In the past, the Circumpolar North’s built environment has been dominated by a nation-state point of view, was influenced by design perspectives appropriate to more southern landscapes, as well as suffered from a limited understanding of the region’s internal dynamics, unique climatic conditions, and diversity of people and cultures. Today, emerging Arctic shipping routes, declining sea ice, expanding resource extraction, growing military imperatives, new geostrategic ambitions, and shifting tourism networks indicate the Arctic is an increasingly accessible and complex three-dimensional space. This evolution may offer plentiful economic opportunities but also create new risks and concerns among the eight Arctic states and their people groups. In the role of leading designer, collaborator, or consultant, Transpolar Studio aims to critically address these inherently spatial challenges through creative design projects located in the Arctic and Subarctic regions.
Mission
Office
Transpolar Studio is a design practice specializing in landscape architecture, urbanism, and design research in the Arctic and Subarctic regions. Bert De Jonghe is the founder of Transpolar Studio, a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), and a Doctor of Design candidate at Harvard GSD. He holds degrees from Harvard GSD (Master in Design Studies), the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (Master of Landscape Architecture), and the School of Arts in Ghent (Bachelor of Landscape and Garden Architecture). In the past, he has worked as a designer at various landscape architecture practices worldwide and served in several teaching positions, including University Lecturer at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø.
Team collaborators: Mia Bennett (political geographer) & Zak Jacobi (landscape architect).
Projects
Svalbard is an Arctic territory built on an irreducible plurality of interests and design traditions. Yet, in recent years, Norway has increasingly overshadowed the desires and design influences of others. Contesting Svalbard combines a granular understanding of the spatial implications of multinational occupation in Svalbard with a critique of the Norwegian nationalism underlying the Svalbard project. Five design tipping points, or issues in Svalbard’s built environment, are selected as fertile ground to inject a range of alternative futures, catalyzing the archipelago’s multinational character. To do so successfully, a participatory and scenario planning approach based in design research is central.
The participatory aspect of this study kickstarted with three co-design workshops in Longyearbyen during May 2023.
Image 1: Cluster analysis of the Circumpolar North. Maps by Bert De Jonghe, 2023.
Image 2: Design workshops in Longyearbyen organized by Transpolar Studio. Photo by Olivia Eastwood, Nordover Svalbard, 2023.
Coastal Connections is an ongoing collaboration with Japanese photographer and landscape architect Akie Koh (Snøhetta, Oslo). Since 2019, Akie Koh and Bert De Jonghe have been taking images of coastal landscapes in Greenland, Norway, Belgium, Japan, and the US. The concept of this project is simple: we aim to find surprising similarities and ironic connections in often very different coastal landscapes. The collection of images represents a conversation, by which every image is a response to another. This response is focused on a particular landscape feature, materiality, or composition. The expected outcome of this work is an exhibition.
In recent decades, industrialization has strongly shaped the landscape of Murmansk, Kola Peninsula, Russia. By documenting and merging industrial sounds, this study frames the soundscape of Murmansk into a scene of complex negotiation processes between multiple actors, both local and global. Link
Across the Arctic, a great deal of commercial aviation infrastructure has its roots in World War II military operations and their protraction during the Cold War.1 Although many of these military imperatives have weakened, the path dependency of air transportation networks, which require enormous amounts of fixed capital, makes them difficult to alter.
As airpower became key to global military might in the 20th century, Greenland’s neighbor, the United States, started building airstrips and missile defense sites in the country as a matter of national security. American interest heightened after April 9, 1940, when the Nazis invaded Denmark, which had controlled Greenland since the early 18th century. With Denmark unable to send supplies to Greenland, let alone exercise sovereignty over it, the Danish ambassador to the United States disobeyed the Danish government and signed an agreement granting American access to the world’s largest island.2 In addition to civilian resupply and the construction of facilities such as weather stations, ports, depots, search-and-rescue stations, and more, this agreement made it possible for the US to establish military airbases on Greenlandic soil. Greenland’s aeroscape was thus originally constructed to the needs of American military colonialism3 rather than those of Greenlanders.
Today, some Greenlandic policymakers are calling for the relocation of certain airports as both a necessary economic step and a move away from Danish and American histories. One example from eastern Greenland involves the proposed relocation of the military/civilian airport on Kulusuk Island (pop. 240) to the main population hub of Tasiilaq, 20 kilometers away (pop. 2000).4 Aligning Greenland’s aeroscape with centers of population and economic activity, however, could disconnect the settlements that initially arose to support American-built airports, and whose continued existence depends on their operation. As postcolonial nations work to reconfigure infrastructural networks to better match local needs, the difficulties that Greenland is encountering within this transition underscore the challenges of including communities whose origins lie in military and colonial interventions within new nation-building projects.
1. M. Farish and P.W. Lackenbauer, “High Modernism in the Arctic: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik,” Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 3 (2009): 517—44.
2. J. Rahbek-Clemmensen, and L.J. Nielsen, “The Middleman—The Driving Forces behind Denmark’s Arctic Policy,” in Handbook on Geopolitics and Security in the Arctic, (Switzerland: Springer, 2020), 77—96.
3. M. Heymann, H. Knudsen, M. L. Lolck, H. Nielsen, and C. J. Ries, “Exploring Greenland: Science and Technology in Cold War Settings,” Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 33, no. 2 (2010): 11—42.
4. Stine Bendsen, Jesper Nordskilde, and Mads Paabøl Jensen, “The Transport Commission of Greenland,” Association for European Transport and Contributors, 2011.
First image: The US Air Force providing fuel for Kangerlussuaq Airport, 1951, Bent Helmudt, Courtesy of the Danish Arctic Institute.
Second image: Kulusuk Airport, 2017, Bert De Jonghe.
Positions
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Journal
Kerb Journal 31
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Editors
Hosiasson et al.
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Date
2024
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Theme
Kerb 31 explores the role of limits in navigating design complexity
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Additional
Peer-reviewed Book Chapter
Airport Landscapes: The Case of Qaqortoq Airport, South Greenland
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Author
Bert De Jonghe
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Editors
Leena Cho and Matthew Jull
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Book
Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic
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Publisher
Routledge
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Date
2023
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Additional
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Speaker
Bert De Jonghe
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Date
28 November 2023
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Additional
Book Chapter
Climate Change and the Opening of the Transpolar Sea Route: Logistics, Governance, and Wider Geo- economic, Societal and Environmental Impacts
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Authors
Mia M. Bennett, Scott R. Stephenson, Kang Yang, Michael T. Bravo, & Bert De Jonghe
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Book Title
The Arctic and World Order
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Editors
Kristina Spohr, Daniel S. Hamilton
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Date
December, 2020
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Additional
Article
Tracing the Limits to Climate Adaptation: From the Pacific Small Island Developing States to the Arctic Region
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Authors
Begoña Peiro & Bert De Jonghe
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Publisher
KoozArch
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Date
November, 2022
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Additional
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Publisher
Actar Publishers
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Foreword
Charles Waldheim
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Editorial advice
Mia M. Bennett
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Date
March, 2022
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Additional
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Publisher
UrbanNext
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Editor
Marta Bugés
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Date
April 2022
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Additional
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Speaker
Bert De Jonghe
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Date
7 November 2023
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Additional
Peer-Reviewed article
The opening of the Transpolar Sea Route: Logistical, geopolitical, environmental, and socioeconomic impacts
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Authors
Mia M. Bennett, Scott R. Stephenson, Kang Yang, Michael T. Bravo, & Bert De Jonghe
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Journal
Marine Policy Journal, Volume 121
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Date
November 2020
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Additional
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Date
July 2022
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Additional
Spotlight
Teaching in the high-Arctic
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Summary
Bert De Jonghe's semester teaching in Arctic Norway (Fall 2023) is discussed on Harvard GSD's website.
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Date
January 2024
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Additional
Contact
Bert De Jonghe ©2024 Belgium
Private limited liability company BE0656856482
Instagram: @transpolarstudio
Email: info@transpolarstudio.com