should contribute to sustainable development.

16 Riksantikvartimen: Cultural monuments in Svalbard, 10 March 2022. 17 https://whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/. 18 https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/35b42a6383f442b4b501de0665ec8fcf/ en-gb/pdfs/stm201920200016000engpdfs.pdf.

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Third, broad knowledge, experience and use should be ensured through the preservation of a diversity of cultural environments.19 The UN SDGs state that cultural environment and tangible cultural heritage are both community resources and common goods, but many conflicting imaginaries and interests make this challenging to deliver on. Many international institutions address the need not only to handle environmental conflicts better, but also to identify and encompass the relations between society and nature, society’s use of and reliance on marine and coastal resources in relation to cultural aspects, economic development and the environmental framework (UNEP 2023; Ocean Decade n.d.; IPBES 2022). Co-creation has also been identified by research as being of great importance in anchoring ownership to the processes, reducing conflicts and increasing motivation to act in accordance with the conservation framework (Blomley and Walters 2019; Jones and Long 2020/2021; Stokke 2021). In addition, it is recommended that the processes be imbued with what society recognizes as economic, ecological or social ‘value’ (Osbourne et al. 2021), that will also eventually create more holistic and balanced imaginaries and visions.

Longyearbyen Longyearbyen—The Imaginary of ‘Norwegianness’ and Experiences of ‘Otherness’ Longyearbyen is being regulated and planned to become a more familybased and prosperous local society, with a Norwegian population clearly present and predominant. But Longyearbyen has a diverse, complex as well as international and fluid population, with around 35% from foreign countries. There are altogether 2504 inhabitants in Longyearbyen and Ny-Ålesund. The Russian settlements in Barentsburg and the abandoned town of Pyramiden, are hardly mentioned in the future imaginaries of Svalbard communities in national policies. In this chapter, the main focus will be on Longyearbyen. Over recent decades, there has been an adaptation towards a more classical municipal framework, with the establishment of the Longyearbyen Local Council (2002) and local elections, yet without the full rights of municipalities on the mainland. The importance of having a stable Norwegian community in Svalbard is anchored 19 Meld. St. 16 (2019–2020)—(regjeringen.no).

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in national policies. The somewhat unclear situation related to the imaginary of a ‘stable Norwegian Svalbard community’ has been challenging for many inhabitants to relate to, since at the same time Svalbard’s territorial status is based on economic opportunities and access for all nations as set out in the Svalbard Treaty, creating an international presence but also fluctuation in the population. SSSI activities and the Longyearbyen community dialogues established during the Covid 19 Pandemic provided new insight into various fields as well as the experiences and imaginaries of a variety of inhabitants, identifying a range of groups of people or ‘communities’, networks and hierarchies co-existing in Longyearbyen. The national goal of supporting a stable Norwegian community did not quite fit with the impact of a growing tourism sector gradually replacing statecontrolled coal production, changing Longyearbyen into a multinational society in a global market and pan-Arctic context. The impacts and implications of the Svalbard Treaty have been seen as far from clear for many inhabitants, insofar as the authorities imagine a Norwegian community, yet the community is international and fragmented at the same time. People have questioned the legitimacy of the community and shared stories of a sense of geopolitical vulnerability (Brode-Roger 2023). Whether a city or place is imagined as a distinct entity based on a kind of collective imagination, although shared by a population with various relations and attachments to it, or seen as a collection of communities or senses of belonging may vary for the very same space (Çinar and Bender 2007). The latter was experienced as the case by many residents of Longyearbyen, who felt there was a mismatch between expectations and lived experiences, as well as confusion over what Longyearbyen ‘actually’ is (Brode-Roger 2023). This could be seen as an instance of an imaginary of ‘otherness’, but also represents the place or town as ‘a field of experience as well as the way social and physical space is imagined and thus made into urban culture’ as the inhabitants situate themselves within a meaningful imaginary, with its solidity and boundedness. This might be different from the map showing Longyearbyen as an entity (Çinar and Bender 2007), or the state imaginary of one Norwegian community. Housing privileges for Norwegian settlers, stricter immigration rules, as well as changes to voting opportunities for people from outside Norway were some of the challenges revealed during the Longyearbyen community dialogues that did not contribute to the sense of belonging to one supportive community. That the main activities are research, tourism and commerce, which attract many international workers, challenged the

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‘Norwegianness’ of Svalbard (Hovelsrud et al. 2023). This paradox of Svalbard was revealed in interrelated topics such as increased tourism, changes in the local labour market and differences in labour conditions for people hired by Norwegian companies and others (Sokolickova 2023). In the ‘Hurdal platform’, developed by the new government in 2021, some new goals for Svalbard as a society were established. One was the ambition to develop ‘a sustainable family community at 78° north [that] enables the Longyearbyen community to become an international showcase for sustainability’.20 The fact is that many people do not identify with Longyearbyen as one community, but rather a diversity of separate communities. Sustainability Goals in the Light of Increasing Tourism and Internationalization The goal of sustainable development of the Arctic is supposed to work across forces making for socio-economic change and the impacts of climate change, and to a large extent it is gradually being integrated into policy and academic considerations regarding the region (Stephen 2018), but this is challenging for Longyearbyen and Svalbard. Although Norway is one of the countries behind the Paris agreement, few examples of actual localization or adapting the concept of the Sustainable Development Goals to the local level, are to be found, and Svalbard is no exception (Dankel et al. 2023). The White Paper on Svalbard states that the environmental goals are to be the framework for Svalbard. But in the revisions of the protection plans for the National Parks, no concrete measures have been implemented. Over a period of years, tourism, research and education have become the developmental tools to bring about an imaginary of a sustainable economic and social future in Svalbard. But sustainability is being challenged by an increase in Arctic tourism, in addition to the severe effects of climate change and competing geopolitical interests, without management tools to cope with the complex changes. There is also a conflict between the demand for tourism development and new strict environmental regulations suggested to protect nature and limit emissions from human-related activities (Hovelsrud et al. 2023).

20 https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/government_platform/id2877512/.

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The precautionary principle outlined in the Nature Diversity Act of Norway (2009)21 has been stated by the Governor as the basis for the administration of the management plan. In the planning documents overall, there has been insufficient anchoring of international agreements like the UN SDGs, the Water Framework Directive22 and coastal zone management planning, although a holistic planning approach is the main goal. The implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals was first addressed by the local council in Longyearbyen when it adopted ‘From global goals to local action in Longyearbyen’ into the Planning Strategy for 2020–2023 (Dankel et al. 2023). Residents in Longyearbyen have expressed the difficulty of relating to the imaginaries of the EU and the Paris Agreement based on the UN SDGs, when the people involved are left with hardly any possibility of choosing, for example, low-emission heating and sustainable transport. People have hardly been involved in the development of overall policies, and lack of involvement makes fair and sustainable development of societies difficult to achieve. Research has illustrated how this could be accomplished based on joint action across the whole of society, and that the necessary political setup needs to be in place to provide tools for the implementation of goals. National Norwegian policies are seen as mainly based on geopolitical values, leaving the inhabitants with few possibilities of choosing sustainable solutions in their everyday lives (Sokolickova 2023). In what could be seen as an attempt to deal with the UN SDGs, the Department of Energy (OE) implemented new regulations for ships around Svalbard on 1 January 2020. To adapt to new regulations in Svalbard, Visit Svalbard and its partners presented a revised Masterplan for the development of Svalbard and Longyearbyen as travel destinations up to 2030 in May 2022.23 The tourism sector is now aiming to become a community builder based on an integrated triple sustainability perspective as the basis for the entire strategy. Impacts of climate change, which affect the entire Svalbard ecosystem, are seen by researchers as far worse than the effects of tourism on natural and cultural heritage. Still, there is a lack of good scientific data in this field, and a need to separate the effects on natural and cultural heritage caused by tourism and climate

21 https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/nature-diversity-act/id570549/. 22 https://water.europa.eu/freshwater/europe-freshwater/water-framework-directive. 23 https://en.visitsvalbard.com/dbimgs/RevidertmasterplanSvalbard2mai2022.pdf.

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change (Hagen et al. 2012; Kaltenborn et al. 2019; Hovelsrud et al. 2020). This research claims that a complex governance system built on strict environmental regulation and preparedness is heavily affecting and limiting the opportunities of the tourist sector in Svalbard, leaving the archipelago to be characterized as a microcosm of global challenges. The newly proposed access restrictions to some areas for tourist operators will lead to an increased carbon footprint and less sustainability in areas that are currently available for tourism purposes, and this is seen by many to be a contradiction. Questions have been raised as to whether the suggested new regulations have been built on existing expert and scientific knowledge at all. It will be crucial for adaptation strategies to address climate change as well as increased tourism, which is stated to be an important national goal, but, again, strict environmental management limits the possibilities of achieving this goal. Whether there are any possibilities at all of new sustainable development opportunities for the tourist sector should be discussed (Hovelsrud et al. 2023). Revisions of Protection Plans for the National Parks in Svalbard—The Reactions in Longyearbyen The preservation of Svalbard’s distinctive wilderness is one of several overarching goals for the Svalbard policy that has been fixed for a long time. Local discussions related to national policies were escalating in 2020, among other things based on the government’s decision to investigate new measures for mitigating the strain on nature in Svalbard. In February 2020 a report was launched by The Norwegian Institute for Natural Research, NINA, on the footprint tourists leave on Svalbard, stating that increased tourism clearly has negative effects, especially from the cruise traffic activities.24 Local dissatisfaction grew stronger as bans and conservation plans were experienced as limiting the possibility for sustainable tourism in Svalbard. The process was characterized as an undemocratic hearing,25 based on ‘one-way’ communication. The management plan for Central Spitsbergen, with suggestions for new protection regulations for lower Adventdalen added to the conflicts, which escalated in connection 24 https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/anbefaler-strengere-regler-pa-svalbard_-_den-okte-turismen-har-helt-klart-negative-effekter-1.14916648. 25 Svalbardposten 26. February 2020 (https://www.svalbardposten.no/ikke-motorisertferdsel-leder-nordenskiold-land-nasjonalpark/nar-horingen-blir-udemokratisk/210010).

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with a public consultation meeting in Longyearbyen on 16 November 2021. A couple of hundred people demonstrated against new environmental regulations covering the tourism sector and outdoor activities. Representatives of national authorities acknowledged there were ‘disagreements and different views on things’, but still felt the processes and the meeting had been good. The state imaginary of the ‘best-protected environment in the world’ seemed to be underpinned by a top-down approach in the planning process. The state and the governor stated the importance of participation in the hearing process in planning documents, but involvement was kept to a minimum, and the division of responsibility between the national authorities and the governor seemed unclear to many local actors during the processes. The planning processes in Longyearbyen and Svalbard were in clear contrast to the participatory approach in planning processes related to the establishment of Raet, a marine national park of 607 km2 bordering on Tvedestrand, Arendal and Grimstad municipalities. Bottom-up management to achieve local participation in decision-making and envisioning future goals has characterized Raet since its establishment (Eilertsen et al. 2020; Selvaag and Wold 2019). An exceptionally wide variety of local actors were invited to participate in the advisory board for the management plan. The goals for Raet were increased marine protection and the potential for socio-ecological development through local participation, an aspect that was lacking in the case of Svalbard. Positive attitudes towards conservation regulations among park users and visitors were identified (Selvaag and Wold 2019) and the municipalities even decided to increase marine protection in 2019, before being called on to do so by the Norwegian directorates. It can be argued that the risk and safety aspects and the pristine nature of Svalbard in the Arctic cannot be compared with a marine national park in the south of Norway, and that Svalbard lacks a permanent population that could retain a collective memory of the place and knowledge of resources, practices and challenges. Still, in Svalbard, there are people, institutions and tourist operators that have been present for decades. Consultants from NINA did the mapping of the environment, biodiversity and resources in both places. Even so very different approaches and imaginaries from the authorities on how nature and resources could obtain the best possible protection are evident.

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The Future Imaginary of Longyearbyen—A Showcase for Green Transition and Sustainable Development? In both overall plans and policy documents there are signs of a change towards an imaginary of a greener Svalbard, followed up nationally by new discussions on how to deal with mass tourism, as the sensitive climatic, hydrological and ecological systems in the Arctic are affected in many ways. The imaginary of green transition is anchored in several national plans and strategies like the Norwegian Government’s strategy for ‘Innovation and business development on Svalbard’ (2018), and the national programme for green transition. At the EU level this initiative is aligned with, and relevant to, the development of EU climate, energy and Arctic policies including the new taxonomy of sustainable investments. Over the last two years, several collaboration initiatives for future imaginaries have merged in Longyearbyen under titles such as ‘Svalbard: circular economy, opportunities and challenges’. The Norwegian Environment Agency, the governor of Svalbard and Longyearbyen local council arranged a seminar on 15 and 16 November 2021. Construction materials, food and household articles were among the topics addressed, as these have to be shipped or flown into Longyearbyen, and waste has to be exported out. The lack of incentives and regulations makes implementing the new goals difficult. There are no return arrangements or producer responsibility for the waste such as apply on the mainland, and Longyearbyen and Svalbard do not take part in the deposit schemes, packaging of batteries or fees for vehicles that pollute. Nor does producer liability apply in Svalbard. Another future imaginary initiative was the seminar ‘The Future of Longyearbyen – a showcase for sustainability’, organized by the Norwegian Scientific Academy for Polar Research and The University Centre in Svalbard, UNIS 1 December 2021. Energy solutions, tourism, technology, people, local communities, the family, employment and values were addressed, as well as various regulations. The seminar was a followup to the Longyearbyen local council (LL) decision to close down the coal-fired power plant before the end of 2023 and the decision to close down Mine 7, decisions seen as ‘a new era with great opportunities’. The seminar was partly inspired by the ‘Hurdal Platform’ developed by the new government in 2021, launching new goals for Svalbard to start the transition to a renewable energy system ‘in line with the needs, opportunities and environmental goals’. But, again, development is designed to

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secure Norwegian interests and Norwegian settlement. A more balanced view of the possibilities of a green tourist sector was described in the Platform, which also stated that there was great potential for growth in the tourist industry. The government nevertheless pointed to the great challenges facing sustainable development due to a dependency on longdistance travel by air or cruise ships to enable visitors to come to Svalbard, but ‘precisely’ because of this, it was argued, the tourist industry also ‘has particularly great development opportunities’. How this can be achieved has yet to be solved. Local organizations and actors took new initiatives in the fall of 2022, to coordinate and discuss future possibilities and future imaginaries for Svalbard. A dialogue meeting called ‘Svalbard in the Future – New and Old Possibilities’ was arranged in Longyearbyen on 10 October 2022. Its scope extended to a new geopolitical reality and changing climate and the possibilities for future business development in Svalbard, like new energy solutions, development of marine activities, food production, etc. Many of these areas are parts of a collective future imaginary of a greener Svalbard, yet they all need changes in permissions and the legal framework to become reality.

Discussion and Conclusions In this chapter, I have identified common and conflicting visions and urban imaginaries in Svalbard with a specific focus on Longyearbyen. To identify future imaginaries of Svalbard communities with possibilities for sustainable tourism, I have discussed cultural heritage management and future activities on a basis of co-creation across research disciplines, sectors and institutions, which has revealed that the complex policy landscape is creating pitfalls for development and collaboration in Svalbard. Addressing the variety of policy documents produced through interaction between social and natural scientists and institutions, together with local stakeholders, has revealed several discrepancies, but also merging collective imaginaries and co-creation efforts. Through inclusive planning approaches and co-creation efforts, and an acknowledgement that several imaginaries co-exist and compete, Svalbard could strengthen the possibility of reaching the UN sustainability goals, and secure safe and holistic local leadership, management and development, that would be an example to other Arctic communities. Recognizing and implementing a diversity of socio-ecologic values and

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co-creation approaches could lead to more just and effective management processes (Jones and Long 2020). Local actors and the national authorities are unlikely to agree on all issues, but if the processes acknowledge differences in values and co-creation approaches in the processes, it may be easier to tolerate decisions that do not find favour with all the actors involved (Mouffe 1999; Stokke 2021). Co-creation also has to do with shared responsibility, and this is something the tourist actors in Svalbard are trying to build into new strategies, by taking a societal perspective on their business. Research has shown that local participation and cooperation actually demand shared cost-burden obligations (Stokke 2021: 15). Co-creation of knowledge, imaginaries and solutions needs to be facilitated, but is also heavily dependent on SDG 16: ‘Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels’ and, in particular, SDG 16.7: ‘Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory, and representative decision-making at all levels’. I argue these goals are crucial to be able to achieve goals like SDG 11: ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable’, and SDG 11.3: ‘By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated, and sustainable human settlement, planning and management’. This is not in place in Svalbard and, as I have argued, people and local actors are striving to figure out how to deal with the lack of these goals and imaginaries in national policy documents and practices. The ‘social’ cannot be divided from ‘nature’ with respect to environmental issues, but needs to be included in the discussion. Interdependencies between social and environmental systems were already addressed by the Brundtland report (WCED 1987) underlining that ‘development needs to comply with planetary boundaries, as well as consider issues of social and environmental justice’. But the report did not address whether that is possible to achieve within the existing capitalist economic system or within the Norwegian interpretation of the Svalbard Treaty. Sustainable development is based on economic growth, ‘rendering ecological modernization the only possible way forward: It [sustainable development] requires a change in the content of growth, to make it less material and energy-intensive and more equitable in its impact’26 (Hagbert et al. 26 WCED, 1987, Chapter 2, §36 (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/doc uments/5987our-common-future.pdf).

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2020). Broad knowledge and involvement may influence behaviour and provide more respectful and engaged residents and visitors. Tailor-made strategies and future possibilities can be supported by digital, technological and environmentally friendly approaches, building on the UN SDGs and the principle of participatory planning and development stated among others by the EU in 2016 (Bouche and Luc 2019). The main question will be whether the Norwegian authorities would rather concentrate on safety and geopolitical issues. After the invasion of Ukraine by Russian, this is likely to be the main concern. Environmental protection regulations have become increasingly important in Norwegian policymaking under the obvious argument of protecting vulnerable nature. Underpinning the urban imaginary of the best-protected environment in the world there might rather be an imaginary of ‘state governance’ (Saville 2019). On 16 January 2023 the recommendations by the Norwegian Environment Agency to the Ministry of Climate and the Environment for stricter regulations related to sea-based tourism were presented. The input from tourist operators to the hearing process has not been implemented. According to the tourist operators in Svalbard, they were not been listened to at all. A delegation of tourist actors and local politicians will meet the national politicians before the final decision is made. The future of Svalbard will still be challenging and filled with contradictory imaginaries, and social science still lacks full acknowledgement in national decision-making relating to Svalbard. The Norwegian authorities’ understanding or management of the Svalbard Treaty might have to be revisited, and that might not be desirable in the present situation. The SSSI and collaborating actors have an important task ahead, in a challenging geopolitical context, to continue to identify societal aspects related to global and national change. It will also be of great importance to bring forward local voices, dreams and imaginations, seen in the light of UN SDGs, to make possible a balanced, collective and inclusive overall imagination for the future of Svalbard communities.

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CHAPTER 11

Imaginaries of Svalbard, Interdisciplinary Research and Fieldwork: Where Emergent Knowledge Surges Jasmine Zhang

Introduction: What Imaginaries Do As one elusive and ambiguous concept, imaginaries have been studied in multiple social science fields and, increasingly, in cross-disciplinary approaches. While sociologists have been pondering for a long time on how to define imaginaries and understand how they come to be, others have been preoccupied with the space that imaginaries carve out and the relations they withhold or create (Anderson 1983; Appadurai 1996; Castoriadis 1987; Geertz 1973; Smith 1977). Interconnections among these various aspects of imaginaries can be taken in different orderings, depending on where one stands and which direction one intends to take. In my case, and consequently traceable in this chapter, there has always been a certain degree of resistance or suspicion regarding the assumption that imaginaries are something external, ready manufactured and

J. Zhang (B) Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_11

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waiting to be consumed. This has to do with the fact that I grew up in a somewhat touristic town in the eastern part of China, where local landmarks overlapped with tourist attractions. This led to my search for a sense of belonging and relationship with a place that had to be negotiated with tourism imaginaries, a process that also inevitably exposed the complexities of imaginaries—always already a blending of the historical, the socio-cultural, the economic, the ideological and the mundane. It has also become obvious to me that understanding this complexity of imaginaries unavoidably means asking what imaginaries do to each of us, individually and collectively, in different contexts. Imaginaries cannot be reduced to fallacies of imagination, as tourism scholars have reflected on in the context of travellers’ expectations of their destinations (Salazar 2012; Salazar and Graburn 2014), including Arctic ones (Saarinen and Varnajot 2019). This book is about the imaginaries of Svalbard, a place that had not been in my imagination before I joined an interdisciplinary project focusing on it. My resistance—one might even call it an allergy—to tourism imaginaries ruled out the possibility of my knowing Svalbard, even though I had lived in Umeå, the urban centre of northern Sweden, for five years and worked with researchers who study Arctic tourism—I was only just getting familiar with the imaginaries of Norrland! Nevertheless, my trajectory crossed with Svalbard, showing that resistance or even rejection can also develop into other modes of engagement with imaginaries. Indeed, just when I imagined that I was clear of the spell of images and imaginaries of Svalbard, I was lured into submitting my application for the postdoc position by imaginaries of other prosperities/ subjects: interdisciplinary research and fieldwork. This brings me to the following cogitation: if we are to insist on a deeper understanding of the processes involved in and generated through imaginaries that are neither solely societal nor psychological, then we need to see imaginaries more as a means than a central subject of study, and from there ask what imaginaries do. Why and how did imaginaries of interdisciplinary research and doing fieldwork in a remote place lead me to the imaginaries of Svalbard? And how have the imaginaries of Svalbard interacted with my imaginaries of doing research in an interdisciplinary team, and conducting fieldwork in three different settlements there? And again, overall how do imaginaries as socio-cultural models interconnect with the spatial, temporal and material systems that also provide important dimensions for them? Taking an autoethnographic method, these are

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the questions I take with me when I reflect on and examine my experiences and activities since I joined the interdisciplinary project SVALUR (September 2020–present). In this chapter I therefore aim to look at the effects and affects that imaginaries bring in the form of interrelationships and entanglements, rather than answer any questions on imaginaries per se through a descriptive approach. In that sense, this writing is also a means that does more than merely serve an end. With all its imprecision and partialness, this way of approaching imaginaries and this chapter provide a humbling and empowering way for me to find an honest yet caring style of expressing what I have learned and continue to learn from Svalbard and from doing interdisciplinary research and fieldwork in remote places. From this perspective, imaginaries can be a productive site, allowing possibilities for sustained relational engagement with these subjects. While taking a deep dive into the lessons and experiences acquired, what I intend to find and lift—and perhaps contribute to this volume and its imagined readers— is how we, as fellow Svalbard passengers, can work together towards a future imaginary with compassion, care and criticality.

Svalbard After I read the job announcement from SVALUR (from here on ‘the project’) sent by a friend in May 2020, I had to google Svalbard. I realized rather quickly that this is one of the places that could seem to be (pre)defined by tourism imaginaries: aurora lights, polar bears, glaciers, a seed vault, spiky and colourful houses, magnificent mountains and polar expeditions and adventures. Subconsciously I wanted to brush these images away and go to ‘the next level’—the complexities underneath, the stories behind, the ‘reality’ of Svalbard—not seeing that the imaginaries, and multiples of them, were still at work. First, the central concern of the project is knowledge creation about environmental change in the High Arctic, placing Svalbard as one ‘case study’ of these rapid environmental changes, a ‘hotspot’ that delivers stark images of the Anthropocene (Brode-Roger 2021). Indeed, the project was financed by one of many funding opportunities in recent years that had a special focus on research into rapidly changing Arctic systems. Second, one of the project’s goals is to explore possible ways to complement knowledge generated from environmental monitoring and research on Svalbard. This proposition naturally posits environmental monitoring

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in relation to other means of knowing and therefore raises many questions touching on a certain imaginary of science or knowledge production (Lehtinen 2019; Saville 2019a): what have scientific and technological development been like in Svalbard (and what role has environmental monitoring played over time)? What relationship does scientific research have with the other two industrial sectors in Svalbard, namely coal mining and tourism? And, in general, how has scientific knowledge on environmental change of Svalbard been circulated among scientific communities and wider societies in the Arctic and beyond? These questions bring to light the third layer of imaginaries that are present and permeating: the geopolitical ones (Viken 2011; Norum 2016). The geopolitical imaginary is manifested partly through the politics of presence that has always been installed in the development of scientific research and environmental monitoring on Svalbard as part of Norway’s efforts to guard its sovereignty. At the same time, geopolitical reasonings have also influenced and motivated other nations’ scientific engagement with Svalbard, making the place a governable, accessible yet delicate gateway to Arctic resources, territory and research (Roberts and Paglia 2016; Pedersen 2017). The project I am working on is deeply embedded in such geopolitical-scientific investments. It is widely acknowledged that monitoring programmes benefit from direct support from various nationally based schemes that have inspired for a number of ideas running through the project. It also means that to explore the possibilities of knowing environmental changes in other ways than through environmental monitoring and research, we need to tread carefully in the knowledge-making space governed by geopolitical rules and imaginaries (Saville 2019a). There are yet more imaginaries, such as those based on local identities (Saville 2019b) and communities (Grydehøj et al. 2012; Olsen et al. 2022), as well as the imaginaries of security (Harrington 2022) and green transition (Ødegaard 2022). The SVALUR project sees the population on Svalbard as transient, as in many other Arctic regions. Even so, the need to imagine a certain kind of local identity or sense of community exists and is debated (Brode-Roger 2023). At the same time, the affective attachment and relationship one experiences and forms with Svalbard as a place and its environment are often summarized in terms such as the ‘Svalbard virus’ or ‘Svalbard bug’, although each individual may have caught their own variant of this infection. What comes out of such an attachment to the place and environment apart from perhaps romanticized images

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of local communities in Svalbard, when the ‘Doomsday’ and ‘Return to Nature’ narratives do not necessarily include and activate experiences and knowledge registered through fleeting encounters with Svalbard? Looking back, I see how connections among these multiple imaginaries of Svalbard are anything but invisible: the images produced by travel agencies, tour companies, photographers and tourists often depict subjects that are also circulated in scientific, geopolitical, environmental and societal dimensions. The SVALUR project that I was lucky enough to join, just like any other Svalbard-based project, is one knot in the rhizome of imaginaries. And SVALUR and its core members who got it funded have shown, as I have slowly learned, a high awareness of and sensitivity to these interlinked imaginaries from the beginning. Working directly with topics such as environmental change, scientific research, long-term monitoring, embodied experiences and people who live, work and visit Svalbard, imaginaries have always been a layer of the project, however invisible they might sometimes have seemed. What the project inspires me to do, therefore, is not to dwell on the fact that these imaginaries exist or that they may play important roles, but to go further and ask what these imaginations, expectations, assumptions and representations do and bring, individually and collectively. For the first year of the project, I was confined to navigating through these imaginaries digitally owing to the pandemic, conducting interviews with participants who had been to Svalbard and lived and worked there. Inevitably, during this time I was only on the receiving side of the multilayered imaginary of Svalbard; I could not counter-share or exchange any imaginaries based on personal memories and experience. I would argue that, despite feeling helpless when I revealed to my interviewees that I had not been to Svalbard, I also had a sense of empowerment. I was still in a position where I could resist and be rational about this ‘Svalbard virus’ after hearing about it for the fiftieth time. The image of being an ‘outsider’ also helped me to resist certain framings of the interviews, and that allowed me to pay attention to alternative imaginaries of what Svalbard is as a place. Then something happened in October 2021. We were able to travel again, and the project sent us postdocs to Longyearbyen for fieldwork. In January 2022, I travelled to Svalbard for the second time. On the plane from Oslo to Longyearbyen, I wrote:

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…the memory of sitting on the flight from Tromso to Longyearbyen last October is still fresh, I remember the excitement in the cabin while the plane was approaching the coast of Svalbard. One could hear the cameras, click, click, click. The guy who sat next to me took photos with his phone and, surprisingly, he offered to send the photos to me. I did not ask him to. I struggled to find reasons to become excited, I remember, as it was not the grand sublime nature that I was coming for, or at least I was trying to wear armour to prepare myself to resist it. But I did want to feel something, and find some motivation to be happy about being here. I thought about the people I would finally meet in person for the first time, after talking to them and after working online so much together. With that thought, there was a warmth rising in my chest. I’ll accept this peculiar place as it is, I thought, as I will not be alone.

As will be revealed to a greater extent in the section on fieldwork, I temporarily let go of my suspicions about what ‘real meaning’ my fieldwork visit might have and surrendered to the allure of being there, meanwhile embracing the imaginaries of ‘having been to Svalbard’, which means that the duration of stay, frequency of visits, intensity of experience all lead to a certain evaluation and ordering of one’s impressions, feelings and affects. Yet ambiguity persists. As I reflected afterwards, while being there, the feeling of privilege was strong, the fact that the mountain faces are there all the time, the skyline is there all the time, the light is changing beautifully, and the industrial landscape, the messy structure of the town, are all just telling one it is a place one should not be. Yet here we are anyway. I was reminded of the energy consumption when I woke up at night, hearing the trucks roaring by outside the window, transporting coal from mine 7 to the power plant. Feeling guilt, trying to forget about it, but its always being there.

I wonder if the sense of ambiguity had to do with the sheer knowledge that my encounter with Svalbard was in any case momentary and would live its life mostly internally. What difference would it make, anyway?

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Interdisciplinarity While my engagement with the imaginaries of Svalbard was characterized by hesitation, uncertainty and perhaps ignorance, the attraction of the project lay in its clear adoption of interdisciplinarity when asking research questions such as ‘Why do we need to capture people’s knowledge of environmental changes in Svalbard?’ and ‘How can we combine experiential knowledge with knowledge from formal environmental monitoring?’ Meanwhile, these questions were also being asked from the increasingly normalized interdisciplinary discourse, in which Mode-1 science was shifted towards Mode-2 knowledge production (Nowotny et al. 2001). My own academic trajectory at the point of applying to the project had taken a zig-zag non-linear route, going from natural science— engineering—social science—to the humanities. One ongoing source of motivation, as well as confusion, which nonetheless helped me to orientate myself in academia has always been the tension between curiosity (the desire to know) about random subjects and the relevance of the result of that curiosity to others (the need to value and be valued). The tension can be sensed as a spectrum or continuum where one constantly weighs different aspects of knowing and understanding, rather than making either/or decisions on which end to follow or comply with. The shift from Mode-1 science to Mode-2 knowledge production is not as linear as it seems (see Barry and Born 2013), and to carve out an interdisciplinary path that would ideally create opportunities to materialize various intentions meant different forms of collaboration in which the tensions among knowing, reasoning, becoming and valuing were treated differently. What I expected from the SVALUR project, therefore, was an ideal opportunity to take this challenging but also creative and reflective path. What I paid less attention to, were the discourses, imaginaries and logics of interdisciplinarity that the project and myself were part of. Strathern (2004) contends that interdisciplinary research can be governed by a logic of accountability, and interdisciplinary activities and engagement can be seen as ways to break down barriers between science and society, creating greater interaction (Barry and Born 2013: 14). Another much promoted logic and image of interdisciplinary research is that through the interactions among scholars from different disciplines that it promotes, innovative methods can develop and lead to better solutions (Barry et al. 2008). Highly entangled, the logic of innovation and the logic of accountability can lead to a unified and singular understanding and

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implementation of interdisciplinarity. For example, there has been much focus on the invention of new technologies and tools to achieve an increased efficiency, precision and accountability of scientific knowledge. Another image derived from the logic of interdisciplinarity, however, is that the economic requirements lead to the cultural autonomy of scientific research being dissolved (Barry and Born 2013: 3). The temptation, as Barry and Born (2013) call it, when interdisciplinarity is seen as a unity, includes treating it as something historically novel, and exclusively politically instrumental. Both aspects have been perceptible in the project, yet to different degrees depending on individuals. On one hand, the project seeks, as Darbellay (2019: 92) describes it, to go beyond disciplinary limitations to interdisciplinarity as a result of a ‘desire to study complex issues/problems and solve them by employing several disciplinary points of view, while exploring the relationships and convergences among insights derived from different disciplines and professions’, thus following the imaginaries and logic of interdisciplinary research being more accountable. On the other hand, this drive within the project for higher accountability (a better understanding of environmental change and more relevance for resilience-building) was reflected upon when the logic of innovation was shown to be problematic. Indeed, discussions both with interview participants and within the project team at various phases indicated several essentialistic assumptions we nevertheless held regarding both local/experiential knowledge and scientific knowledge, as well as views on epistemological differences among the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. The tensions generated by these discussions were intriguing and impactful, as they touched on many of the core questions regarding the project but also shaped dynamics and various ways of collaborating within it. There are several layers to be unpacked here. First to deromanticize the separated images of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, Barry and Born (2013: 4) point out that the entangled evolution of disciplines has never been ‘pure’, making interdisciplinarity a ‘historical constant’ (4). Osborne (2013) contests the notion that interdisciplinarity is not the opposite of disciplinarity and does not dissolve disciplinarity, but rather reinforces it. If there were no disciplines, then there would be nothing to ‘inter’ with. Second, to interrogate what is at stake in interdisciplinary practices (in the case of the SVALUR project, geography is one possible field in which the propositions put forward above by Barry and Born and Osborne might be demonstrated), Whatmore (2013: 163) identifies tensions between

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the taken-for-granted separation of ‘human society’ from the ‘environment’ and the imperative that insisting on ‘the ontological impossibility of sustaining the binary conception – human and environment’. Finally, and in connection with the previous point, the integration of data and different modes of knowing has been framed as unproblematic, good for problem-solving, while in reality the ‘integration bit’ has always been the ‘crux of interdisciplinarity’ (Klein 2008). This is because what ‘integration’ means lacks certain clarity (O’Rourke et al. 2016). There is thus a risk of conducting interdisciplinary research for the sake of the name, so that integration acts to obscure opportunities to discuss the often political and politicized differences and similarities that exist in knowledge-making at both micro and macro levels. Peeling off the layers, the question is: ‘How might one understand interdisciplinarity less as a unity and more as a field of differences, a multiplicity?’ (Barry and Born 2013: 5). What I have learned from the SVALUR project, the tensions as well as the deliberations derived from it, is a hope for the unknown that cannot simply be equated with the imagination or illusion of a happy ending. In a way that links them to the multi-layered imaginaries of Svalbard, the imaginaries and discourses around interdisciplinarity provide a continuous openness that doesn’t necessarily lead to accountability or innovation, but to something emergent, subtle and obscure. The rewards one gains from such a process may not be seen as significant against the context of growing debates on whether academics can/should be activists, but can nevertheless be vital starting points for positive changes. There is also a humbleness within the project with respect to the materiality of imaginaries, representations and discourses that is perhaps connected to the environmental sciences as field sciences, but also leaves abundant space and respect for social science and the humanities that also rely on empirical observations and analysis through fieldwork. As many of us tend to forget or essentialize, despite the epistemological differences between natural and social sciences, knowledge production represents constant practices of negotiation, mediation and collaboration, creating a new mixed batch of curiosity- and application-driven questions. For me, the SVALUR project has been very much about these practices, yet also an important illustration of embracing creative tensions (Cairns et al. 2020), being inventive, or what Barry and Born (2013: 4) propose with a sense of hope, that there are occasions when interdisciplinarity can be taken up as a force to ‘generate knowledge practices and forms, and may have

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effects that cannot be understood merely as instrumental or as a response to broader political demands, social or economic transformations’.

Fieldwork Conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Svalbard has always been a core component of the project, as its focus is on gathering embodied knowledge on environmental change generated from direct contact with local environments. Importantly, the embodied experiences are both a part of professional activities, such as in coal mining, environmental monitoring and scientific research and also of everyday residential and recreational activities. The project draws out the similar significance researchers from social science and ecology attribute to the ‘field’, in imagining it to be both a theoretical foundation for their subject and a tangible space where social, cultural and ecological objects and the process can be witnessed directly. To consider the imaginaries around doing fieldwork critically helps me to go one level further in thinking about the imaginaries of Svalbard—as it opens the question of whether Svalbard is indeed a unique place that provides extraordinary conditions for generating knowledge and experiences. The ‘peculiar commitment to an ethos of fieldwork’ (Whatmore 2013: 161) in the sciences of the geo, the bio and the human connects the three disciplines, yet this kind of image is rarely noticeable in Svalbard, leading to a divided image so that, as the hotspot of social and environmental change as well as scientific research, Svalbard is seen in totally separated ways. Figuring out what imaginaries of fieldwork do is therefore the vital missing piece in my investigation. While fieldwork can range from a day trip to a longitudinal study, from periodic or regular returns to one-time encounters, and from a solo to a group undertaking, it is ‘a mode of enquiry (that) encourages researchers to engage bodily with the material world and to treat the situation (field) of knowledge production (work) as constitutive of, rather than incidental to, the research event and the evidence that it generates’ (Whatmore 2013: 161). According to Fjågesund (2008), science came to Svalbard in the 1770s, associated with voyages and expeditions where the scientific drive was melded with political and commercial purposes. Since the nineteenth century, more especially since the second half of the twentieth century, through a series of investments by various nations

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but predominantly by Norway, Svalbard has established itself internationally as one of the most modern, well-equipped and accessible field sites in the Arctic for conducting scientific fieldwork (Paglia 2016). However, this image of Svalbard being a place of science primarily refers to field sciences such as ecology and geology. Whereas, as the portrayed ‘counterparts’ to natural scientists, social science and humanities scholars have also conducted fieldwork on Svalbard. But it was not until recently that social scientists and humanities scholars devoted their fieldwork to anything besides studying the natural scientists and their fieldwork (i.e. in Geissler and Kelly 2016), contributing to the so-called ‘Svalbard Studies’ (Chekin and Rogatchevski 2020). However, despite these growing efforts and demonstrations of cross-disciplinary perspectives from the social scientific fields (Albert 2023), the roles of social scientist and humanities scholars in the landscape of knowledge production on Svalbard remain very much unreflected.1 I take this gap in knowledge as a sign of several things, all indicating that certain imaginaries of ‘fieldwork’ are effective in Svalbard. First, there seems to be an understanding/assumption/sentiment that social science and humanities scholars are preoccupied with research questions that are associated with controversies, and thus conducting fieldwork onsite resembles a speculative search that may be experienced as intrusion. However, such sentiment is not unique in Svalbard, a geopolitical territory. After all, the complicit role of anthropologists and ethnologists in colonial and postcolonial histories all over the world have been extensively discussed (e.g. Smith 1999). The fixation of many social science and humanities scholars on morality has also been pointed out (Tsing 2011). However, Svalbard’s being less of a place for a social science fieldwork site was decided on at the beginning of the modern development of science in Svalbard, i.e. the establishment of the Norsk Polarinstitutt and UNIS where only natural science and technology subjects were studied. In recent years the domination of natural science has reached a more official and regulated level, which makes one wonder whether working on a more self-reflexive attitude from both sides of the fence might lead to a somewhat more inclusive policy towards social science and humanities. 1 The establishment of the Svalbard Social Science Initiative has changed the landscape of knowledge production on Svalbard, yet the lack of self-reflection and self-criticism of social scientists on their own fieldwork experiences has still to be improved. In a way this edited volume is contributing to that.

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It is thus worth asking, following this image of the role of non-natural scientists in Svalbard, especially of those who aspire to obtain first-hand experiences of the ‘reality’, what is really at stake here in terms of doing fieldwork in Svalbard. Why does access to the field seem to be so irreplaceable yet so contested? Among scholars from both the natural and social sciences who are deeply impacted by Anglo-Saxon world views and academic training, an obsession with purity, originality and naturalism is common. As a result of a belief in the tree model of knowing, a vertical direction, ‘truth’ always lies ‘underneath’ the surface and one has to have trained eyes to capture every detail to detect the patterns and clues that lead to the answer. The imaginary involved here is a hierarchy of knowledge and a hierarchy of ‘truthfulness’. At the same time, this logic and imaginary also mean automatically that what is observable is on the surface, thus observations and descriptions of natural specimens/human populations and their ecological associations/human behaviours, do not necessarily lead to the truth and perhaps are never enough. To cope with this, natural scientists gather ‘more’ quantitative and monitoring data to complete the never-ending puzzle, while social scientists also collect more qualitative data, dig ‘deeper’ and wish to unearth something invisible and bring it to light. It all sounds very extractive and exploitative. And not so strange either. The frontier imaginaries of the field station and fieldwork often coincide with ‘the relationship between centre and periphery – a frontier imaginary that links scientific discovery to the territorial expansion of empire’ (Geissler and Kelly 2016: 801). And when you think about it, who could resist the invitation or opportunity to do fieldwork in Svalbard? ‘Everyone who has been here wants a piece of it’, a friend and colleague once said when we talked about the iconic ‘Svalbard’ woollen hats and scarves. I have heard natural scientists half-jokingly confess that the fact that fieldwork in Svalbard meant visiting an exotic and remote destination was a decisive factor for their career path. For some natural scientists and tour guides, references to Svalbard were part of the Arctic imaginary from encounters in their childhood or adolescence. I have also heard people asking questions such as ‘Is the research done here worth the carbon footprint(s) I bring?’ As social scientists and humanities scholars, we are told to take ourselves more seriously (Sörlin 2015), yet there is a huge question mark over ‘how’. How do we take ourselves seriously when what we do is perceived to be either ‘seeking conflicts and making trouble’ or ‘coming to an exotic place and having fun’?

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We need to confront, as Osborne (2013) rightly points out, the cultural division between natural and social sciences. And I would like to add that the problem of divided perceptions of differing legitimacy of doing fieldwork between the two ‘cultures’ lies in the fact that ‘disciplines in the social sciences and humanities… simply don’t tend to have the more circumscribed epistemological profiles that are characteristic of the natural sciences’ (Osborne 2013: 82). In contrast to what natural scientists study, the ‘known unknowns’ (things they know that they don’t know), social scientists investigate unknown knowns (things they know are there but don’t know enough about to fully understand) or on occasion the unknown unknowns (things they don’t know anything much about and therefore simply need to go out and find) (Osborne 2013). While this is a very simplistic way of describing and potentially essentializing these disciplines into two camps, it helps us to see the irony that fieldwork is imagined as precisely the opposite of imagination. Fieldwork promises direct contact, unlike a photograph, a satellite image, a piece of artwork, a film or a book that provides mediated knowledge and images. In this light, doing fieldwork to understand environmental monitoring and research on environmental change is vital to comprehending the materiality and physicality of monitoring, through observing and re-enacting what on-site fieldwork is about. And this physical, material, instrumental layer of knowledge production is exactly where other types of knowledge (than the rational and controlled) may emerge. The embodied experiences and everyday insights can only be gained through on-site fieldwork and, for social science, that is almost the only way we can convince other researchers, stakeholders and research participants of the value of our research. Perhaps the sense of deficiency in how social scientists’ work can be valued is caused not only by a lack of methods (of which we had many, from participatory observations, in-depth interviews, focus groups, to participatory mapping), but also by a lack of shared reflections on how our practices are situated in relation to ‘lived interdisciplinarity’ (Strathern 2004). We did not seem to see that the layer of lived experiences of interdisciplinarity was also part of the fieldwork, or our reflections on the fieldwork. The imaginaries of fieldwork have powerfully impacted internal collaboration within the SVALUR project because of how each of us conducts fieldwork in Svalbard, how we situate fieldwork in the context of knowledge production and interdisciplinary collaboration, how we position ourselves as researchers and co-workers in fieldwork situations. All of

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these points required honest and open discussions. It strikes me that there was a disconnection in that we did not use reflections on our own fieldwork as a way of understanding the fieldwork done by natural scientists and technicians, or vice versa. Since we are interested in how knowledge emerges, disperses, is exchanged and consolidated, it would have been useful to self-examine what knowledge/experience we gained through conducting fieldwork and to discuss the situations and conditions from which this knowledge/experience emerged. Is it enough to have lived in a place for a long time and how long is enough? Is it the experiences associated with activities, mobilities and adventures that lead to emergent knowledge? If we want to understand how such experiential knowledge sits with scientific knowledge made from environmental monitoring, how can we not see that there is an exclusive and superior culture operating in the social science and humanities as well?

Imagining for the Sake of Engaging and Engendering What I embarked on at the beginning of this essay was to examine and synthesize what the imaginaries of Svalbard, interdisciplinary research and fieldwork have collectively done, making imaginaries a means rather than the focus of scrutiny. Certainly, reflecting through a lens of imaginaries on these subjects that are essential to the project has helped me to analyse and process the challenges that emerged within it, some of which impacted individuals while others affected wider groups. For me, describing what these challenges were is less important or productive than seeing how the imaginaries of Svalbard, interdisciplinary research and fieldwork have jointly contributed to creating challenging conditions and situations. While Svalbard was not on my radar before the project, I had been imagining interdisciplinary research as something ‘good and important’. I was also dreaming about once again doing fieldwork somewhere ‘away from home’. Yet an interdisciplinary project focusing on Svalbard (such as SVALUR) already cooperates in the multi-layered imaginaries of the place: it is likely to be imagined as solving intricate problems requiring competencies and skills from various disciplines, as a result of Svalbard’s situatedness in the Anthropocene era and the global geopolitical context. Here the imaginaries of Svalbard appear to co-evolve with those of interdisciplinary research, reinforcing each other to create narratives that run ‘we have a problem, and we need to fix it’. It is therefore not strange

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that in such narratives on-site fieldwork would be imagined as an essential component, both for collecting in-depth materials to understand what the problem is, and for forming a collaborative space among co-workers, not least aligning their individual imaginaries through on-site communication and collective investigation. The combined force of these imaginaries functions to sustain professional as well as personal relationships and engagement, but is often confronted by the tendency to simplify imaginaries as mere fallacies of imagination. A familiar narrative is ‘we imagined it was like this and then one day reality kicked in and revealed that the imaginary was false’. I argue that this narrative sets a trap because it denies any possibility of further understanding what the duality of ‘imagination/reality’ means and brings earlier engagement (even when it was in the form of imagining) to a full stop, while appearing to provide ‘an easy way out’ through learning the ‘reality/truth’. We all fall into this trap all the time, as we underestimate the complex ways in which imaginaries affect us. For many this trap is invisible as they treat an unexpected outcome as a failure, so that convincing themselves that the imaginaries were false becomes a coping strategy. What this strategy fails (!) to recognize is the possibilities that lie in an unexpected outcome, and that it had always been part of the process from the beginning. Imaginaries of interdisciplinary research are also, in fact, about imaginaries of how we view and deal with disciplinary differences. We somehow expect that anyone who enters an interdisciplinary arena (however that is defined) will see ‘difference’ in a similar way, presumably an open way. Yet the imaginaries of interdisciplinary research as a hub for innovative methods and accountable knowledge entail both promise and discontent. And the results of such promise and discontent depend on individual researchers’ attitudes and experiences with instrumental logics, commercial and political agendas and neoliberal imperatives. As Tsing (2011: 155) puts it: ‘Knowledge grows through multiple layers of collaboration – as both empathy and betrayal’. This leads to the insight that how we imagine things, or how we allow ourselves to register and be affected by broader imaginaries, influences how we experience, learn and in turn imagine the future. Different from being impacted by social imaginaries, the act of imagining thus affords us an active role: to imagine with awareness of existing imaginaries and to imagine in such a way as to consciously react to the effects of imaginaries. I am reminded of the vital effects of imagining as it

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relates to reframing and reforming (important for early-career researchers who are searching for commonality through discipline, project- or placebased practices) (Oughton and Bracken 2009). The act of imagining therefore indicates a willingness, desire and intention to see, feel and understand. And to imagine becomes a way to participate, to include and to be included. For me it has been pivotal to be able to imagine other perspectives and ways of engaging with a research situation or question when binaries seem to persist and dictate how we think about everything. Imagining thus becomes a way of knowing. But it is also a way of being and becoming—that to imagine is to acknowledge one exists in this dimension but in a way that admits possibilities in other dimensions. Interestingly, this seems to connect to my reflections on the imaginaries of people being their ‘true selves’ while in Longyearbyen: if the one you find or come in contact with there (Longyearbyen) is ‘true’, what is the other one or ones that you left behind, and have to eventually return to? If you don’t return to the other ones, and decide to be loyal to this one, how long does that loyalty or security last? Surely nobody gets that privilege to be ‘true’ forever, or what is true can only be defined against the fake, so if there’s no space left for performing the fake or something less true, then there’s no space remaining for the existence of truth either.

Perhaps we should try to imagine from the in-between space of the persisting binaries: true/false, free/controlled, disciplinary/ interdisciplinary, and with the imaginaries of these binaries—what is it that we are searching for? Can the search for an ‘in-between’ space be the exact logic behind imagining, interdisciplinary research, visiting Svalbard and doing remote field work? This relates to the logic of ontology proposed by Barry et al. (2008) as another way to strive towards interdisciplinarity apart from the logics of accountability and innovation in interdisciplinary research. In the context of environmental research, where environmental issues raise fundamental questions concerning the very distinction between the natural and the social, the ontological rationale reminds us to imagine what are related or relevant connections among different ways of being, knowing and sensing, in processes of knowledgemaking and policymaking. In this way, we are no longer limited by the imaginaries of a climate hotspot, tourism destination, geopolitical frontier or remote field site, but rather facilitated by them.

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In other words, imagining with imaginaries of an in-between space means always being open to, recognizing and celebrating collaborative efforts and intentions, especially in cases where it seems most unlikely. One example is an unexpected encounter at the Ecology Department that hired me for the SVALUR project: I became friendly with the departmental librarian because one day she came to me to talk about Svalbard and her memories of a visit twenty-five years ago. Our meeting triggered her imagination and interest in interdisciplinary research, just as the project triggered mine. As the department’s librarian, she came across a book called Picture Ecology (Hughes 2022). ‘Would it be an interesting book for ecologists, do you think?’ she asked me. ‘Yes, it looks fascinating!’ I replied. Of course, I had to be the first reader to borrow the book when it arrived. Picture Ecology is a book on how photography contributed to the birth of ecology as a field-based science. Hughes (2022) argues that at the start of the twentieth century developing an ecological eye for recognizing and describing plants and their associations with their surroundings meant developing new visual methods and technologies. And for recording, registering, mapping and communicating the visual knowledge inherent in ecological fieldwork, photography was used in reports, publications, presentations and personal tokens exchanging knowledge with other ecologists. It is through the utilization of photographic technologies and instruments ‘developed early ecological methods so that ecologists could regulate and authorize their new discipline, transforming visual intuition into rational science’ (Hughes 2022: 3). While we are familiar with the dualistic debates on modern technologies (a detached and indirect way of engaging) and conventional scientific research and monitoring (an embodied and direct way of studying), books such as Hughes’s point out the things happening in-between: imaginations, images and imaginaries made by technologies have always been there, since the birth of a modern scientific discipline. And why should we even be surprised about it? Since ‘the practice of science and its steady progress has had a large impact on how people can interact with Svalbard on both an emotional and intellectual level’ (Poot 2019: 110), how we locate technological and similar interventions in relation to our imaginaries of the embodied fieldwork and knowledge deserves more critical discussion.

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Coda Through this concluding story, I wish to emphasize that imagining for the sake of engaging and engendering is something different from telling untold stories, showing invisible influences or leaving behind legends. There is no single story to tell or single plot to reveal. Stories are happening all the time. Although to tell stories doesn’t necessarily mean putting an end to the representation of what has happened, the storyteller often forgets to include what is yet to come. But there are also fragments, happenings and affects, that linger and feed further imaginations. In a transient society like Svalbard—not least in the main settlement Longyearbyen—even researchers who are deeply engaged with the place and society, are always reliant on others’ knowledge and experiences. Nobody is really ‘anybody’ without their companions and collaborators. The idea of originality or ownership in such a setting seems to be unimaginable. Whatever is invisible is only a matter of perspective, time or the audience, which means revealing the invisible can be momentarily effective but does not necessarily make the invisible visible. We also need to remember the very setting-up of networks and social groups operates on invisible exchanges and influences leading to the peculiar situation where it is not uncommon for a person to consciously fall into a social hierarchy, and it is hard to resist the desire to become visible and leave a certain mark or legend. The visible invisibility, so to speak, also makes any impact hard to trace. In the context of Svalbard, perhaps the ‘real impacts’ of any interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research will never be shown to us, only imagined. ‘One knows one is in an interdisciplinary context when there is resistance to what one is doing’ (Strathern 2005: 130). There is an energy in the feeling of discontent that pushes one to explore, search for other spaces and engage. La Cour (2022) argues that such discontentment also exists for her in how Svalbard and the Arctic have been portrayed as an outskirt of the world, as well as in the epistemological problematics of ethnographic writing. This article started by talking about resistance and discontentment; it ends by advocating the ability to imagine. Such an ability is grounded in experiences, knowledge and images gained from the unimaginable contacts with the field, connected with the everyday environment we are operating from, but is also tied to the awareness that everything is embedded in what was imagined before and can always be reimagined again. I have illustrated how the lens of imaginaries has crafted

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a productive site for me to reflect on experiences from the SVALUR project, on three interrelated subjects, namely Svalbard, interdisciplinary research and fieldwork. The purpose is to look for and imagine alternative and interstitial imaginaries from within. Would it have been better to leave things unsaid, unwritten and thus unheard and unseen? It would be if one believes that the opposite of reproducing imaginaries can be reduced to a vacuum—which would mean not seeing the paradox of imaginaries, that they link the inner and the outer, the one and the other, but also exclude all possibilities of escape. As one attempts to understand, to go from not knowing to knowing, one is already in the web of imaginaries, discourses and narratives. The interwovenness of imaginaries of the Arctic, Anthropocene, geopolitics and Svalbard as a ‘place for science’ has been discussed previously. However, the effects of the interrelated imaginaries of interdisciplinary research and Svalbard are much less discussed. I do think this collection of writings indicates the existence of interdisciplinary research in Svalbard, but also the need to understand it better. Even in the most superficial sense, imaginaries are kept alive by people as through collectively imagining they are able to participate, search for a sense of community, show their interests, get reactions and belong. Imaginaries may contrast with ‘reality’, yet we will never know how much of perceived reality is caused by the effects of imaginaries. I have written this paper with the intention of shedding light on the inventiveness of imaginaries research and interdisciplinary research in Svalbard, but what imaginations it triggers I can only imagine. Acknowledgements Thanks to everyone I encountered in Svalbard or elsewhere, as part of my research within SVALUR. Thanks to all collaborators on the SVALUR project, especially the PIs René van der Wal, Maarten Loonen, Vera Hausner and Virve Ravolainen. I take full responsibility for the account given here of any insights gained from the project as they are based on my own recollections and reflections.

References Albert, Mathias (2023) ‘Concluding commentary: inter-disciplinary vistas research on Svalbard in a local to global continuum’. Polar Record 59 (e4): 1–4.

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Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barry, Andrew and Georgina Born (2013) ‘Interdisciplinarity’. In: Andrew Berry and Georgina Born (eds) Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences. London: Routledge: 1–56. Barry, Andrew, Georgina Born and Gina Weszkalnys (2008) ‘Logics of interdisciplinarity’. Economy and Society 37 (1): 20–49. Brode-Roger, Dina (2021) ‘Starving polar bears and melting ice: how the Arctic imaginary continues to colonize our perception of climate change in the circumpolar region’. International Review of Qualitative Research 14 (3): 497–509. Brode-Roger, Dina (2023) ‘The Svalbard treaty and identity of place: impacts and implications for Longyearbyen, Svalbard’. Polar Record 59: E6. Cairns, Rose, Sabine Hielscher and Ann Light (2020) ‘Collaboration, creativity, conflict and chaos: doing interdisciplinary sustainability research’. Sustainability Science 15: 1711–1721. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by K. Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chekin, L. Leonid and Andrei Rogatchevski (eds) (2020) Svalbard Studies. Nordlit no. 45 (special issue). Darbellay, Frédéric (2019) ‘From interdisciplinarity to postdisciplinarity: Extending Klein’s thinking into the future of the university’. Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies 37 (2): 90–109. Fjågesund, Peter (2008) ‘When science came to the Arctic: Constantine Phipps’s expedition to Spitsbergen in 1773’. Journal of Northern Studies 2: 77–91. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geissler, P. Wenzel and Ann H. Kelly (2016) ‘A home for science: The life and times of Tropical and Polar field stations’. Social Studies of Science 46 (6): 797–808. Grydehøj, Adam, Ann Grydehøj and Maria Ackren (2012) ‘The globalization of the Arctic: Negotiating sovereignty and building communities in Svalbard, Norway’. Island Studies Journal 7 (1): 99–118. Harrington, Cameron (2022) ‘The eternal return: Imagining security futures at the Doomsday Vault’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221145365). Hughes, Damian (2022) Picturing Ecology: Photography and the Birth of a New Science. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Klein, Julia T. (2008) ‘Evaluation of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research: a literature review’. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 35 (2 Suppl): 116–123.

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la Cour, Eva (2022) Geo-aesthetical Discontent: The Guide, Svalbard and Postfuture Essayism. Gothenburg: Art Monitor. Lehtinen, Ari A. (2019) ‘Associations of the edge: Arctic imaginaries’. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography 73 (3): 168–178. Norum, Roger (2016) ‘Barentsburg and beyond: coal, science, tourism, and the geopolitical imaginaries of Svalbard’s “New North”’. In Graham Huggan and Lars Jensen (eds) Postcolonial Perspectives on the European High North: Unscrambling the Arctic. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 31–65. Nowotny, Helga, Peter B. Scott and Michael Gibbons (2001) Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ødegaard, Cecilie V. (2022) ‘Returning to Nature’. Social Analysis 66 (2): 1–22. Olsen, Julia, Andrian Vlakhov and Karin A. Wigger (2022) ‘Barentsburg and Longyearbyen in times of socioeconomic transition: residents’ perceptions of community viability’. Polar Record 58: E7 (doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0032247422000043). O’Rourke, Michael, Stephen Crowley and Chad Gonnerman (2016) ‘On the nature of cross-disciplinary integration: a philosophical framework’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 56: 62–70. Osborne, Thomas (2013) ‘Inter that discipline!’ In: Andrew Berry and Georgina Born (eds) Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences. London: Routledge: 82–98. Oughton, Elizabeth and Louise Bracken (2009) ‘Interdisciplinary research: framing and reframing’. Area 41 (4): 385–394. Paglia, Eric (2016) The Northward Course of the Anthropocene: Transformation, Temporality and Telecoupling in a Time of Environmental Crisis. Stockholm: KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Pedersen, Torbjørn (2017) ‘The politics of presence: the Longyearbyen dilemma’. Arctic Review on Law and Politics 8 (2017): 95–108. Poot, Matt (2019) ‘From physical landscapes to digital territory’. In: Peter Hemmersam, Janike K. Larsen, and Andrew Morrison (eds) Future North: Svalbard. Oslo: OCULS at AHO: 110–111. Roberts, Peter and Eric Paglia (2016) ‘Science as national belonging: the construction of Svalbard as a Norwegian space’. Social Studies of Science 46 (6): 894–911. Saarinen, Jarkko and Alix Varnajot (2019) ‘The Arctic in tourism: complementing and contesting perspectives on tourism in the Arctic’. Polar Geography 42 (2): 109–124 (doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/1088937X.2019.1578287). Salazar, Noel B. (2012) ‘Tourism imaginaries: a conceptual approach’. Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2): 863–882.

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Salazar, Noel B., and Nelson H. Graburn (eds) (2014) Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Saville, Samantha M. (2019a) ‘Locating value(s) in political ecologies of knowledge: the East Svalbard management plan’. Locating Value. London: Routledge: 173–185. Saville, Samantha M. (2019b) ‘Tourists and researcher identities: critical considerations of collisions, collaborations and confluences in Svalbard’. Journal of Sustainable Tourism 27 (4): 573–589. Smith, Valene (ed.) (1977) Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Smith, Linda T. (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Sörlin, Sverker (2015) ‘The emerging Arctic humanities: a forward-looking postscript’. Journal of Northern Studies 9 (1): 93–98. Strathern, Marilyn (2004) Commons and Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing. Strathern, Marilyn (2005) ‘Anthropology and interdisciplinarity’. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 4 (2): 125–135. Tsing, Anna L. (2011) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Viken, Arvid (2011) ‘Tourism, research, and governance on Svalbard: A symbiotic relationship’. Polar Record 47 (243): 335–347. Whatmore, Sarah J. (2013) ‘Where natural and social science meet? Reflections on an experiment in geographical practice’. In A. Berry and G. Born (eds) Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences. London and New York: Routledge: 161–177.

CHAPTER 12

Pictures of the Arctic: Visitors’ Visions of Svalbard vis-à-vis Their Experience in its Landscape Martin Fiala

There never having been a permanent population, on Svalbard everyone is a visitor. We are all here temporarily, some just longer than others (Fig. 12.1). People come to Svalbard from all corners of the world. Each visitor comes for their own reasons, and with their own idea of this place in their imagination. They also bring with them a picture of the Arctic as a whole. Svalbard, despite its remoteness, becomes for many their first taste of the polar regions by virtue of its convenient accessibility. Svalbard never had an indigenous population and was first discovered by humans in 1596. The first visitors were whalers, who only spent the summer months here. Later, trappers would overwinter, occasionally staying several years (Arlov 1989). There are currently a few settlements, originally established as coal mining company towns. Current laws

M. Fiala (B) University Centre in Svalbard, Longyearbyen, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_12

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Fig. 12.1 Guided hiking tour on Svalbard, 2019 (Photograph by the Author)

prevent births and deaths on the island. Pregnant women and people no longer able to support themselves physically or financially must return to where they came from—either in Norway or another country. In general, everyone living on Svalbard, including the very few who grew up there, maintains a ‘home’ address down south. The genius loci of Svalbard is undeniably strong. I myself felt it when I first arrived. Since settling here, I have observed its influence on those I guide on tours. Guiding offers an opportunity to examine the idea of the Arctic—that inescapable object many come to experience on Svalbard.

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Being outdoors with visitors often presents the ideal abundance of time and calm needed for such discussions and reflections. Keeping a logbook of these tours, I first recorded mainly changes in the terrain and weather. As my knowledge of seasonal conditions grew, the notes became increasingly idiosyncratic; I wrote down moods, impressions and conversations. While circumstances on each tour vary, both guest and guide continuously project their existing image of the Arctic onto the landscape, while simultaneously reconstructing that image as they are confronted with their lived experience of it. Guided tours, therefore, provide a fertile ground for both exploring existing Svalbard imaginaries and reshaping them. On Svalbard, people on tours are referred to as guests. This term certainly reduces the negative connotations many seem to associate with ‘tourists’—those who have the time and means to travel to foreign places in the pursuit of pleasure and culture, often pictured as masses of humans pouring through delicate historical towns and fragile landscapes. When discussing peoples’ experience on guided tours, I will keep to the local term guest, while retaining the term tourist when speaking of people who travel to places in a more general sense, and visitor to refer to anyone who comes to Svalbard for whatever purpose or length of time. This chapter explores the recurring imaginaries visitors bring to Svalbard, how these preconceived ideas shape their perception of the place, and how this perception shifts during the experience of the archipelago, for both guests and myself as the guide. Many of the personal imaginaries of people coming here share recurring traits. I have grouped these under several themes. What follows is a brief introduction to the idea of the Arctic and an overview of these Svalbard themes, which are subsequently explored in more detail in the rest of the chapter. This kind of categorization tempts the question: is there a true, authentic way to visit and experience Svalbard? Many visitors have strong opinions on the matter, and some certainly believe that to be the case. Yet from my exposure to the many different stories and viewpoints of my guests, I find it increasingly difficult to maintain such a stance; who could be the arbiter of such a thing, except oneself? This chapter is a personal reflection based on my experience as a guide on Svalbard. It offers a particular viewpoint—one of many—based on my observations from several years of residing there and interacting with guests out in nature. In a similar vein, I have written the chapter in the

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same storytelling manner I would use to describe and discuss Svalbard with my guests on tour.

The Idea of the Arctic The ancient Greeks and Romans knew almost nothing of the Arctic, yet this did not curtail their imaginations of it. For the Greeks, the region was a mythical place, the lands to the north under the constellation of Arktos, the Great Bear (Homer, Odyssey V: 270–76).1 Here too lay Hyperborea— a temperate land beyond the northern wind (Pliny the Elder, IV: 88– 91).2 The first accounts of the Arctic’s periphery were similarly fantastical; frozen lands and seas of ice, shrouded in perpetual darkness or doused in endless sunshine (Pomponius Mela, III: 56–57).3 In the few centuries since its discovery, Svalbard has stirred much in the imagination. First with its abundance of whales to hunt, then legendary tales of rough trapper life, followed by inspiring and oftentimes perilous expeditions for the sake of research and the conquest of the North Pole and finally the difficult and financially questionable endeavours to mine the islands’ rich resources (Arlov 1989). Svalbard now instead caters to hunting down climate data and the perfect polar bear photo. People’s idea of Svalbard has always largely been defined by their imaginary of it. Though we have filled most blank spaces on the map, there was, until fairly recently, little information and few images to feed or confront our imaginaries of the Arctic. Nowadays, thanks to increased mobility, most travellers face the opposite issue: a plethora of first-hand accounts, spread through books, films and online via articles, blogs or social media. An abundance of excellent photography and copious volumes of footage all confront our imaginary of the north, and rival our lived experience of it once we finally do visit. People come to Svalbard for many reasons—tourism, research, study, work. Often there is an overlap in both visitors’ aims and their views. Like many, I first came to Svalbard as a one-time chance to experience a small adventure at what felt like the margins of civilization. I recall my first

1 For an analysis of the relationship between the circumpolar constellation of Ursa Major and the north polar region, see Burnham (1978) and Blomberg (2007). 2 See also Dion (1976). 3 See also Chevallier (1984).

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glimpse of the island. Curiously, it looked exactly as I imagined it. The clouds broke, and a vast expanse of snow-covered mountains opened up before us. Everyone on the plane was glued to their tiny window, taking pictures. Stepping out of the airplane into startling fresh air smelling of both sea and mountains, my immediate first feeling on Svalbard was that of nostalgia. I will miss this place when I leave. The snow melt of late May combined with a lack of any significant vegetation to hide all the mishmash of human presence gave the small town of Longyearbyen a scruffy look, definitely not what one would call ‘pretty’. The first grounded experience I had—similar to that of many guests I met over the years—is of a curious juxtaposition between how normal the town looks, with all the familiar and mundane elements of regular life—a supermarket, shops, cars, offices and so on—set against a backdrop of barren glacial valleys, with the occasional reindeer grazing next to the sidewalk. Except for a few other tiny settlements, separated from each other by mountains and fjords, the nearest real town from the main settlement of Longyearbyen is 1300 km south. Despite this, Longyearbyen doesn’t feel like it’s in the middle of nowhere. Rather, it feels like the centre of … something. Undoubtedly, this strong sense of place is why many keep returning—in some cases for decades. Some stay. Longyearbyen currently has people of 53 nationalities (Statistics Norway n.d.) who all seem to share a common obsession with the place. Svalbard is an expensive place to be a tourist in, so often the solution to staying longer and seeing more is finding an excuse to work here. Working as a guide has given me the chance to meet around a thousand guests a year, from dozens of nationalities and of all ages. I spend a good portion of each tour also asking guests questions and learning from them; their backgrounds and occupations cover the full gamut. It seems interest in and passion for the Arctic don’t discriminate. Like those living here, guests tend by and large to be gripped by a common fascination with the polar regions. Rarely does a person show up who isn’t already primed to be excited by the place. The sort of people who find the idea of the Arctic unappealing are also the sorts of people who would never consider coming in the first place. I used to meet such people frequently before coming here—most people fall into this category. Some ways in which the place has been described to me by those who have never been here include:

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‘A lifeless, snow-covered wasteland’ ‘Barren and boring’ ‘Depressing-looking mountains’ ‘Depressing polar night’ ‘Tiny, ugly village’ ‘Looks sad’ ‘Boring town, nothing to do there’ ‘There’s nothing there, it looks inhospitable’ ‘Too cold’

Depressing, boring and cold seem to be the main assumptions made by those who have decided they will never visit. Such answers give a glimpse into a common imaginary of what many down south picture Svalbard to be. Those who do come, and who often return or stay, are of course biased towards the positive picture they imagine the Arctic to offer: be it an adventure in raw nature, the oddity of living in an extreme and remote settlement or a chance to discover the ruthlessness and fragility of the polar environment. Whatever the reasons and expectations, everyone comes with their own picture. Being outdoors in nature with guests offers a great opportunity to unpack these ideas and engage in discussions and musings on the Arctic, nature and everything else. Almost always, short-term visitors ask the long-term visitors—who call themselves locals —what brought them here, how long they have been here, why they have stayed and how long they plan to stay. These are the four common questions every guide gets. I have always found it enlightening to ask guests the same thing back: how they learned about Svalbard and what made them decide to visit. I also like to ask what their idea of the Arctic was before arriving, and how that compares to their experience of being here. Many views I recognize in myself from when I first came. On each tour, everyone’s personal preconceived views mix in with reflections from the group; coloured by their imagination, the immediate experience, our mood, the weather or season. Their answers give some insight into the various imaginaries through which people see the place.

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Visitors’ Perspectives From the many conversations with guests on guided tours and those living here, several broad imaginaries through which people perceive Svalbard’s cultural and natural landscape keep resurfacing. These largely dictate what each expects from their experience of the place. Leisure People come for fun and to experience something out of the ordinary. For most this means getting out of town and into the landscape, whether on foot, skis, snowmobile, dog sledge or ship. An important part of this is also personally documenting and sharing the experience. Adventure Some people come to explore. They want a taste of adventure in the footsteps of the polar expeditions of the past. To see for themselves the polar landscapes and lives described in literature, paintings, films. They don’t want to be ‘tourists’. They want to have an ‘authentic’ experience, outside their comfort zone. Things shouldn’t feel organized, commercial, or—depending on the time period their reference material covers—too modern. Nature Experiences Not all guests see themselves as explorers. Still, they wish to explore nature, enjoy the scenery, experience the light, photograph animals or find inspiration. Memory Some see Svalbard through time: from family stories, growing up here or having worked here. Environment The climate in the Arctic has been rapidly changing, making it a prime example of an ever-more dominant imaginary through which to view the archipelago. Home For those who stay on, Svalbard isn’t just a vacation destination or a pretty landscape anymore. It also becomes all the other things in life: a job, a social life and mundane routines. It becomes normality. While there is certainly no one single imaginary in visitors’ minds, expectations and motivation to visit are based on the aforementioned picture people have of the Arctic in general—and of Svalbard specifically. This gives rise to largely similar expectations that are repeatedly incorporated into each person’s perception of the place, and referred back to when assessing their experience. This shared imaginary seems to

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cross age, gender and nationality, despite there being demographic differences in the sorts of activities and times of year different people visit the island. Although, since a guide does not and cannot guide each and every possible tour year-round, the type of tourist one meets on one’s particular tours is likely to be somewhat distinctive. The main symbols of Svalbard have strong longevity and change only very slowly over time. For instance, people don’t associate their visit with whale hunting anymore, but most certainly hope to snap a photo of a polar bear, or witness the northern lights. Unfortunately, they sometimes arrive only to discover that a short walk through town in summer with a mobile phone will not yield any such encounters. Svalbard’s tourism board now specifically aims to post not only photos of bears on its social media, but also of the other animals one can see here, and only realisticlooking photos of the northern lights. Some aims appear far more trivial; reaching Svalbard’s high latitude for instance—or going even higher aboard an expedition ship—is still a primary meaningful goal for many, despite being largely just a cartographic concept on a map. Most of these hallmarks make up only a sliver of Svalbard and one’s possible experiences on it. Meanwhile local residents, especially guides, contribute to this probably the most, simply by the fact they spend so much time in the landscape and so have a far better chance to capture and produce this material that is then spread around. As a guide, one also actively plays into this common imaginary of the untamed wild, the unique experience, the extreme adventure. The tours are designed to elicit that feeling. As a guide, it has always been interesting to contrast my own idea of Svalbard against those enshrined in the guests’ varying imaginaries. Such comparisons do not really reveal what Svalbard is or how we should perceive it, but certainly help in guiding. Getting to know what sort of constructs of Svalbard people have goes some way to helping to understand their assumptions and perspectives, and points to what sort of confirmations or challenges guests might be looking for on a tour. Getting an understanding of visitors’ imaginaries can improve the chances of facilitating a good experience on a tour.

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A Theme Park Inside a Nature Documentary: Svalbard as a Leisure Destination Within the Arctic region itself, Svalbard is for many the entry point to the polar experience. The archipelago is far easier and cheaper to access than other places in the Arctic. Many say they wanted to visit Greenland or Antarctica, but, for practical reasons, such as funds, know-how or time, came to Svalbard instead. Many who arrive see Svalbard in terms of the recreational activities they can enjoy. The outdoors offers a stunning backdrop for exciting experiences and thrilling adventures beyond the scope of their daily lives. In addition, many see the uniqueness of the place as a fitting stage to mark a special events in their lives, such as a holiday, birthday, honeymoon or anniversary. There is also quite an overlap between tourists and those coming for work, study or research—people tend to use the opportunity of being here to see as much as they can. Often visitors have heard of Svalbard through word of mouth. People will often stay several days, though many come to this end of the world for as short a period as a weekend. For them, Svalbard is a place they haven’t thought about much and they are here to see what it’s about, using the opportunity to take some exciting pictures along the way to share online. Some come with no conscious expectations, wishing to minimize the influence of the vast amounts of Arctic imagery floating around within such easy reach. Despite this, many say they have tried to imagine what to expect but could not. Oftentimes people comment on the actual experience being both unlike anything they imagined and seemingly impossible to capture. They say their photographs do not adequately represent the visceral emotions of being in the place. Others gave it zero thought unintentionally, showing up in the middle of winter wearing jeans and sneakers, booking the hardest hiking trip without ever having hiked or even ever seen snow. The obvious challenges this brings with it take them by surprise. Many see their visit as a privilege, and the ‘experience of a lifetime’. Suddenly, what one normally sees only in documentaries, one can now witness with one’s own eyes—blue glacier fronts, a bear strolling along the shore, the midnight sun or the northern lights dancing in the sky. The place can be experienced in many ways, yet, for most, just being here and experiencing the relatively mundane fact of being in town is special. And many who live here long-term—myself included—feel the same. A

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noticeable number of guests ponder out loud about the possibilities of returning to experience different seasons, working here or perhaps settling here for some time to see what life is like and how the landscape changes through the year. I have had repeat guests on countless tours, and several have since moved here. ‘I don’t like warm places’ or ‘I enjoy cold’ are frequent reasons for coming to see the high latitudes—as if there must be an obvious dichotomy of preference between being able to enjoy spending time in warm versus cold places. This binary option is definitely not shared by the majority of those who live on Svalbard, and manage to revel both in living in the far north and enjoying vacations in warmer climates. Winter is by far the favourite season among locals. Many visitors are often surprised by how relatively warm Svalbard is, and how—climate change aside—the Gulf Stream, dry air, and—if one is fortunate—sun and no wind, actually make for relatively mild winters and pleasant summers. If anything, winters are increasingly not cold enough. From the perspective of tourism this complicates the planning of tours, as the fjords freeze less and less and the snow pack is increasingly less predictable. Despite this, locals still look back fondly at the summer of 2020, when temperatures briefly hit a record 22 °C for a few days. People who are unimpressed by their visit are in the minority. This is likely due to the fact that those who are openly excited by the place—because it matches their expectations, or especially because it does not—are also the most vocal. Many enjoy their time here merely for the one-time experience, before going back to their normal life. Often they reason that this particular stay is fine, but they would not like the other seasons. A common reason given being that they ‘miss trees’. Showing them Svalbard’s tiny polar willows and occasional birches leaves them unconvinced.

Finding Your Inner Explorer: Tourism Marketing in the Arctic Standing on a vast plateau, my eyes follow the footprints in the snow towards some of my group walking a short distance out in front. ‘It feels like we’re explorers’, exclaims a guest next to me. ‘You are’, I reply. Although my group didn’t discover this plateau, they did discover it for themselves. If my guests feel like they are exploring, that’s perfect, because that is exactly what the trip promised to sell them.

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Svalbard is so far north, many have never noticed it. Occasionally, the islands get clipped out of world maps. Once discovered, many dreamers and romantics venture to this edge of the map for introspection and to add to their life story. The archipelago serves as a real place for their personal fictions to play out. Visitors often recreate personal versions of images or written accounts of the Arctic they have encountered before arriving. It is likely no coincidence that even the most casual of visitors, end up taking many photos that look similar to certain artistic or cultural trends. Historical notions and popular perspectives seep into our conceptions of the world, and our image of the Arctic. For instance, not all visitors will be aware of Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’,4 yet from the average social media photo of a person standing in the mountains; we can see Romanticism’s influence on our relationship with nature pervade society.5 Yet to experience wilderness for leisure or personal introspection is quite a modern invention. Ironically, it only really becomes possible when that wild unknown has been sufficiently cultivated and civilized to make it safe and pleasant. Actually, being truly on one’s own away from civilization would be a brief and harrowing experience. Even in the seeming emptiness of Svalbard, an invisible network of support covers the land— from GPS and Search and Rescue to an entire industry devoted to crafting tours into a forged unknown, since only this can guarantee us a journey with the comforts and assurances of society which we rely on and have come to expect.6 At some point, it appears the word tourism became a pejorative term, synonymous with an experience of a place that is not authentic. Nobody seems to want to be a tourist anymore. Tourists are now the other people visiting the same place as you, getting in the way of your ‘real’ experience. Inauthentic experiences are generally associated with mass tourism and a

4 See: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer) c.1818 by Caspar David Friedrich, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. 5 I have found the identical observation is made by Macfarlane (2003: 157). 6 Our perceptions of nature, wilderness and the humans in it are often quite paradox-

ical, and very much a social construct. This idea now seems completely obvious to me, internalized over years of reflection outdoors—but the original article which, many years ago, dramatically clarified my relationship to nature and the lens through which I see my guests and our tours in general, was William Cronon’s The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting back to the Wrong Nature (1995).

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large number of features put in place to facilitate access to the landscape for people who otherwise, on their own, could not move about in it. Svalbard’s landscape is remote, with potentially rough weather conditions, polar bears and an overall harsh climate. This means that to take people with no experience to see it—in a way that, with the growing numbers of visitors, does not wreck the very thing everyone comes to see—everything has to be very organized. Therefore, for some visitors, it is important that they momentarily forget they are tourists. Operators don’t merely offer tours anymore; they offer adventures.7 Multi-day trips are almost universally referred to as expeditions.8 This image that visitors are not just tourists on a tour, but explorers on a journey, is an imaginary that is both reflected in and often consciously reinforced by language used in promoting activities on Svalbard. For instance, Hurtigruten—the largest tour operator on the island—has the slogan ‘connect with your inner explorer’. Taglines such as this betray the fact that humanity has already explored and mapped most of the Arctic. Yet the inspiring imaginary of the traditional polar explorer can still be leveraged; the landscape now serves instead as a suitable backdrop against which to explore oneself. People are offered a similar thrill—that of witnessing the same places as the polar heroes of the past—but without the need for any prior experience. Guests can venture into a very curated unknown, one within the relatively safe confines of a carefully organized tour. Apparently, the prime example of the inauthentic experiencer is the cruise ship tourist—scoffed at by locals and other tourists alike. Cruise ships are perhaps seen as an inauthentic way to experience a place because they are the antithesis of exploring—massive, crowded, organized, predictable, commercial, easy, fast. Ironically though, when it comes to the perception of oneself on the island, it has been my experience that cruise ship tourists are perhaps the most honest; they don’t imagine themselves to be explorers. They drop into town for a few hours

7 Adventure is often directly in the name of the operator, such as ‘Svalbard Adventures’ or in, for instance, the tour operator Seabourne’s very deliberate welcome to guests is ‘your adventure begins now’. 8 For instance, the tour operator ‘Svalbard Wildlife Expeditions’. Similarly, most companies in Longyearbyen and those who operate here from outside the island (often in the summer) refer to their multi-day trips as expeditions, both externally in promotional material, but also internally in their operations.

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to get a leisurely glimpse of the island. Svalbard for them is not the destination, rather it is one of the perks of the cruise, along with the ability to, for example, travel to far-off places with toddlers or elderly grandparents. Perhaps—though it seems hard for many other visitors to imagine—some people just enjoy being on a cruise ship. Many will insist that cruise ship tourists are doing it wrong. Usually the ones telling the story are convinced they are getting a better, more authentic experience. In general, tours that feel too ‘touristy’—for instance, because they have a large number of participants,9 or where the logistics of organization, safety and route-planning of the trip are very obvious, such as matching jackets, itineraries or planned group activities— are deemed as less authentic by some. Hence, some seek the adventure inherent in exploring the unknown, but with all the assurances and easeof-access that come from organized tourism. This results in a small piece of theatre we all take part in; the search for an ‘authentic’ experience by very artificial means.

Raw Wilderness: In Search of a Nature Experience For most, the first and usually only encounter with the Arctic is through photographs, writing or videos—now more prevalent than ever and circulated online with ease. Most visitors are steeped in such images before arrival and are looking to capture the same for themselves. Fortunately, in this process, they also discover the less obvious but often far more peculiar aspects of the place, such as the dramatic variety across the seasons, each with its own subtleties. This raises the question: to what extent should the guide interfere in the guests’ experience? Some have such strong preconceptions, that unless these get crushed before a tour, they get in the way of them being able to experience much of the place. As a guide you want to bring the group together, to get people to share their views so their expectations can align—ideally just enough so that their experience on the ground isn’t

9 Outside of day trips, there are two main types of ship offering tours around Svalbard; large cruise ships (up to several thousand passengers) stop in Longyearbyen for only a few hours. So-called ‘expedition cruise’ ships are smaller (from a dozen to under three hundred passengers) and cater more to the idea that those on board are explorers as opposed to ‘just’ tourists.

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too irreconcilable with the image they had before, allowing everyone to have a good time. The seasons and weather have a big impact on peoples’ experience. Svalbard weather can change quickly and dramatically. As do the seasons, and with that, the trips one can undertake. People always ask what is the best time of the year to come, but that depends on what one wants to do. As the year cycles through, changes in the surroundings and one’s activities become special markers—the first or last sunrise or sunset, first or last snowmobile trip of the season, first day with no gloves, the first birds returning, midsummer, first snowfall on the mountains as summer draws to a close, the last ships leave, first day with the lights on or the first stars in the sky. Winters are not nearly as cold and dreadful as some imagine. Low precipitation means there is not that much snow, and life outside does not take place in a constant freezing blizzard—at least most of the time. What stand out most, and everyone is always taken aback by them, are the colours. The snow and glaciers seldom appear white, instead taking on hues of the sky, which comes in many pastel shades of blue, purple, pink and green. The minimalist snowy winter landscape is far from monotone. People are often surprised how green Arctic summer can be. Far from being lifeless, the snow melt reveals the tundra’s rich vegetation; grass and moss covers the valleys, interspersed with tiny shrubs, flowers of all colours dot the landscape and a rich variety of lichen cling to rocks on even the most unforgiving mountain ridges. As the midnight sun begins to surf close to the horizon in late summer, it casts a warm light over everything, so that even the barren scree slopes display many shades. Everything is there, it is just small, subtle and very brief. And then there is the water, beneath which most of the Arctic wildlife resides. Except for a few eccentrics who get excited by the idea of experiencing two months of complete darkness, most visitors tend to avoid the polar night. Yet outdoors, the subtleties in the landscape still give a hint of the passage of time. One can begin to appreciate how the dark season is in fact far from just plain darkness; the moon will douse the entire snowy landscape in a blanket of bright, silver light, on occasion the northern lights loom on the southern horizon, stars and the Milky Way circle around, with the North Star appearing to sit almost directly overhead, and at the tail-end of the season, the horizon is ablaze with various shades of dark green, blue and purple, hinting at the sun waiting deep below the earth.

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It is not just the light and what one can see with one’s eyes. In summer even, but especially in the sunny winter, guests are repeatedly shocked by the absolute silence that reigns over the landscape. Often they find this one of their most powerful and memorable features of their time here. What some perceive as barren and boring, such as the minimalist winter mountainscape, others see as calming and exciting, sublime even. Some people’s experience goes literally beyond the senses, and apparently one doesn’t have to go far out of town for this experience. A tourist-turned-local described to me one evening in the pub the sublime feeling—glimpsing the presence of the divine—on one of the mountaintops just next to town. He was very serious when describing what he felt. For most, the experience is not that extreme. Yet there is definitely an almost unanimous appreciation of the landscape. At the very least, people find it fascinating. Within a group on tour, the feelings this conjures up are quite obvious. It manifests in many ways; most guests talk about it with the guide and the group, some call others on their phones, some take it in on their own in contemplative silence. And nearly everyone documents their experience, be it through photos and videos, or on longer trips in journals or sketches. A delightful observation I have made across different tours is that the landscape seems to bring out a sense of appreciation and inspiration in everyone alike. Amateur or professional photographers, artists, writers, researchers, locals or those who just come for the pleasure of the experience; each sense the landscape with different intensity and from a different perspective, but there seems to be little difference in people’s fundamental reaction to where they find themselves. It brings them all together. This, at least speaking for myself—and undoubtedly many of my colleagues—is one of the most rewarding things about guiding. The nature experience is not just for the guests of course; almost universally the guide joins in, despite having seen the scenery countless times. This is noticed. When guests see the guide enjoying the place at least as much as they are, it genuinely adds to their experience. The impressions created by the seasons, particularly by the light, are hard to describe; pictures or footage rarely do them justice. Still, people try today as they have in the past, for one finds these same impressions mentioned repeatedly in old accounts of those who visited Svalbard

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before us.10 The Arctic landscape has played out the same drama and touched people in the same way across the centuries that humans have been coming here.

Back in the Eighties, This Was All a Field: Svalbard Through the Lens of Memory Some visitors look at Svalbard through the lens of time. One of my bosses told me that back in the eighties you could snowmobile across to the other side of the fjord. Today, this sounds like myth; the fjord in question is a year-round expanse of water nearly thirty kilometres across. ‘This is where the shop used to be when I was a little girl’ a guest who grew up here tells me. Also back in the eighties, ‘this was all a field full of wildflowers’, exclaimed a long-term researcher (now the university sits on top of it). ‘This glacier used to go all the way down the valley’ said a teacher of mine. It was hard to believe until I looked at an old map, and indeed, it did. Retreating glaciers are, in fact, fairly common; a few decades is enough on Svalbard for long-time visitors to witness glaciers dramatically receding into a fjord, or nearly disappearing altogether.11 Some older Norwegian visitors—many who have never been here before—first learned of Svalbard from family stories; from their grandfather who worked in one of the mines, or their mother who was a secretary, or a friend of their uncle who was a trapper. These people come to Svalbard to give a location to the stories they grew up with. Contrary to the timeless appearance of the Arctic landscape, the human side of life on Svalbard changes across mere years or decades; reasons for

10 A classic account of Svalbard is Christianne Ritter’s A Woman in the Polar Night (Eine Frau erlebt die Polarnacht) (1938), describing her 1933 overwintering in a trapper cabin. It was a very different time, yet her descriptions of the landscape, light and seasons are astoundingly relatable, as they are the same ones each person can witness on Svalbard today. 11 It should be noted that the interplay between climate change, terrain and glaciers retreating and surging is quite complex. Here, I am not attempting to comment on retreating glaciers from a climatological or glaciological perspective, rather, from the perspective of people perceiving their landscape changing over the course of their life on Svalbard. Erik Schytt Holmlund and Kristoffer Rønning, while studying glaciology at the University Centre in Svalbard, have documented these differences in a series of present-day comparisons with archival photographs. See Hirsti and Digernes-nordström (2019).

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coming change and demographics shift. Many who experienced a particular time on Svalbard come and revisit to find a very different place. ‘It’s so neat now, there used to be barely anything here and the town looked far uglier’ says a guest who first visited in the 90s when tourism had barely kicked off. Most return within a few years, but on occasion some come back after many decades to rekindle old memories of a Svalbard unknown to us today. Often they bring photographs, and so connect the longgone past to the present for the rest of us. A miner once came with his wife to celebrate his birthday, bringing a newspaper clipping of him as a young man, digging out coal with a jackhammer in one of the now decommissioned mines. It is not just the town of Longyearbyen that is viewed through this lens of fond nostalgia. Once, an elderly gentleman came to see the island, after not having been here in over sixty years. When he was young, he took part in an expedition on one of the glaciers. We went to visit the same place where they camped. Back then, he said, they had to walk one mile to get to the foot of the glacier. Today, he saw he would have to walk four miles. He brought a photo album from back then: the people in it from another time, the mountains the only enduring link. We walked through Pyramiden, which he had visited. At the time, the city was still in its infancy. It has been abandoned since 1998. We both realized that he actually didn’t recognize any of the buildings, because his first visit predated most of them and even the oldest photo albums still extant.12 He said he felt like a ghost, walking around. To us now, these places have disappeared in time, only occasionally leaving a shadow in the form of cultural remains. Yet for these visitors, they are intimate sites where they, or someone close to them, once visited, lived, worked and forged memories in.

12 Though abandoned, the settlement of Pyramiden does currently have a hotel (along with a fully functioning bar, cinema, staff accommodation and generators to power the place).

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See the Glaciers Before They Melt: Reconciling Travel with Environmental Concerns As people have become increasingly aware of climate change, the imaginary of the Arctic—as a harsh and resource-laden expanse—has given way to that of the Arctic as an increasingly finite and delicate landscape under threat. Many visitors now appear to find themselves facing an internal conflict; by coming to Svalbard they are in part contributing to the problem, at the same time, exploring nature and distant places is exciting and enriching. Longyearbyen has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the human settlements with the most noticeable changes caused by climate change.13 The paradoxes are hard to ignore; a coal mining town in one of the world’s most pristine natural environments. Many environmentally conscious people fly here from all over the world to drive around on snowmobiles, board ships taking them even further north to see shrinking glaciers, take photos of fragile fauna in its disappearing habitat and experience fine dining from ingredients shipped here from all corners of the planet. Such paradoxes are even harder to contend with by those who choose to live here, partaking in this year-round. Especially for a person in the role of a guide, whose livelihood depends on tourism as well as the environment, this is a constant dilemma and an unavoidable topic of discussion among members of the profession on Svalbard—both within companies and in education. It also raises the question of what sort of discussions are appropriate with guests. This will very much depend on both guide and guests. I find this naturally and unavoidably comes up to some degree on each tour. Guests sometimes ask, ‘Is it all right to walk here?’ Yet to not explore Svalbard’s nature with people does not seem like a solution, but merely to ignore the problem. Perhaps whatever tour we are currently on is not the biggest of our concerns. Then again, such an attitude also reeks of what-about-ism. Tours can be improved to have less of an impact, but is that enough? Maybe we should not be here at all, we sometimes wonder

13 Average temperatures have increased 3–5 °C between 1971 and 2017. Projections suggest a continued increase in average temperatures, precipitation, shorter winters, loss of glacier mass, permafrost and sea ice, as well as an increase in avalanches and floods. See Hanssen-Bauer et al. (2018).

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with guests. Not having arrived at a satisfying answer, we set aside our vague and confused feelings about the matter, and soothe ourselves with the notion that if we don’t see it, if we don’t form a connection with it, how can we care about preserving it? Svalbard has, like many popular tourist destinations, moved from promoting tourism growth towards a focus on tourism management. Yet everything comes with a trace and compromises. More stringent limits on visitors means some people won’t get to come here. They will likely be priced out. Is that fair? What balance does one strike, between environment, community, research, education, leisure? Such questions face everyone who comes to Svalbard. Some feel it is not warranted. Others can’t shake off the thrill of this grand Arctic play, and so continue to participate while looking for an answer. Some visitors see Svalbard almost exclusively through the lens of climate change. This attitude can perhaps be sustained on a brief visit, but becomes untenable when one lives here. Svalbard is then more than just a fragile changing environment, it also becomes the site of everything else in life; work, family, friends, hobbies, a home.

Home, Sweet Home: Permanent Communities on Svalbard The first thing I heard when I came to Svalbard for the first time occurred just as I sighted the islands from the airplane window. A mother with two children behind me, presumably also looking out of their window, said ‘home, sweet home’. I found this quite striking—in contrast to what was outside—but also very memorable, as, at the time, it certainly did not align with where I thought I was heading. There is a common trope that anyone can come and live in Longyearbyen, though in practice things are more complicated. You have to have work and housing—and these can be difficult to find.14 This does not stop countless people from trying. While some come for practical work

14 Technically, the Svalbard treaty only allows the citizens of any signatory member state

to live and work on the archipelago. In practice, this right tends to be extended to nonsignatory states’ citizens as well. However, each person must be able to support themselves with work and housing. Housing is scarce, and, in practice, one’s accommodation is usually tied to one’s work. Hence losing a job or housing becomes a major issue, often forcing people to leave.

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or personal reasons, many come for the thrill of the town’s unconventional setting and mix of people, and strand themselves out of growing curiosity. The frontier vibe of Longyearbyen looks like the ideal place to leave old lives behind to start anew. Yet gone are the days when Longyearbyen was a small mining town on the edge of civilization. It is serviced by regular flights, ice-free fjords now grant ships year-round access, and a fibre-optic internet cable makes Svalbard feel as close to the rest of the world as any other place. Portrayals of Longyearbyen are fuelled by a tendency to show people’s everyday relatable lives and habits as always contrasted with a strange and unconventional backdrop. Of course, over time, growing familiarity increasingly normalizes these contrasts. The inspired and eager outlook of a tourist begins to give way to the mundane routines and responsibilities of daily life. People’s past lives inevitably catch up with them once more. The imperfections and contradictions of a once idyllic town and landscape seep out. Tensions and complexities that arise in a small and dynamic community—one whose aims and direction are largely determined by a government thousands of kilometres away—grow in relevance. Many visitors comment on how the town feels slow and relaxed, probably because they view it through the lens of their vacation. If anything, the tourism and small scale of Longyearbyen make it actually quite fastpaced. Seasons are brief, so things happen quickly. The microcosm of the town also reflects whatever one does far quicker than in a larger city. Visitors regularly question the ability to live here year-round, dealing with the constant sunlight or night. While endless sunshine troubles the sleep of many in the summer months, many new residents are likewise hesitant about their first ‘dark season’. Conversely, many long-term residents consider it pleasant and cosy. Just like living on Svalbard in general, it helps to have something to do, a reason for being here. Again, selfselection is at play here—most people who come to stay here, especially in the polar night, do so by choice. Almost universally, people stay on far longer in this Arctic bubble than they anticipated. There are a few muti-generational families and some individuals who have spent decades in town, as well as an increasing number of children and young people who grow up here. Yet, on average, the vast majority only stay a few years. Even ‘permanent’ residents on the island—called fastboende in Norwegian—are likewise living here only temporarily—as their residence is only possible so long as they have a job

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or savings, housing, and have the health and means to support themselves. Life on Svalbard eventually becomes untenable. Svalbard may become your home, but you can’t stay for life.

Finding Svalbard Svalbard tends to stir excitement whenever it is brought up as a topic, both here and elsewhere. I sense that often the excitement felt by those who arrive for the first time is that of a surreal experience, of this imagined and inaccessible place suddenly materializing. Yet the more one experiences, the more this Arctic imaginary begins to erode, as the foreign becomes familiar, and each person’s experience more idiosyncratic. Over time, as one starts to notice more nuances, similarities and contradictions with where one came from, this imaginary of Svalbard as a unique place begins to unravel. It is clearly not that remote, nor that empty— human traces are all over the islands: settlements, ships, snowmobiles, cabins, research stations, ruins, graves and trash. At the same time, Svalbard reveals the Arctic to be far more diverse and rich than merely a vast frozen wilderness. All the while there is an incessant feeling of something special. Maybe the underlying imaginary of Svalbard is born out of the awesomeness of the landscape as against the tininess of the humans in it. It seems that for many, this stark contrast fuels the sense of the place, even reinforcing it every time one goes back down south. The experience of being out with people in Svalbard’s nature gives shape to an always evolving imaginary of it, and by proxy the Arctic as a whole, that is deeply personal as well as shared. People come here to capture their picture of the Arctic, and in a sense, each way of being on the island—whether working in an office, or snowmobiling out to the farthest reaches of the tundra—brings with it its own ability to experience this environment. What constitutes an authentic visitor experience on Svalbard, I dare not say. This notion makes less sense to me over time. A lot of judgement comes in from all sides about what is the proper way to experience Svalbard. The longer I guide, the more impartial I am about how people want to be in the landscape. It certainly allows the visitors’ imaginaries the most space to play out. An organized tour already sets up quite a few parameters within which visitors must confine themselves. As a guide, one

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can lead people towards the opportunity—within the limits of what is safe and sane—to find out for themselves what Svalbard means to them.

References Arlov, Thor Bjørn (1989) A Short History of Svalbard. Oslo: Norsk Polarinstitutt. Blomberg, Peter E. (2007) ‘How did the Constellation of the bear receive its name?’ In: Emilia Pásztor (ed.) Archaeoastronomy in Archaeology and Ethnography. British Archaeological Reports International Series 1647. Oxford: BAR Publishing: 129–132. Burnham, Robert, Jr (1978) Burnham’s Celestial Handbook (Vol. III). New York, Dover Publications, Inc. Chevallier, Raymond (1984) ‘Unveiling the Arctic: The Greco-Roman Conception of the North from Pytheas to Tacitus’. Arctic 37 (4): 321–346. Cronon, William (1995) ‘The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature’. In: William Cronon (ed.) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.: 69–90. Dion, Roger (1976) ‘La notion d’Hyperboréens: ses vicissitudes au cours de l’Antiquité’. In: Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé, 2: 143–157. Hanssen-Bauer, Inger, Eirik Førland, Hege Hisdal, Stephanie Mayer, Anne Brit Sandø and Asgeir Sorteberg (eds.) (2018) Climate in Svalbard 2100. NCCS report no. 1/2019. (https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/globalassets/publik asjoner/M1242/M1242.pdf [accessed 5 March 2023]). Hirsti, Kristine and Joakim Digernes-nordström (2019) Present-day versus Archival Photograph Comparisons of Svalbard’s Glaciers. NRK, 27 September 2019. (https://www.nrk.no/norge/xl/se-hvordan-isbreene-pa-svalbard-harkrympet-de-siste-hundre-arene-1.14698584?fbclid=IwAR1NzbUWk0Bq4 AhEMovQpTJg86kAdl6Il6CB6KZmvtdMARGqJ9uKzSalhqU [accessed 5 March 2023]). Homer (1919) The Odyssey. Translated by Augustus Taber Murray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: London: William Heinemann, Ltd. Macfarlane, Robert (2003) Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination. London: Granta Books. Mela, Pomponius (1998) Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World. Translated by Frank E. Romer. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Pliny (1945) Natural History, Book IV . Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ritter, Christiane (1954) A Woman in the Polar Night. Translated by Jane Degras. London: Pushkin Press. Statistics Norway (Statistic sentralbyrå) (n.d.) (https://www.ssb.no/en/ [accessed 05 March 2023]).

CHAPTER 13

Imaginaries of and in Svalbard: What Is Being Made? Dina Brode-Roger

The introduction to this collection explores what an imaginary is and suggests how various understandings of Svalbard can be made through different imaginaries. The conclusion will explore what is being ‘made’. This collection shows a wide scope and variety of imaginaries: from the history of the archipelago (Berg/Dodds); to how it fits into a broader international space (Humrich); to an understanding of urban spaces (Hemmersam) or the future visioning of those urban spaces (Iversen); to a reflection on oneself and the research one does here (Zhang) etc. The chapters of this volume show not only a range of imaginaries of and in Svalbard but also a range of understandings of what Svalbard is. It can be a theatre (for fictional or real events); a gateway to elsewhere or to introspective reflection; a place that people call home; a place to work in, or perhaps with; a box to check off on a bucket list; or even a purely imagined place. The authors show the way different facets of a place can be revealed by thinking with an imaginary, whether consciously or not.

D. Brode-Roger (B) KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7_13

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This kind of framing raises many questions. If there is an imaginary (or many imaginaries), is there a ‘real’ place that is its counterpart? And at what point, or how, do the imaginary and the reality of the place overlap and entangle? How do we differentiate an understanding of the ‘reality’ of a place from an ‘imaginary’ of it? Does one ‘create’ the other or do they co-create each other? Is an imaginary an individual or collective phenomenon? Who gets to create one and what does that say about a place like Svalbard, where so many people have an idea of what it is but have either never been, or have only been in and out as researchers or tourists or transient ‘locals’? Is it possible to disentangle these things? Is it desirable to do so? The various sections that follow will explore these and other questionings.

Why Is Looking at Imaginaries of and in Svalbard Meaningful? It is interesting to consider how the various imaginaries of Svalbard open up new ways of understanding this place and our relationship to it. As Zhang explores in her chapter, it is perhaps this that we need to focus on most. By opening up a broader view on how we understand what this place is, by understanding that the imaginaries through which any (and every) individual sees Svalbard influence their understandings of what this place is and how it is portrayed (see the chapter by Brode-Roger and la Cour), we may also develop a way of seeing that can shed light on how we perceive Svalbard and how we work with it as a place. By doing this, we may also begin to understand the ways in which we do not see it, or may be incapable of seeing it, because of imaginaries that are deeply embedded in cultural, social or theoretical pathways that inhibit our perception. By thinking of the imaginaries themselves as a way to step off to the side of the road (Stewart 1996) in order to self-reflect, we can then begin to unpack what imaginaries might reveal. By understanding the way in which the inter- and intra-related, rhizomatic, fragmented imaginaries of Svalbard shed light on our individual, situated meaning(s) and meaningmaking, we then reveal the way that all understanding(s) and our multiple ways of being-in-the world are constantly shifting, becoming and in flux. Understanding then becomes a praxis (Dewey 2005/1934; Thrift 2008) a long-term path of exploration that reflects as much, if not more, of each of us as it does of the place or topic we are researching.

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In this collection, the temporal frames of the imaginaries vary. Some are future-looking, some reflect on where we are today and some explore where we were yesterday. Some, such as la Cour and Saville’s in their chapter on Herta Grøndal’s visual work, and Schildberg’s in his chapter looking at the company town origins of Longyearbyen, explore how one aspect of a temporal event might have nomadic, rippling effects with and in other temporal moments. This breadth of questioning, coupled with the breadth of approaches to the subject matter and even the range of methods in which the subject is explored (from a grounded, personal, perspective to a conceptual, theoretical one to an explorative, performative one) show the many and varied ways imaginaries can work with other forms of analysis to bring out interesting nuances in understanding. And, as Albert hinted in the introduction, imaginaries may also help break the classical (Western) spatial/temporal understanding of place, history and ourselves, revealing yet another layer that can enrich our reflection and understanding.

Which Themes Are Out There That This Book Did Not Cover? From a grounded perspective, a dive into imaginaries can help us understand how we understand a subject, in this case Svalbard. However, I will qualify that by stating that the collective of authors here are almost all European (or of European descent) and, perhaps even more formative, we are all shaped by and in Western academic institutions. Even if almost all of us are situated in different departments, with different ontological perspectives, different methodological approaches, we share a deeply embedded euro-modern mindframe (Grossberg 2010; Said 1994) that structures fundamental aspects of our worldviews. We are—or for some, have become—part of the conjuncture that anchors us in today’s Western civilization. All but one of us are embedded in Western academic institutions. As diverse as the imaginaries about Svalbard in this collection are, they emerge from and within a similar overarching cultural perspective. This brings me to reflect on the many ways that the approach we use frames the question (Braidotti 2002; Brode-Roger, forthcoming). What may be missing from this collection is not so much a theme that was not covered but rather a range of worldviews, a spectrum of worldings, that were not included. The circumpolar region is a place where

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many cultures and perspectives are present, including those embedded in various Indigenous, Western and Russian worldviews. In this collection, however, we only put forward, albeit in multiple, fragmented facets, the euro-modern Arctic imaginary. In many ways this is par for the course, given that our subject is Svalbard, physically located in the European Arctic. However, a chapter or two from a Russian scholar’s perspective would have been not only interesting but grounded since there is a well-established Russian presence on Svalbard. Similarly, a contribution from a scholar from, and working in, one of the selfproclaimed ‘near Arctic states’ (such as China) and/or states with a stated interest in the Arctic, some of which are also ‘Global South’ countries (such as India) would have been valuable additions. This is not to imply that worldviews are homogeneous and can be categorized. Rather, this points to ways of opening the discussion further and deepening the complexity of understandings of what imaginaries are and what they do by acknowledging not only their situated positionings but also the ways in which they are always inherently entangled and co-constituted. It is also important to note that in all discussions of what an imaginary is, or does, the imaginary will always be intrinsically situated within a human positionality. There is no way to understand an imaginary outside of the human perception (and production) of it. Even if one could bring a less human-centred perspective of the subject of the imaginary into the discussion, the realm of the imaginary is with the human.

The Imaginaries ‘of’ and ‘in’ Svalbard Distinction: To What Degree Is This Helpful? How we see things, anchored in our own situated perspective(s), shapes not only our perception of the object of study but also the different meanings we give to the concept of ‘imaginaries’. This collection reveals the range of positionalities we all have. It exposes different facets, both of the place and of the person looking at the place (whether from within or without or some combination of both) and the specific situatedness within which each author is embedded. As Braidotti (2002) has suggested, this then points to the multiple and even fragmented positionings within what is often presented as the homogeneity of the European worldview. In this context, Svalbard is an interesting case study for imaginaries. There are many ideas and imaginings of what ‘the North’ and/or ‘the Arctic’ are more generally (see Davidson 2016/2005; Lopez 2014/1999

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for an overview of some of them) in addition to those of ‘Svalbard’ more specifically (as shown in the chapter by Fiala). These well-established imaginaries of the North and the Arctic, in which Svalbard is situated, shape how others from outside the region see it. In other words, their vision of the place is shaped by the imaginary they have of it, before they even get here. This also influences how they then ‘interact’ with the place, potentially maintaining a certain distance even while being in the space (see Massey 2015/2005 for a discussion about the ways in which how we conceive of a place influences how we then act in that place). As an interesting example, one of the chapters of this book was written by someone who has never been to Svalbard. It is thus obvious that it is entirely possible to conceive of and analyse a subject, such as Svalbard as a place, without ever having been there—which links back to the comment above that imaginaries are inherently human constructs and as such can help us understand how we, as humans, understand the object of study. In addition to thinking how imaginaries can be ‘in’ or ‘of’ Svalbard, as discussed in the introduction, I would suggest we also add ‘about’. Certain chapters in this collection explore this type of imaginary, for example in the ‘twin’ re-creation of this place (Martinsson) or in a projected view that actually removed Svalbard from the equation altogether (Brode-Roger). This formulation might also encourage a certain shift in how we understand what is meant by ‘of Svalbard’. ‘In Svalbard’, on the other hand, seems relatively stable: these are the imaginaries that are developed by those actually in the space. They are multiple, entangled, inter- and/or intra-related, or perhaps even in contestation. ‘Of Svalbard’ can also involve multiple standpoints but here I would use it to mean, at least to some degree, coming from Svalbard. Included here are all the imaginaries that have some basis in the place, or where work or time was at least partially done in the space we call Svalbard. ‘About Svalbard’ on the other hand, would cover the imaginaries based on work, time or thoughts done completely outside of this space. This can get tricky, as nothing is ever as clear as we would like it to be in an ‘either/or’ positioning (even with multiple possibilities). For example, I would include the imaginary of Svalbard that serves as a backdrop for the television series Fortitude as saying something about how people conceive of Svalbard and its situatedness in the broader Arctic context (and therefore ‘about’ Svalbard in a very broad sense) but not ‘in Svalbard’ (even though shot here) or ‘of Svalbard’ (even though based on scouting trips conducted

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before shooting the first two seasons in Iceland). Someone else could easily decide to think of it differently. Turning this in a slightly different direction, if we take an imaginary and use it as a lens to read the subject rather than analyse what the imaginary is doing, we can then unpack a facet of that subject more deeply. By consciously thinking ‘with’ an imaginary, we can explore more deeply what that imaginary then reveals, both about the subject and how that subject is seen from a specific, culturally situated standpoint. Are these distinctions helpful? That depends on what one is looking for. I find it interesting to look at the tensions and dialogues between these different imaginaries since they reveal much about the positionalities of the people whose work is entangled with or about an imaginary (or several imaginaries). If the main focus is in separating the imaginaries into neat boxes, these divisions may be less satisfying as the distinctions between them are rarely so clear when you get down to a granular, not a conceptual or theoretical, level.

What These Different Perspectives Show Us Imaginaries may reveal as much if not more about those who share the imaginary than about the place itself. Consider the diversity of approaches taken in this collection: a wide variety of imaginaries are discussed, using many different writing styles and methods of analysis/reflection. By looking at the entire spectrum of how we are framing the framing (Brode-Roger, forthcoming), we can start to see how our own cultural and grounded situatedness is influencing what we are seeing and how we are interpreting it. This collection, a fragmented constellation of specific imaginaries and positionings, then reveals not only the facets that each chapter and author is embedded in, but also the dialogues, tensions, connections and interwovenness of the play between (and at times within) chapters. This collection then is perhaps not so much about Svalbard as about our collective and individual imaginings of what Svalbard is. As with Haraway’s idea that it matters what stories we tell stories with (Haraway 2016) so too, then, it matters which imaginaries we imagine the Svalbard imaginary with. To return to the question of what is made through these imaginings of Svalbard: Do they create this place, since they are embedded in our futuring of it (in the past and now)? Do they shape our understanding and interpretation of it, as when we look at historical

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material (whether images,’ documents or material traces)? In all cases, isn’t how we see already simply a framing of our own situatedness, and therefore what we see (or ‘make’) an expression of that? One of the questions that came up in the introduction to this collection, as well as in our authors’ workshop in Bielefeld, is whether Svalbard actually is or is not a ‘unique’ and/or ‘exceptional’ place. I guess I would be tempted to ask, why this question is important to people. I have heard some researchers say that it is not unique/exceptional, to justify the idea that it shouldn’t be considered differently, whereas others claim that it is, in order to show how this place needs a different kind of analysis or understanding. And since every place is unique in its own way, Svalbard can be understood in either way: it is unique in certain respects and it is similar to other places in others. So what does that say about those who take part in the conversation about Svalbard’s uniqueness? Why is this question important to those individuals? In some cases people may be trying to make a point—that it can or cannot be compared to other places. In other cases it may act as a shorthand to get to what they think is important to look into. Whatever the reason, the fact that people feel compelled to even discuss whether it is or isn’t ‘unique’ (and on what terms) says more about the situated perspectives of the researchers than the place itself. Whatever answer the researcher comes up with, their own situated perspective will have shaped their understanding of the place, their formulation of the question, and the way in which they conduct their research to understand it, thereby ‘producing’ it in a specific way.

What, Then, Is Being ‘Made’? The ‘making of an archipelago’ might imply that something concrete should emerge from this collection—which is an interesting counterpoint to the idea of an ‘imaginary’. On the other hand, the making of something might also imply that it is created, that it is an assemblage, a put-together, co-constituted, intra-developed, entangled thing (not unlike the monsters or even ghosts discussed by Tsing et al. [2017]) that shimmers and manifests and reflects and diffracts in multiple ways. This comes closer to an imaginary but then what does that imaginary produce? Here we speak of the ‘making of an archipelago’ but perhaps it is more the making of an understanding or the making of a way of presenting or viewing Svalbard.

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To some degree, as the chapters show, the different imaginaries of, in and about Svalbard reveal different things. Part of what is revealed may have to do with the place itself; part may have to do with the person describing or using a specific imaginary. Part, again, might have to do with the culture the imaginary harks back to (generally, but not always, linked/entangled with the researcher’s perspective). This is, in many ways, a good example of what Barad (2007) calls the entanglement of matter and meaning as one creates the other in an intra-action of entanglement, temporally, spatially, intellectually and materially. Ultimately, what is being ‘made’ here are reflections of our situated positionings, a ghost of the culture that shaped the framing of the individual’s perspective as refracted through a prism (or prisms) of their situated positioning(s). But that does not mean that the imaginaries do not also reflect something other than that: underneath, entwined in, embedded in each imaginary is a common thread connecting the chapters and the imaginaries to Svalbard: a specific place, a place that all but one of the authors have travelled to. Unveiling and rethinking our academic situatedness(es)—individually and as part of a wider interconnected collective—not only makes visible our own subjectivities (Mignolo and Walsh 2018), it also helps us to separate, to some degree, the object of study (Svalbard) from our situated perspectives on it. In the same way that things that are ‘global’ are often imagined as elsewhere (meaning everywhere else), while being ultimately also ‘here’ and local (for more on this see Braidotti’s work on the ‘g-local’ 2002), the imaginary of this place is also always here, even if projected from afar. The way we conceive of something (a place, space, etc.) impacts how we understand it (Massey 2015/2005). An imaginary shapes how we perceive what we are seeing/considering (in this collection, Svalbard). Therefore, it also shapes what we can see (a barren space? a source of raw material? a geopolitical theatre? an insta shot waiting to be made?) and how we behave in that space, including how we analyse and understand it. This collection then is a polyphonic assemblage in which multiple tunes intertwine, creating harmony and dissonance (Tsing 2015) and if we can take the time to notice each of the parts, then we can also begin ‘to appreciate the multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories of the assemblage’ (ibid.: 24). By allowing the multiple threads of the imaginaries in, of, about and with Svalbard to come into dialogue, a reading of this collection will not only reveal facets of Svalbard, the object of our

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reflections, but it will also give insights into our own situated positionings beyond Svalbard. This emergence of a multiple, layered reading is in the end the most exciting thing. It is not so much Svalbard that we are constructing but our own situated and culturally bound perspectives that we are revealing—and how these shape the research and the analysis we perform.

References Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi (2002) Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brode-Roger, Dina (forthcoming). ‘Framing the framing’. In: PhD dissertation Longyearbyen, Svalbard: Identity in Change. Leuven: KU Leuven. Davidson, Peter (2016/2005) The Idea of North. London: Reaktion. Dewey, John (2005/1934) Art as Experience. New York: Perigee. Grossberg, Lawrence (2010) Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lopez, Barry (2014/1999) Arctic Dreams. London: Vintage Books. Massey, Doreen (2015/2005) For Space. London: Sage. Mignolo, Walter D. and Catherine E. Walsh (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Said, Edward E. (1994) Cultural Imperialism. London: Vintage. Stewart, Kathleen (1996) A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thrift, Nigel (2008) Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. Tsing, Anna (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (eds) (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Annex: Text of the Svalbard Treaty

Treaty between Norway, The United States of America, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Ireland and the British overseas Dominions and Sweden concerning Spitsbergen signed in Paris 9th February 1920. Article 1 The High Contracting Parties undertake to recognize, subject to the stipulations of the present Treaty, the full and absolute sovereignty of Norway over the Archipelago of Spitsbergen, comprising, with Bear Island or Beeren-Eiland, all the islands situated between 10° and 35° longitude East of Greenwich and between 74° and 81° latitude North, especially West Spitsbergen, North-East Land, Barents Island, Edge Island, Wiche Islands, Hope Island or Hopen-Eiland, and Prince Charles Foreland, together with all islands great or small and rocks appertaining thereto (see annexed map). Article 2 Ships and nationals of all the High Contracting Parties shall enjoy equally the rights of fishing and hunting in the territories specified in Article 1 and in their territorial waters. Norway shall be free to maintain, take or decree suitable measures to ensure the preservation and, if necessary, the reconstitution of the fauna © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7

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and flora of the said regions, and their territorial waters; it being clearly understood that these measures shall always be applicable equally to the nationals of all the High Contracting Parties without any exemption, privilege or favour whatsoever, direct or indirect to the advantage of any one of them. Occupiers of land whose rights have been recognized in accordance with the terms of Articles 6 and 7 will enjoy the exclusive right of hunting on their own land: (1) in the neighbourhood of their habitations, houses, stores, factories and installations, constructed for the purpose of developing their property, under conditions laid down by the local police regulations; (2) within a radius of 10 kilometres round the headquarters of their place of business or works; and in both cases, subject always to the observance of regulations made by the Norwegian Government in accordance with the conditions laid down in the present Article. Article 3 The nationals of all the High Contracting Parties shall have equal liberty of access and entry for any reason or object whatever to the waters, fjords and ports of the territories specified in Article 1; subject to the observance of local laws and regulations, they may carry on there without impediment all maritime, industrial, mining and commercial operations on a footing of absolute equality. They shall be admitted under the same conditions of equality to the exercise and practice of all maritime, industrial, mining or commercial enterprises both on land and in the territorial waters, and no monopoly shall be established on any account or for any enterprise whatever. Notwithstanding any rules relating to coasting trade which may be in force in Norway, ships of the High Contracting Parties going to or coming from the territories specified in Article 1 shall have the right to put into Norwegian ports on their outward or homeward voyage for the purpose of taking on board or disembarking passengers or cargo going to or coming from the said territories, or for any other purpose. It is agreed that in every respect and especially with regard to exports, imports and transit traffic, the nationals of all the High Contracting Parties, their ships and goods shall not be subject to any charges or restrictions whatever which are not borne by the nationals, ships or goods which enjoy in Norway the treatment of the most favoured nation; Norwegian nationals, ships or goods being for this purpose assimilated to those of

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the other High Contracting Parties, and not treated more favourably in any respect. No charge or restriction shall be imposed on the exportation of any goods to the territories of any of the Contracting Powers other or more onerous than on the exportation of similar goods to the territory of any other Contracting Power (including Norway) or to any other destination. Article 4 All public wireless telegraphy stations established or to be established by, or with the authorisation of, the Norwegian Government within the territories referred to in Article 1 shall always be open on a footing of absolute equality to communications from ships of all flags and from nationals of the High Contracting Parties, under the conditions laid down in the Wireless Telegraphy Convention of July 5, 1912, or in the subsequent International Convention which may be concluded to replace it. Subject to international obligations arising out of a state of war, owners of landed property shall always be at liberty to establish and use for their own purposes wireless telegraphy installations, which shall be free to communicate on private business with fixed or moving wireless stations, including those on board ships and aircraft. Article 5 The High Contracting Parties recognise the utility of establishing an international meteorological station in the territories specified in Article 1, the organization of which shall form the subject of a subsequent Convention. Conventions shall also be concluded laying down the conditions under which scientific investigations may be conducted in the said territories. Article 6 Subject to the provisions of the present Article, acquired rights of nationals of the High Contracting Parties shall be recognised. Claims arising from taking possession or from occupation of land before the signature of the present Treaty shall be dealt with in accordance with the Annex hereto, which will have the same force and effect as the present Treaty.

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Article 7 With regard to methods of acquisition, enjoyment and exercise of the right of ownership of property, including mineral rights, in the territories specified in Article 1, Norway undertakes to grant to all nationals of the High Contracting Parties treatment based on complete equality and in conformity with the stipulations of the present Treaty. Expropriation may be resorted to only on grounds of public utility and on payment of proper compensation. Article 8 Norway undertakes to provide for the territories specified in Article 1 mining regulations which, especially from the point of view of imposts, taxes or charges of any kind, and of general or particular labour conditions, shall exclude all privileges, monopolies or favours for the benefit of the State or of the nationals of any one of the High Contracting Parties, including Norway, and shall guarantee to the paid staff of all categories the remuneration and protection necessary for their physical, moral and intellectual welfare. Taxes, dues and duties levied shall be devoted exclusively to the said territories and shall not exceed what is required for the object in view. So far, particularly, as the exportation of minerals is concerned, the Norwegian Government shall have the right to levy an export duty which shall not exceed 1% of the maximum value of the minerals exported up to 100.000 tons, and beyond that quantity the duty will be proportionately diminished. The value shall be fixed at the end of the navigation season by calculating the average free on board price obtained. Three months before the date fixed for their coming into force, the draft mining regulations shall be communicated by the Norwegian Government to the other Contracting Powers. If during this period one or more of the said Powers propose to modify these regulations before they are applied, such proposals shall be communicated by the Norwegian Government to the other Contracting Powers in order that they may be submitted to examination and the decision of a Commission composed of one representative of each of the said Powers. This Commission shall meet at the invitation of the Norwegian Government and shall come to a decision within a period of three months from the date of its first meeting. Its decisions shall be taken by a majority.

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Article 9 Subject to the rights and duties resulting from the admission of Norway to the League of Nations, Norway undertakes not to create nor to allow the establishment of any naval base in the territories specified in Article 1 and not to construct any fortification in the said territories, which may never be used for warlike purposes. Article 10 Until the recognition by the High Contracting Parties of a Russian Government shall permit Russia to adhere to the present Treaty, Russian nationals and companies shall enjoy the same rights as nationals of the High Contracting Parties. Claims in the territories specified in Article 1 which they may have to put forward shall be presented under the conditions laid down in the present Treaty (Article 6 and Annex) through the intermediary of the Danish Government, who declare their willingness to lend their good offices for this purpose. The present Treaty, of which the French and English texts are both authentic, shall be ratified. Ratifications shall be deposited at Paris as soon as possible. Powers of which the seat of the Government is outside Europe may confine their action to informing the Government of the French Republic, through their diplomatic representative at Paris, that their ratification has been given, and in this case, they shall transmit the instrument as soon as possible. The present Treaty will come into force, in so far as the stipulations of Article 8 are concerned, from the date of its ratification by all the signatory Powers; and in all other respects on the same date as the mining regulations provided for in that Article. Third Powers will be invited by the Government of the French Republic to adhere to the present Treaty duly ratified. This adhesion shall be effected by a communication addressed to the French Government, which will undertake to notify the other Contracting Parties. In witness whereof the above named Plenipotentiaries have signed the present Treaty. Done at Paris, the ninth day of February, 1920, in duplicate, one copy to be transmitted to the Government of His Majesty the King of Norway,

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and one deposited in the archives of the French Republic; authenticated copies will be transmitted to the other Signatory Powers. Full original text in French and English available at: http://library.arcticportal.org/1909/1/The_Svalbard_Treaty_9ssFy.pdf

Index

A Alaska, 23 Amsterdamøya, 125, 134, 195 Amundsen, Roald, 23, 24 Architects, 83, 164–168, 172, 173, 198 Archives, 72, 73, 75, 84, 86–90, 135 Arctic Circle, 101, 141, 143, 152 Arctic landscape, 23, 143, 179, 274 Arctic Ocean, 20, 28, 29, 36 Aurora, 239

B Barentsburg, 7, 28, 33–35, 57, 77, 78, 80, 83, 152, 169, 174, 176, 193, 196, 198, 223 Barents Sea, 31, 191, 203 Barentsz, Willem, 21 Brundtland report, 231

C CAPARDUS, 214, 221 Circumpolar North, 9

Circumpolar region, 96, 147, 283 Citizen science, 214 Climate change, 5, 21, 58, 62, 95, 100, 101, 106, 107, 120–122, 126, 130–136, 139, 142, 173, 179, 201, 204, 205, 213, 219, 221, 225–227, 268, 276, 277 Co-creation, 216, 223, 231 Cold War, 20, 28–31, 34–36, 56, 78, 164, 173, 174 Colonial history, 144 Colonizers, 168 Company town, 5, 15, 73, 76–79, 83, 90, 147, 169, 170, 172, 177, 178, 190, 200, 201, 206, 219, 283 Cultural heritage, 5, 7, 73, 76, 84, 135, 177, 179, 197, 213, 216, 217, 220–223, 226, 230 D Danskøya, 23, 134 Darkness, 103, 262, 272 Demilitarization, 31, 58

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Albert et al. (eds.), Svalbard Imaginaries, Arctic Encounters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43841-7

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INDEX

Documentary, 77, 79, 80, 130, 153

E Ellsworth, Lincoln, 23 Environmental Protection Act, 76 European Union, 43, 53, 99, 218, 226, 229, 232 Explorer, 23, 24, 100, 270 Extended reality, 120, 136 Extraction, 24, 25, 51–54, 63, 73, 78, 89, 99, 106, 135, 206, 219 Extractivism, 155, 157

F Far North, 142, 268, 269 FOSSIL, 84, 142, 222

G Ghost town, 205 Glaciers, 103, 105, 107, 119, 121, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132, 147, 239, 272, 274–276 Global warming, 144 Global West, 144 Grøndal, Herta, 14, 72–74, 82, 283 Grønfjorden, 192 Gravneset, 126, 127, 129, 131, 133 Grotius, Hugo, 46–51, 55, 59 Grumantbyen, 169 Guide, 3, 4, 15, 215, 260, 261, 263, 264, 266, 271, 273, 276, 279 Gullybreen, 126, 129 Gullybukta, 126, 130

H Haugdal, Elin, 74, 174 Hiorthfjellet, 145 Hiorthhamn, 196 Hobbes, Thomas, 47, 49, 55, 59, 60

Holmiabukta, 120 Hunting, 22, 24, 80, 124, 135, 190, 191, 219, 262, 266 Hurdal Platform, 229 I Identity of place, 89, 140 INTAROS, 214 Isfjord, 27 K Kant, Immanuel, 47, 49, 59–62 Keilhau, Baltazar, 25 Kongsfjorden, 123, 132, 195, 196 L Løtvedt, Jan Alfred, 74 Lampert, Herta, 74, 87 Legendary tales, 262 Leisure, 265 Libraries, 135 Local communities, 33, 220, 221, 229, 241 Local identities, 83, 84, 240 Longyear, John M., 27, 169, 188, 192, 199 M Magdalenefjorden, 120, 123, 125, 126, 133, 135, 136 Memories, 71, 72, 84, 109, 156, 157, 222, 241, 253, 275 Museums, 135, 142 Myths, 72, 146 N Narratives, 10, 11, 13, 89, 90, 130, 136, 148, 154, 163, 214, 222, 241, 250, 251, 255

INDEX

NATO, 21, 30–33, 36, 56–58, 62 New European Bauhaus, 218 Nobile, Umberto, 23 Nordenskiöld, Adolf Erik, 25 Norsk Polarinstitutt, 247 North Pole Museum, 142 North West Spitsbergen, 125 Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), 75 Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 74 Norwegian Parliament, 25, 30 Norwegian Sea, 20, 25, 54 Ny-Ålesund, 20, 23, 33, 35, 77, 123, 141, 169, 189, 191, 193, 195, 196, 204, 205, 223 P Paris peace conference, 27 Peace, 50, 59–61, 63 Postwar architecture, 174 Pyramiden, 14, 33, 35, 57, 77, 83, 150, 151, 165, 169, 174–179, 187, 191, 193, 196, 198, 203, 205, 223, 275 R Raudfjorden, 132 Rephotography, 120–122, 133, 144 Representation, 5, 10, 33, 82, 86, 90, 96, 154, 254 Rossi, Christopher, 45 Royal Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security, 43 Russian settlements, 63, 151, 223 S Sense of community, 240, 255 Settler community, 144 Social memory, 91, 158

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Social Science, 7, 12, 72, 214 Social theory, 7, 46, 47 SSSI, 7, 72, 214, 221, 224, 232 Statens Filmcentral, 77 State town, 76 Store Norske, 33, 74, 76–78, 87, 88, 169, 189 Svalbard Museum, 142, 171 Svalbard Science Conference, 7 SVALUR, xi, 239–241, 243–245, 249, 250, 253, 255 Svea, 73, 74, 83, 86, 88, 189–191, 193, 196–198, 203, 205, 220

T Territorial status, 142, 149, 224 Trinityhamna, 126 Tromsø University Museum, 73

U UAK, 214 UNIS, 171, 173, 200, 229, 247 UN SDGs, 217, 218, 223, 226, 232

V Virtual landscape, 130, 136 Virtual reality, 120 Virtual spaces, 131

W Western civilization, 283 Wight, Martin, 48 Wilderness, 21, 76, 89, 101, 185, 203, 220, 227, 269, 279 World War I, 56 World War II, 21, 28–30, 56, 77, 111, 164, 169, 174, 177, 193, 197, 200