UC Berkeley

Arctic Modernity: Welfare Colonial Architecture in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) examines the built environment of the Danish-led modernization of Greenlandic cities from 1953 to 1979. During these years, the Danish state sought to rapidly modernize, industrialize, and Danify Greenland, transforming the former colony and its Indigenous Inuit population into an Arctic part of the emerging postwar Danish welfare state. Taking my analytical starting point in the South Greenlandic town of Paamiut, I analyze multiple scales of the city’s built environment to trace how large-scale rural-to-urban displacements, high-modernist mass housing, coercive domestic environments, and racialized systems of labor and materiality reveal architecture’s role in the attempted transformation of Greenland and Inuit. Challenging existing historical narratives and conventional methodological approaches to research on Scandinavian modernism, colonial history, and the Greenlandic-Danish relation, I foreground the Indigenous Inuit experience of these transformative years. I do this by building an eclectic methodological approach that combines oral histories, archival research, critical cartography, material history, and visual culture, while drawing on a wide range of sources. Inspired by contemporary decolonial scholarship and the field of Critical Arctic Studies, I highlight Indigenous agency within spaces and systems of coercion, demonstrating how inhabitants adapted and subverted the imposed welfare modernism. Extending into the present, I show how local communities are now building alternative futures from the rubble of these failed urban experiments. Through my historical analysis, I show how the Danish government merged welfare and colonialism by using modern architecture, urban planning, and welfare ideology as colonial tools to retain Greenland’s territory and shape cultural relations of the North Atlantic and Arctic. By suggesting that Greenland was never peripheral but, in fact, central to the development of Danish modernism and postwar welfare ideology, the dissertation contributes to decolonial scholarship on welfare-state architecture, illuminating how legacies of welfare colonialism continue to impact Greenland, the Danish Realm, and the broader Global High North.