Mar 10, 2026: Presentation by Timothy Heleniak at the European Committee of the Regions
On March 10, 2026, InfraNorth researcher Timothy Heleniak presented “Is infrastructure enough? The case of decline in the Faroe Islands” at the concluding conference of the Horizon Europe-funded project PREMIUM_EU. The event was organized by Nordregio and hosted by the European Committee of the Regions in Brussels and live-streamed online.
In this talk, Heleniak presented his InfraNorth case study on the Faroe Islands, examining infrastructural developments over the past six decades in the 18-island North Atlantic archipelago, where a massive road construction project was undertaken. The project included building many tunnels, the first of which opened in 1963, and sub-sea tunnels; the most recent one was inaugurated in December 2024.
Transport infrastructure lies at the foundation of the country’s development, and ferry lines have been progressively replaced by fixed links regardless of socio-economic conditions, such as the economic and demographic collapse after the crash of the fisheries in the early 1990. His talk investigated the archipelago’s spatial and regional development over the last six decades to determine whether road expansion has contributed to the demographic sustainability of communities. This is done by analysing the development of transport infrastructure and its impact on population change at the regional, island, and village levels.
Results show that fixed links have been critical in connecting distant villages and islands together across the archipelago. Yet, the few exceptions of the so-called ‘outer islands’ demonstrate that tunnels alone have been insufficient to achieve a demographically balanced country. While the Faroe Islands have a unique physical geography, there are lessons for other remote rural regions facing accessibility challenges.
The full recording of the presentation is available here.
