In one of its largest research initiatives ever the Research Council of Norway focuses on the arctic areas and the Barents Region. Against this backdrop the exhibition by adopting a global cartography seeks to encircle the role of Tromsø in the future. The town is in quest of a challenge of its own and its particular responsibilities. The future Tromsø is only to be traced and discovered within perspectives which are vastly larger than the city itself. When the Minister of Foreign Affairs declares that the role of the Norwegian Government is to contribute to the large dialogue and that Norway’s objective in the arctic areas is to be in the forefront in climatological research, this posits a challenge to the knowledge comunities of Tromsø. A new geopolitical panorama has been outlined.

The inner pressures – an exercise in openness
The small city centre is a major arena for interpreting the pressures on
the city from the outside as architecture while also affording a programme for
studying this type of internationally oriented public sphere. The city core is
a veritable battlefield for future interpretation. In a dramatic break with on-going planning the Tromsø politicians decided on a ”Time-out” and proclaimed the Year of Urban Development in search of alternative sources of knowledge.
The Tromsø X-files exhibition of October 2005 presented in a model all the projects planned and proposed for the city centre to full public view, the main theme being ”to exhibit is to open up.” The city discovered that it was being bombarded by projects which only marginally reflected and were concerned with its future role.

For the whole of 40 weeks an entire ”universe of supporters” published their reactions in chronicles and feature articles in the region’s largest newspaper, launching theses on the future city. Large organised marches with masses of participants ”invaded” the sites of development, proposing new rooms of interpretation, new shared models of understanding. Indeed, the city centre must now be conceived as a place ”in the making.” For the city we see and experience now does not constitute the real town – that exists in the future space which is now being challenged by national and international strategies in politics, research and culture.

The pressures from the outside and the newly obtained openness foster an expanded room of possibilities, a field of tension. A number of the knowledge comunities in this town, which harbours Norway’s youngest population and that of highest education, now challenge conventional planning concepts by making entirely new statements about the future in full public view.  They look with expectation towards what the city’s response to the challenges will be and how it will reshape itself by means of a new built reality – in this consists the pressures from within.