Housing Policy, Urbanization, and the Production of Homelessness in Greenland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Visible homelessness is on the rise in Nuuk, Greenland. Since the early 2000s, the number of people staying at the municipal shelter, accessing support programs, and registering as homeless in the community has, by a qualitative estimate grown. Attention has also been given to the growing number of Greenlanders living homeless in Danish cities. However, the literature on Greenlandic homelessness remains sparse, and very little literature conceptualizes homelessness in Greenland within its specific geographical, cultural, or social context. To better understand the emergence of visible homelessness, this article explores the social dimensions of homelessness and asks how homelessness can be understood within the dynamics of urbanization in Greenland. Drawing on four years of participant observation in Nuuk with homelessness outreach organizations, and 20 in-depth interviews with both service providers and men and women experiencing homelessness, and four lived experience focus groups, we find that the emergence of homelessness in Greenland is part and parcel of a trajectory of welfare colonialism, resettlement, and contemporary urbanization. We highlight four specific policy issues: 1) an existing housing stock in Nuuk inappropriate for diverse needs; 2) urbanization in the absence of a national housing or homelessness strategy; 3) a lack of integrated supports and reliance on the non-profit sector; 4) and an increasingly punitive approach to managing the limited housing supply. Stepping back, we argue that the emergence of visible northern homelessness is an important lens through which to understand the dynamics of northern urbanization, social marginalization and exclusion, and the continuation of colonial relations in the era of self-governance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".