Moving costs: history and identity in Kiruna, Sweden

A town is often seen as something definite, something that is robust and stable, built to last. Buildings change over time, but street patterns and plot structures tend to be resilient. Kiruna, a town of 18,000 in Lapland, northern Sweden, is challenging this notion. It came to prominence in 2004 when the local council announced its relocation, declaring that the town would be moved to enable the iron ore miners, around which the town was founded and built, to continue to excavate the ground underneath it. Otherwise, the town faced the prospect of sinking.

The history of Kiruna has long been peppered with change and transformation – transformation of land use, built environments, and heritage values. Diverse international conditions and national decisions foisted on the local community have had an enormous impact. Since the Iron Age, the lands surrounding the mountains of Luossavaara and Kiirunavaara have been settled and used for hunting, fishing and reindeer herding by the Indigenous Sámi population. But when iron ore deposits in the area were discovered by the Swedish state in the 17th century, and it became possible to mine and refine those resources on an industrial scale, the state took control of the land, allowing the mining company Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB (LKAB) to establish itself in the town in 1890, to extract the ore and reap the profits.

Hans Ragnar Mathisen’s Sápmi with only Sámi Place Names from 1975 maps the homelands of the Sámi people across the Nordic region, omitting the borders that inscribe it with state interests

Credit: Hans Ragnar Mathisen / Photo: Björn Strömfeldt / ArkDes

Lapp magic drums, Jan Luyken, 1682. (Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Credit: Sepia Times / Universal Images Group / Getty

As part of the state’s permission to mine the area, LKAB had to guarantee housing and other facilities for its incoming workers. A model company town was developed, with high housing standards as well as a library, hospital, fire station, church and schools, and a tram line connecting residential areas with places of work. The town continued to develop alongside LKAB, which has been state-owned since 1907. When the mining company prospered, so did Kiruna. In the decades after the Second World War, the town expanded, the centre was redeveloped and its housing stock modernised from small wooden structures to apartment blocks. But as the market price of iron ore has continued to increase, driven by China’s development, the town’s transformation has taken a new turn.

Since the iron ore deposits extend beneath the settlement, the continued mining undertaken by LKAB has been causing subsidence and has had a drastic impact on urban planning in Kiruna. In 1990, the state designated the entire town as a heritage site of national interest, and the town council concluded that it would never be economically viable to mine underneath the town. It is worth noting that the state’s attribution of heritage status was based on an idea of Kiruna as a unique settlement from the 20th century in which contemporary planning ideals were realised on ‘green field lands’, a designation that erases the centuries of settlement and land use by the Indigenous Sámi and Tornedalian populations. In 2010, ‘green field’ was rephrased to ‘underutilised’, in a gesture that reflects a growing awareness of Indigenous populations, while also indicative of what is thought of by official bodies as proper ‘use’.

‘The intricate urban mesh of many buildings from different periods, and the sense of a community that has developed over time, will largely be lost’

Despite the heritage assessments made in the ’90s, in 2004 several planning processes were initiated with the intention of moving the town. The new town centre was to be north-east of the ‘old’ centre and adjacent to areas that were already built up. New sewage and electricity supply systems were incorporated in 2009 and a new railway route opened in 2012. The impact of the move has become more physically evident since 2015, when the demolition of existing buildings started, and as familiar places were torn down and vanished. In 2018 a new town hall by Henning Larsen Architects was the first building inaugurated in the new town centre. LKAB is currently building a new housing development north-west of the town, in the Luossavaara slopes.

Initially, there seemed to be a consensus that moving the town meant moving many of its buildings, especially those considered of cultural significance. But while adopting a detailed development plan for the area first affected by subsidence, LKAB changed tack, arguing that this would be too expensive. While the mining company is legally obliged to compensate for damage caused by their activities, in reality this means negotiation with the various stakeholders affected. After years of debate, in 2019 it was agreed by the town council, LKAB and the County Administrative Board that about 50 of Kiruna’s oldest buildings would be moved. The rest would, by default, be demolished.

Dominant histories are reproduced through preservation criteria: LKAB’s iron ore hoisting and separating plant designed by Hakon Ahlberg and photographed by Lennart Olson is among the structures that will be spared demolition

Credit: Lennart Olson / ArkDes Collections

The choice of which buildings to preserve was decided by the town authorities and the mining company without much consultation with the inhabitants of Kiruna. While there is an overall consensus regarding which buildings constitute the built heritage of the town, a more nuanced selection of buildings would have been highlighted through consultation with the community, and more narratives than those that are already dominant might have been added to the interpretations of the town and its cultural significance. The selection of buildings to be preserved is limited in that they tend to represent only the oldest buildings of Kiruna. The overlapping layers of time brought about by an intricate urban mesh of many buildings from different periods, and the sense of a community that has developed over time, will largely be lost.

Many of the selected buildings also come from LKAB’s company area, one of the three separate areas from which the town was initially formed. While there is no doubt as to their historical value – they constitute a significant part of Kiruna’s protected built heritage, and are from one of the areas that is first affected by the expanding mine – the selection highlights a history that gives primacy to the history of the mine, and that may be more favourable for LKAB to preserve.

It means that the magnificent town hall by Artur von Schmalensee (1964), a listed building which was recurrently highlighted in planning documents as well as in media reporting about the urban transformation, was torn down last year. Kiruna Council and LKAB had sought to revoke the listed status of the property, intending to have a new town hall built, but a report from the County Administrative Board favoured reconstruction, showing that parts of the building could be taken apart and reconstructed according to its original plans while improving energy efficiency, ventilation, security and accessibility at the same time. The costs involved were determined to be reasonable, and the listing status was upheld – but the council took the decision up to the Administrative Court, appealing a second time when the building’s listed status was upheld again, until the Administrative Courts of Appeal finally ruled in the council’s favour. All that now remains of the building are the door handles and the old clock tower, both moved to the site of Henning Larsen’s new hall.

Some buildings are uprooted and driven further from the subsidence area

Credit: Jessica Nildén / ArkDes

Vid Hjalmar Lundbohmsgårdens gamla plats cirka kl. 14-14.45. Denna dag genomfördes årets sista husflyttning. Denna gång var det dags att flytta Kirunas äldsta byggnad B1, en betydligt enklare flyttning än de som tidigare genomförts. Byggnaden är ju inte så stor och lyftes helt enkelt av grunden med hjälp av en kranbil. © Kjell Törmä

Credit: © Kjell Törma / ArkDes

The loss of Schmalensee’s town hall was widely noted at a national level, while most of the interventions to preserve Kiruna’s built heritage have gone unmentioned. Locally, debate around the relocation is dominated by arguments that neglect nuance. As they see the town they knew begin to disappear, there is distress among Kiruna’s inhabitants and a need to commemorate and mourn, mixed with some excitement about the new town centre. At the same time, the mine’s expansion is viewed as an inevitable necessity. Kiruna is conceptualised as a mining town, both founded around and existentially reliant upon the mine – and if it were to close, Kiruna’s other possible industries would likely not be enough to sustain it.

The significance of the mine as an economic asset must not be underestimated. LKAB is by far the largest private employer in the Norrbotten region, with around 3,700 employees located mainly in Kiruna and Malmberget, another mining town 120 kilometres to the south. Many people are, directly or indirectly, dependent on the mine for their livelihood. The mining company makes up over 90 per cent of the EU’s iron ore production, and the Swedish government, which is the sole shareholder of the company, have benefited from the increased market prices of iron ore over the past decades. Another argument, often posed by mining interests and national politicians, is that as long as we want products that require mining, we must accept mines in our own country – and that it is better to have mines in Sweden than in countries with inferior environmental legislation.

‘Heritage values shift over time, but once a building or a neighbourhood is demolished, or a different history is forgotten or covered over, so is the tangible recollection of the past’

However, this narrative erases the huge local impact of mining. The intrusion of the mine and the associated urban transformation interrupt reindeer herding, which in turn has a direct impact on the two Sámi ‘villages’ in the area – a ‘village’ in this sense being an economic association with grazing lands and reindeer trails that have been designated and regulated by the state. Only members of a Sámi ‘village’ are allowed to keep reindeer or use the areas for hunting and fishing, excluding Sámi who do not belong to one, and the Swedish state continues to insist on its right to manage these hunting rights through legislation that dates back to the 19th century.

Interestingly, the concerns surrounding Kiruna’s relocation have received much more attention internationally than in the Swedish media. Dimensions such as how mining has affected the Indigenous Sámi population, as well as issues raised by conservation specialists over the careless management of the historic environment and the demolition of listed buildings have been drawn out by international press, whereas domestic media coverage has, on the whole, focused on the exceptional narrative of moving a town, sometimes portraying Kiruna as exotic and remote. It is easy to think that media coverage would have been different if the town were further south, where the impact of the mine would be more physically evident to decision-makers. The current Kiruna Forever exhibition at ArkDes in Stockholm may yet change this focus, as the complex and varied issues of relocating a town, demolishing large parts of it, the many actors involved and the ways in which local communities are affected, have been investigated in all their complexity and presented to the public.

Only fragments of some buildings survive, like the old clock tower that accompanied Schmalensee’s town hall, transported to where the new town hall by Henning Larsen Architects sits, still in view of the mine

Credit: Peter Rosen / ArkDes

What will happen in Kiruna in the future is at this point speculative – how long will there be iron ore enough for mining to continue, whether enough of the town’s identity will be preserved, or if it will develop into a fly-in fly-out settlement? What is clear is that the ‘town move’ is a useful concept precisely because of its ambiguity. It opens itself up to interpretation, allowing a range of fantastical conclusions to be drawn. To say that Kiruna is being demolished would signal something completely different – even if it were just as true that much has been or will be torn down. Just as there is a risk that the nuances of this transition will be lost in the face of the mine’s inevitable advancement, there is a risk that many dimensions of Kiruna’s history will be lost in the urban transformation. Heritage values tend to shift over time, but once a building, or a neighbourhood, is demolished, or a different history is forgotten or covered over, so is the tangible recollection of the past.