Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
posed by winter, the ways that designs can improve the sustainability and liveability
of settlements, and the opportunities for behavioural initiatives to improve life in
winter.
83
Problems of the Four Types of North
It has been argued that the problems of winter for the people who inhabit these areas
of seasonally freezing conditions relate to two major issues,
the physical conditions
of the 'actual north'
, and what is described as the '
psychological north
' (Pressman
2004
, p. 4). Although these two ideas may be basic to understanding the difficul-
ties of settlements in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, they need to be
complemented by problems posed by the '
economic
', as well as the '
social
' effects
of winter conditions upon settlements and their residents. Before dealing with these
four Winter City problems some clarifications must be made. The term 'north' in
the Winter City literature is used as a surrogate for areas that experience long winter
conditions. Obviously settlements in many high mountainous areas further south
have similar problems, as do places in the high latitudes of the southern hemisphere.
so the term 'north' is not literally accurate, but may reflect the fact that most of the
settlements affected by winter conditions are in the northern hemisphere. Also the
term is usually applied to places where freezing conditions exist for several months,
although it could be argued that places further south with long, rainy winters and
also constant cloud cover experience some of the same sets of difficulties.
8.3.1
The Physical or Actual North
Students of Winter Cities have never really clarified the exact location of places
to which the term applies. One of the simplest ways of defining such centres is by
including places where at least two months of the year have average temperatures
below 0 ﾰC, while the idea of a 'hard or extreme north' can be identified within this
zone, those with a more intense winter, perhaps separating out those places beyond
the Arctic Circle that have at least several weeks without sunlight. The Canadian
geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin (
1979
) used ten social and physical indicators
to measure the character of what he described as 'nordicity' in Canada. Essentially
this defined the severity of winter in different northern Canadian regions, classify-
ing the country into four zones (near, middle, far and extreme north) outside the
main ecumene, the populated areas in the south. In general, the severity of winter in-
creases as one goes north, but latitude is not the only variable involved; altitude and
the regional effects of mitigating or enhancing features upon local climates, such as
cold or warm sea currents, and the degree of exposure to cold winds have consider-
able effects. These variations mean that the term 'Winter City' is a vague one in a
location sense, without any accepted precise definition. Yet without going into the
detailed variations of the degree of the physical severity of winter in various areas,
