One Percent of Greenland Lives in a Single Building

[UPDATE: Block P was torn down in 2012]

I received the July 2010 print edition of National Geographic in the mail over the weekend. It had an interesting article on Greenland as it struggles with the effects of global warming. Naturally it includes all the usual excellent photography, maps and narrative that one would expect from such a publication.

Then a minor trifling, a nearly throw-away comment appeared as I read the entire article. I’ve long since learned to live with my predisposition towards nonsense. It’s why my family calls me the “master of useless trivia.” The article mentioned,

“Block P, Nuuk’s biggest apartment building, which alone houses about one percent of Greenland’s population.”

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Found It

So I poked the recesses of the Intertubes looking for it. Finally, I think I located the elusive building in the capital city of Nuuk. It is called Blok P in Danish (map).

It sits within a large array of apartment blocks that wouldn’t look out of place in the old Soviet Union, architecturally speaking. Examine the photo and see if you don’t agree. The Danish government emptied many of the smaller coastal villages of Greenland a generation ago. Then they moved their inhabitants to these concrete Bloks. The article further states,

“The sprawling, rundown apartment blocks are a legacy of a forced modernization program from the 1950’s and 1960’s, when the Danish government moved people from small traditional communities into a few large towns. The intent was to improve access to schools and health care, reduce costs, and provide employees for the processing plants in the cod-fishing business, which boomed in the early 1960s but has since collapsed.”

I couldn’t find a source for the one percent “fact” although various places on the Web made the same non-attribution claim. I’m willing to believe it’s been vetted sufficiently by the National Geographic fact-checkers but let’s conduct a quick order-of-magnitude examination.

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Fun With Math

The July 2010 population estimate for Greenland is 57,637 according to the CIA World Fact Book. One percent of the population is 576. I see six very long floors completely crammed with apartments. Do I believe that 576 people might be able to live there? Yes, that seems entirely plausible to me.

USA Equivalent

It’s easy and fun to play games with Greenland’s diminutive population. Consider those 57,637 people again. If everyone in Greenland wanted to take a trip to the United States then the entire national population would fit almost perfectly within the stands of Arizona Stadium (map), home of the University of Arizona Wildcats (capacity 57,803).

UK Equivalent

If Greenland’s national population would rather visit the UK then they would fit within Emirates Stadium (map), formerly Ashburton Grove, home of the Arsenal Football Club. There would even be room to spare (capacity 60,355)

I know what you’re thinking: Yes, some of us still read print magazines.