March 16, 2022: Article by Peter Schweitzer & Olga Povoroznyuk in “Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning”
The town of Tiksi came into being in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union intensified its efforts to industrialize the Arctic. A critical element of that policy was to make the Northern Sea Route a viable Arctic shipping lane and Tiksi, located where the Lena River meets the Arctic Ocean, became an important transportation hub on that route. Post-Soviet transformations led to a rapid decline in population numbers and economic significance of the town, while climate change opened up new opportunities for shipping and mammoth tusk collecting. Today, the situation seems to have stabilized but the promises of a bright future pronounced in strategic papers by the government are yet to be realized. The article explores the socio-economic, infrastructural and environmental changes of recent decades in order to explore future development prospects for Tiksi. The infrastructural legacies of the Soviet past, combined with the environmental conditions of the region, result in the intertwined material dependencies of built and natural environments. Still, these material dependencies are neither straitjackets nor unchangeable. It is the interplay between global climate change, national policies, and local initiative that will challenge the material dependencies of the past and present.
Published in Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, March 16, 2022
Article as PDF
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Nov 2025: Special Issue of “Anthropologica” Co-edited by Giuseppe Amatulli and Philipp Budka
A new special issue of Anthropologica (Vol. 67, No. 1, 2025), the journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society, has just been published. Titled “Narratives and Temporalities of Infrastructure: The Canadian Experience,” the issue was co-edited by Giuseppe Amatulli (Carleton University) and InfraNorth researcher Philipp Budka and presents anthropological perspectives on water, energy and transport infrastructures […]
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Nov 2025: Article by Julia Olsen, Alexandra Meyer, et al. in The Polar Journal
The Polar Journal, which publishes policy-relevant research on polar affairs from across the social sciences and humanities, has recently released the article ‘Building transdisciplinary bridges and learning from the Svalbard context’ by Julia Olsen, Alexandra Meyer, and Lisbeth Iversen, Ulrich Schildberg, Ragnhild Holmen Bjørnsen, Grete K. Hovelsrud, James Badu, Dina Brode-Roger, Adriana Craciun, Hanne H. […]
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Nov 5, 2025: Presentation by Philipp Budka at the University of Vienna
On November 5, 2025, at 5:00 pm CET, InfraNorth researcher Philipp Budka will deliver a lecture titled “Sovereignty by Design: Community Infrastructures and Relational Futures in Remote Canada,” as part of the Wednesday Seminars, the lecture series of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Budka’s talk examines infrastructural sovereignty—the […]
