Displacement: time and temporality in Nordic colonial architecture
Welcome to this seminar and the Cities & Society seminar series with Professor Tone Huse on colonial architecture, urban planning and temporal displacement in the Arctic.
Colonialism in and by the Nordic nation states is an understudied, yet growing field of research. It interrogates the histories and continued effects of Nordic colonialism, as well as efforts to decolonize the Indigenous lands of Kalaallit Nuunat and Sápmi. In this talk, Huse will focus on the urban planning and development practices of the Danish state in Nuuk during the so-called “assimilation period” spanning from 1953 to 1979. She will discuss how urbanisation became a technology of colonialist policies of assimilation and control, but also how colonial architectures were resisted by Kalaallit women. These movements and counter-movements have entailed spatial displacement and erasures in various forms, but also, and importantly, speak to how time and temporality is scripted by colonial architectures. Asking how architecture represents a form of material politics of time, the talk will concentrate on the notion of “temporal displacement”. This notion, suggested by Huse, speaks to forms of displacement that privilege distinct everyday temporalities, thereby excluding others, and in the context of urbanisation are solidified by the durability of built infrastructures.
About the speaker
Tone Huse is an associate professor at the Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Science and Theology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her current research focuses on the geographies and materialities of urban politics, economies, and planning in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat. Her work spans historical as well as contemporary research, is radically interdisciplinary, and committed to experimenting with new means for interacting with broad publics. Huse is the author of Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City. On Displacement, Ethnic Privileging and the Right to Stay Put (Ashgate 2014), and co-author (with Kristin Asdal) of Nature Made Economy: Cod, Capital and the Great Economization of the Ocean (MIT Press 2023).
Huse is currently the Principle Investigator of UrbTrans, a project that focuses on the interconnections of colonialism, decolonization and urbanization in the Arctic.
