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Greenland

Cooperation on major problems

Now, a DKK 1.3 billion refurbishment programme has been launched with a view to promoting sustainable development and energy efficiency in the housing sector.

In the middle of the 1990s, news of an outbreak of tuberculosis in a settlement shook Greenland's politicians. Investigations showed that the standard of Greenland's housing stock was shockingly low and that hygiene standards in the drinking water supply system and waste disposal left much to be desired. On that occasion, several members of the Greenlandic Parliament expressed the view that the local politicians had neglected their duty, and the Parliament and the Cabinet took steps to remedy the situation.

Just a few years later, however, Greenland's Premier added a far more serious economic problem to his agenda with the Danish Prime Minister. The Home Rule Government's analyses of the maintenance of buildings etc. revealed a catastrophic lack of maintenance that required immediate action. The question was, how exactly the matter should be handled, what it would cost and who should and could pay for it.

On 12 May 1998, it was agreed between the Danish Government and the Home Rule Government of Greenland that, at the request of the Home Rule Government, the Danish Government would provide technical and scientific assistance with a view to mapping the need for refurbishment and that the discussions on the question of refurbishment should continue.

As always with political decisions, a committee was appointed - the so-called Coordination Committee, with representatives of the Danish Government, the Home Rule Government and Greenland's National Association of Local Authorities (KANUKOKA). Working in cooperation with affected authorities and institutions, the Coordination Committee was to establish a professionally sound basis for the Home Rule Government's further work on the refurbishment project, which would also form the basis for the continuing discussions between the Danish Government and the Home Rule Government on how the big refurbishment project was to be tackled and financed.

The Committee worked fast - after just one year it delivered a report summarising the problems from the building boom in the postwar years, particularly in the period from 1960 to 1980. The Danish Government was already familiar with some of the problems from a similar building boom in many other places in Denmark. On top of that came documentation of a lack of maintenance and a lack of new investment in the electricity supply system and the drinking water supply system.

The report concluded that a complete refurbishment programme was needed and that this would cost around DKK 4 billion.

How could things gone so wrong

DKK 4,000,000,000 is a lot of money, and the fact that it has got to be used to pay off a kind of debt - to make up for the lack of normal maintenance, old building damage and necessary reinvestment in water pipes and power stations - does not make the figure look any smaller. Besides that, a large part of the bill will basically have to be paid by about just 15,000 households or families. It is therefore natural to ask how things could have gone so wrong.

To answer that question in the year 2002 we have to go fifty years back in time. In many parts of the world the 1950s were a time of reconstruction and the setting of new goals for society. This also applied to Denmark and Greenland. In Greenland, one of the goals was to combat tuberculosis with its catastrophically high mortality, and another was to improve the country's housing stock. These two goals supplemented each other because it was well established that better housing and more space reduced the risk of tuberculosis infection.

Intensive action was taken on the housing front from the mid-1960s onwards, and from 1965 to 1985, the number of dwellings in Greenland doubled - from around 7,500 to 15,000. At the same time, the number of new cases of tuberculosis fell dramatically and the proportion of deaths from tuberculosis fell to 2% in 1979. At the same time, the general health of the population improved, and the size of the population increased by 33% from 1960 to 1970.

The measures to provide better housing and improve public health were thus highly successful, but success brought a need for even more homes.

Modern industrialised building methods

One might wonder how it was possible at all not only to provide all this new housing, but also to supply the new homes with electricity and drinking water. The answer lies in the technological development in the building industry at that time. Precisely in that period, industrialised building culminated in Denmark and in many other parts of the world as well. Housing construction at that time was symbolised by large, completely identical blocks of flats with balcony access, made of prefabricated concrete components lifted into place and assembled by large building cranes. In the building industry, importance was attached to the repetitive element, but also to new ways of reducing construction costs - in connection, for example, with choice of building materials and methods of construction. In both Denmark and Greenland this resulted in the use of new materials and methods that did not keep their promise and that later became weaknesses that developed into building defects.

The industrial uniformity and the repetitive element unfortunately resulted in the introduction of an appallingly large number of defective materials and new, untested building methods. On top of these technical building defects came what we today call shoddy building, which was undoubtedly the rule rather than the exception because of the extremely fast building tempo.

It was thus the success of industrialised building technology that laid the foundation of the present need for refurbishment.

Deterioration of housing through wear and tear

Buildings in Greenland suffer from the same basic defects as buildings in Denmark and Europe, but the wear and tear to which they are subjected and the maintenance they receive have undoubtedly differed.

The wear and tear on a dwelling are inextricably related to the number of occupants and the effects of wind and weather. In Greenland, both have been very different from elsewhere in Denmark. Besides that, there is the question of whether the dwellings have been designed to meet the occupants' needs.

There is a difference between "urban dwellers" and "rural dwellers". It lies, for example, in both occupation and housing needs. Farmers and fishermen need singlefamily detached houses with plenty of "yard space". Unfortunately, a large proportion of the hunting and fishing population in Greenland have moved into "town" - into small flats that are neither large enough nor designed to cope with the job of a fisherman or farmer, and that are therefore often subjected to extraordinary wear and tear.

The average size of dwellings in Greenland is smaller than in the rest of Denmark. In 1960, there were almost three times as many occupants per room as in the rest of Denmark, and in 1990, there were still over 50 per cent more occupants per room in Greenland. Even today, the average home in Greenland is about 40% smaller than the average Danish home. All else being equal, the far more intensive use of homes means greater wear and tear - a well-known phenomenon in any housing association.

One last factor that makes the housing problem in Greenland different from the warmer part of the Realm is, of course, the weather. Not that there are not similarities, for there are: in large parts of Greenland, as in southern Denmark, the weather is characterised by frequent changes in temperature and by rain and wind. That has a wearing effect on dwellings. Besides this, however, there is the special Arctic climate, with rapid falls in temperature down to heavy frost. These changes can quite literally cause frost cracks in any building that has not been designed and built for the prevailing climatic conditions.

Regular maintenance or major refurbishment

With so many factors leading to increased wear and tear on buildings in Greenland, one would think that Greenland had a tradition for intensive and systematic maintenance of its housing stock. Unfortunately, this is not the case - quite the reverse.

One unfortunate result of the immense changes in Greenlandic society and in the pattern of settlement was that the individual occupant paid almost no attention to the maintenance problem. Moreover, the individual tenant had no influence on maintenance and no financial incentive to carry out any maintenance.

At the same time, during that entire period, there was a constant need for new housing, which meant that the Danish Government and, later, the Home Rule Government paid little attention to the way the housing stock was operated or to the lack of maintenance. The lack of attention paid to these basic operating factors on both sides inevitably led to an immense backlog of refurbishment work.

Towards the end of the 1980s, the wear and tear of homes built before 1975 was so serious that the Home Rule Government initiated an analysis of the need for refurbishment of its rental housing stock. The analysis ended in 1992, but its first phase alone led to initiation of the most urgent repair work, and at the end of 1991, the Greenlandic Parliament adopted a refurbishment programme costing DKK 1.3 billion.

It turned out that neither the programme nor the amount set aside for it was sufficient.

Sector programme - an agreement with obligations

In light of the considerable cost of a proper refurbishment programme, the Danish Government, in a joint declaration with Greenland's Cabinet on 2 June 1999, undertook to provide financial assistance for an extraordinary refurbishment programme.

In the Finance Act for the year 2000, the Folketing (the Danish Parliament) defined the assistance and granted DKK 50 million per year for a four-year period for a sector programme for environmentally sound, energyefficient housing refurbishment in Greenland. As an innovation in the cooperation within the Realm, the Danish Government's grant to the Home Rule Government was earmarked and certain conditions were attached to it.

One of the main conditions for the DKK 50 million grant is that the Home Rule Government itself uses between DKK 200 and DKK 275 million per year on the refurbishment programme. At the same time, the Home Rule Government is required to draw up a complete sector programme for the refurbishment of housing stock, institutional buildings and supply systems.

The sector programme idea implies a requirement of involvement of all affected sectors in the project - working across the affected sectors, including the environment sector. The overarching aim is to ensure a sustainable process, and as a check on the process, the Finance Act includes a requirement that the programme be presented to the Advisory Committee for the Arctic and approved by the Danish Ministry of the Environment. In addition, at some time, the realisation of the entire programme must be evaluated externally.

The programme is now entering its third year. The Home Rule Government has had to cope with a major organisational task, consisting in defining the various forms of refurbishment, including bathrooms, new thermal glazing and better insulation, heat regulation, water meters, renovation of drinking water pipes, and conversion of old power stations into small combined heat and power plants, with use of the residual heat in the local district heating network. And this could be the easiest part of the task, despite the great technical challenges.

The fact is that the idea of future sustainability means that attention has to be paid to such questions as training programmes for the necessary manpower. Strange as it may sound, the use of prefabrication and the lack of maintenance for many years have resulted in a shortage of qualified manpower - or, without mincing words - to a shortage of good building tradesmen that master the difficult art of remedying the sins committed by others. Then come such formal questions as how homes are to be insulated, wet rooms renovated, new drinking water pipes established, etc. This should not be taken to mean that there are no building regulations or other rules for this - for there are. Greenland is in many ways as closely regulated a society as the rest of Denmark, but a DKK 4 billion refurbishment programme in a small society obviously needs careful consideration - and so, for instance, does the question of how best to incorporate environmental and energy thinking in the choice of materials and methods.

In the Finance Act, the Folketing has also provided for funds to be used for future sustainable development of the affected sectors and sound environmental implementation of the refurbishment programme. The Home Rule Government has made good use of this provision for a number of initiatives, including a revision of the building regulations, improvement of the planning basis for drinkingwater and energy supply systems, better control instruments for the various contracts to ensure the introduction of environmental management in the firms involved in the project, and better training programmes for coming building tradesmen.

All in all it must be said that, with this fouryear sector programme, the Danish Government and the Home Rule Government have taken a number of important new initiatives to tackle a major challenge.

The future will show whether the initiatives chosen are sufficient and the right ones.

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