The Arctic City Between Design and Daily Life: An Epistemology of Comfort
This article examines the Arctic city as a space of epistemological divergence between design-based and everyday forms of knowledge. The empirical basis of the study includes semi-structured interviews with architects and residents, mobile (drive-along) and informal interviews, a focus group, and field observations conducted in the cities of Novy Urengoy and Tarko-Sale. The article explores how notions of comfort, urban normality, and inhabitability are constructed under conditions of extreme climate, demographic instability, and infrastructural limitations. It demonstrates that architectural knowledge in the Arctic context is governed by normative visuality and institutional accountability, whereas everyday narratives focus on bodily vulnerability, care, and situational adaptation. Rather than interpreting these contradictions as failures of implementation, the study proposes to view them as productive fields of attunement that analytically reveal the city as a plural and contested socio-technical assemblage. Methodologically, the research combines narrative analysis with elements of situated ethnography and contributes to urban anthropology, critical infrastructure studies, and the social history of everyday life in the Arctic. The authors declare no conflict of interests.
Keywords
Arctic,
urban comfort,
architectural knowledge,
everyday life,
embodiment,
infrastructure,
urban experience,
ethnography of the North,
urban design,
situated knowledgeAuthors
| Ustyuzhantseva Olga V. | National Research Tomsk State University | olgavust@gmail.com |
| Prokopova Sofia M. | Ural Federal University named after the First President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin | Sofiaprokopova@gmail.com |
| Kravchuk Svetlana G. | Ural Federal University named after the First President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin | svetlana_usenyuk@mail.ru |
Всего: 3
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