Making the Arctic City explores the unwritten history of city-building in the Arctic over the last 100 years. Spanning northern regions of North America, through Greenland, Svalbard to Russia, this is the first book to provide a truly circumpolar account of historical and contemporary architecture and urbanism in the Arctic – and it shows how the Arctic city offers valuable lessons for the post-colonial study of architectural and urban planning history elsewhere.

Examining architects' and planners' designs for Arctic urban futures, it considers the impact of 20th-century models of urban design and planning in Arctic cities, and reveals how contemporary architectural approaches continue to this day to essentialize extreme climate conditions and disregard the agency of Arctic city-dwellers – a critical perspective that is vital to the formulation of future design and planning practices in the region.