Techniques of North: Sitting on Top of the World

Abstract

Louis-Edmond Hamelin, the Quebecois elder statesman of northern geographies, has worked for half a century on fertile concepts such as “winterity” and “nordicity” in order to juxtapose real, extreme environments of high-latitude regions with the rich and complex ways they are perceived, imagined, depicted, and talked about. Hamelin even developed a “nordicity” scale, used by governments to allocate infrastructure and environmental resources. He named it the VAPO, or valeurs polaires. The VAPO is a composite and somewhat subjective measure that tracks ten different aspects—things like “annual cold,” “types of ice,” as well as “accessibility by means other than air” and “degree of economic activity”—rating each on a scale between 0 and 100. The total score, out of a thousand, must be over 200 for a place to be consid- ered “in the North.” The North Pole itself has a theoretical value of 1000, as VAPO as possible.