The authors put an ambitious task of measuring urban sustainability in all major Arctic cities. They designated fifty cities with a population of 12,000 or above in all eight countries of the Arctic region with total population of nearly 3.9 million people. Half (twenty-five) of these cities, with 60% of the population, belong to the Russian Federation.
In order to measure urban sustainability, authors originally wanted to develop a new Arctic Urban Sustainability Index, but could not agree on the selection of indicators (which is not surprising given that cities in different countries had emerged and functioned under quite different conditions). They decided to apply international standards for urban sustainability developed by International Organization for Standardization—ISO 37120. The authors make clear, however, that they are well aware of the limitations of this approach when applying it to Arctic cities. They admit that they could not collect all 128 indicators required by ISO 37120 standards for all fifty cities, not even forty-five core indicators, and therefore the book is rather a test of a few selected indicators on a variety of case study cities.
The book consists of three parts. Part I has only one, mainly theoretical chapter devoted to the general issues of urban sustainability in the Arctic. The chapter gives a comprehensive overview of Arctic cities and discusses major factors of their functioning.
Part II tests indicators of urban sustainability applied to Arctic cities. It consists of four chapters, dealing mostly with cities in the Russian Arctic. One chapter is devoted to comparative analysis of the mining cities Vorkuta and Salekhard; another deals with the largest industrial city within the Arctic circle: Norilsk, and its problems; another is devoted to Yakutsk, which strictly speaking is located outside the Arctic region but plays a very important role for the population of the Arctic. This chapter focuses mainly on culture-related indicators, both quantitative and qualitative. Finally, the last chapter of this section focuses on the energy security and sustainability of two small cities on both sides of the Bering Sea: Nome in Alaska and Lavrentiya in Chukotka, Russia, examining how different governance structures affect their energy resilience.
Part III explores the ways to extend the international standard for measuring urban sustainability to make it more adjusted to the specificity of conditions in the Arctic and consists of five chapters. One innovative chapter tries to define “fate control,” which is understood as the “ability to guide one's own destiny by making choices and transforming them into actions and outcomes” (16). The author tries to develop this method by introducing the Fate Control Index and applying it to twelve Arctic cities selected from Russia, the US, Canada, Greenland, Sweden, and Norway. Another chapter addresses the very acute problem of corporate social responsibility and sustainability in the most quickly developing gas extraction region in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in Russia, showing that the existing set of urban-related indicators can be misleading when a city's countryside is an arena of massive resource extraction efforts. Another chapter deals with the planning process in ISO indicators based on the example of eight major cities in the Russian Arctic. The analysis demonstrates that planning offices very vaguely consider sustainable development issues and usually pay little attention to urban sustainability indicators in their planning process, although situations vary from city to city depending on the general ecological situation there. Another chapter focuses on connectivity between cities as an important indicator for urban sustainability in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) of the Russian Federation, especially considering climate change and related permafrost transformation. Finally, the last chapter deals with the problems of sustainability planning implementation using Whitehorse in Yukon, Canada as a case study.
In conclusion, the authors discuss major findings and lessons learned during their research and try to define future steps. They conclude that the major shortcoming of the ISO 37120 indicator set is the lack of sustainability theory behind it, which can help to derive the drivers for sustainability that can be quite different, especially in the Arctic. Another shortcoming of ISO 37120 is the impossibility to interpret how various components of sustainability can work together. Authors rightly point out that this international standard often has very little sense in Arctic contexts because it does not take into account the specificity of permafrost, the isolation of many cities, and the lack of economic diversity. The importance of Indigenous cultures also is hardly reflected through this indicator set.
The authors conclude that future research is needed to develop a comprehensive data set that brings together measures for all indicators of sustainable development for all Arctic cities with populations over 12,000 people. The book has 296 pages; it contains fourteen figures, four maps, twenty-three tables, bibliographical references after each chapter and overall index.
In general, this work represents a very interesting attempt to implement a universally-developed set of urban sustainable development indicators to the particular conditions of Arctic cities. The authors make a comprehensive overview of urban developments in the Arctic, focusing mainly on cities in the Russian Federation, which is understandable given their weight among total Arctic cities (50% in number, 60% in population), although there is a fair number of examples and case studies from the other Arctic countries as well. What becomes evident from the very beginning (and authors make no doubt that they are well aware of it), is the fact that many specific conditions and peculiarities of Arctic cities cannot be adequately described by ISO 37120 indicators because so many conditions in which these cities emerged and now function are very different from conditions elsewhere. Of course, the reader appreciates this specificity, but on the other hand, the book is provoking interesting thought: every region on Earth has its own specifics for urban development. What if one directs a study toward cities in the Amazon region, or the Sahara Desert, or Tibet, or small island communities? How applicable will be these “universal” ISO standards in those cases?
