Managing Snow in an Arctic City: Urban Political Ecology Approach

How do we understand the snow–city intertwinement in the Arctic context? To answer this question, we have examined the environmental management practices of the city of Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland through the theoretical framework of urban political ecology. In this approach, snow is viewed as a relational matter that has a fundamental role in the creation of modern Arctic urban space. Our research is based on interviews with local urban planners and architects, who tend to see snow as something that can be technically managed and cleared out of the way. At the same time, however, they also find snow to be a great challenger. Snow is given affordances that are tied to the city structure, either making snow a nuisance and a budgeting problem, or a landscape equalizer and a pull factor for the tourism industry. This chapter shows that even when something like snow management in an Arctic city is easy to take for granted, in reality it is embedded in and formed through multiple levels of political, cultural, and economic practices.