Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
accumulation, together with an emphasis on southward-facing doors and windows
to increase exposure to sunlight and warmth. Indeed the latter concept was one of
the recommendations in the Swedish national building code of the late nineteenth
century. Similarly, historic societies in northern lands developed various aids to
movement across snow and ice, such as dog sleds, snow shoes, skis and sleighs,
which often meant that mobility across uneven land was easier in winter. These
new inventions and the development of building designs to take account of various
climatic conditions and variations evolved through long periods of trial and error.
Unfortunately the traditional practices that adapted settlements to the extremes
of their local environment were increasingly ignored from the early twentieth cen-
tury. Older and tested building practices were replaced with new house designs
more suited to temperate environments, based on cheap fossil energy sources and
materials brought from considerable distances. In northern lands these modernizing
influences, especially under the impact of suburbanization, started to dominate the
additions to existing towns and the many new settlements in the far north that were
primarily linked to new mining, fishing, and administrative developments. As a
result, many of these settlements were badly adapted to the often severe conditions
of winter, making them less sustainable and more placeless, and containing many
residents who viewed winter as a season to be endured, rather than welcomed. Rec-
ognition of these problems led to the creation of the concept of Winter Cities in the
late 1980s, a movement that has gained in popularity and impact in the last two
decades, although most of the settlements supporting the ideas were really towns,
rather than cities in size. This was one of the first of many movements characterized
by an adjectival prefix to 'cities' that sought to create new approaches to the devel-
opment of settlements at the end of the twentieth century, in this case to the often
severe climate conditions of northern lands. However, this movement was not sim-
ply a description of the presence of winter in these settlements. Rather, the Winter
City approach attempts to reduce winter's negative consequences and to emphasize
its positive features and opportunities, so as to create more sustainable and liveable
settlements in both the structures and the life of the people living in these centres.
This objective of treating winter as an asset is reflected in the introductory quota-
tion that was the keynote concept of the first meeting of the Sapporo World Winter
City Mayors' conference in 1982. It is the first theme city type that has emerged in
an international context with an emphasis upon mitigating problems posed by lo-
cal climate conditions, although it is anticipated that other movements to improve
sustainability in other climate regimes will emerge in the future.
8﻽2
Origins of Winter City Ideas
The development of the Winter City approach comes from several sources. The
pioneering work of key individuals, especially the planner-geographer, Norman
Pressman in Canada (1988, 2004) and the retired Canadian journalist J. C. Royle,
were especially influential in creating and publicising the idea in North America.
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