Arctic Profile: Running Tromso – the successes and the challenges

Name: Jarle Aarbakke

Title: Mayor of Tromso

Eye on the Arctic: What are the three main municipal issues facing Tromso from City Hall’s point of view?

Jarle Aarbakke:  We’re a city that is growing. For the last 40 years the number of inhabitants has doubled. Now we have 73,000 people coming from 146 different nations. The growth of the city like that creates problems and opportunities. A general one, like in the rest of the western world, there’s an ever increasing number of people that need health care, both in their homes and in nursing homes. Here, it’s  the responsibly  of the community and with our growth it’s an increasing challenge. We also have a growing number of children which is also a concern in the city because City Hall is responsible for taking care of kindergarten and elementary schools. It’s a challenge to continue providing high quality services when the population is growing so quickly, but this  is also an opportunity because this it’s obviously much better to have these kinds of problems than being a city in decline.

Tromso’s City Hall. Does Tromso’s rapid development hold any lessons for Canada’s Arctic regions? (Eilís Quinn/Eye on the Arctic)

What’s the number one issue/complaint/concern the citizens of Tromso bring up with you when they meet you in person?

That we’ve had to raise one of the taxes  here in order to deal with the challenges I just mentioned, health care and good schools. Some of our citizens are frustrated with that and here in northern Norway, we are known to speak our minds, so they let me know about that.

What’s going well in Tromso?  What major issue/challenge has the city overcome in recent years, and how did they do it?

Tourism. I’m going to sounds like a tourism machine, but it’s the truth. You can go whale-watching here. You can do sledding. Within the city centre here you have a concert hall, caffe lattes, the northern lights.
When you travel abroad, or in southern Norway, what`s the biggest misconception people have about the city?

Some wonder if we have electricity. Things like that. People think of Tromso as a very remote city in the Arctic: deep frozen and so on. But in the summer, we have up to 30 degrees plus. One other misconception is that we live off fishing, but we also have oil and gas, a lot of activities based on high competence, people who develop natural resources. So we’re small. High in the Arctic. But you can still do pretty much anything here.

The above Q&A has been edited and condensed

Does Canada have something to learn from the Tromso experience?