It has been officially announced that this month, Sweden's northernmost city, Kiruna, with a population of over 18,000, will begin the move. Founded in 1900, 145 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, the city is a direct analogue of Russian monocities and the brainchild of the country's largest state-owned mining company LKAB, which is currently Europe's largest iron producer. However, the area of underground iron ore mining at the foot of Mount Kirunavara has grown to such an extent that the resulting voids threaten to damage nearly 3,000 residential buildings and other buildings in the city.
After ten years of discussion, a large-scale architectural competition was held to solve the problem, in which 57 teams from around the world took part. In February 2013, the best project was named - "Kiruna 4-ever" from the consortium of the Swedish bureau White Arkitekten and the Norwegian Ghilardi + Hellsten.
Although the competition project included only a 20-year urban development plan, the winners proposed a 100-year masterplan for sustainable development. According to this plan, the city should, while developing along a linear axis, shift to stable ground at a distance from the mines, and residents, as the city moves, should gradually wean themselves from dependence on the extractive industry, creating new commercial enterprises and institutions. Today Kiruna is the first city in Sweden in terms of small business growth rates, and this cannot but be reflected in the architecture of the new city.
In May 2014, LKAB pledged to contribute 415.5 million euros for the first phase of construction. It involves the construction of a new city center within seven years, including a historic clock tower, a town hall designed by Henning Larsen Architects, a building for a tourism center, a library, and a swimming pool. “We are delighted to be taking the first steps in our Kiruna plan. Like a centipede, the city will slowly crawl, move on a thousand feet a few kilometers to the east,”says the project's lead architect Mikael Stenqvist.
The city is planned to be built along the development belt along the main street of Malmwegen. This belt will connect the center of Kiruna with the mine, the airport and the neighboring towns of Tuolluvaara and Lombolo. In the next stages of the project, a new efficient transport system will be created in the city, and branch areas will appear to the north and south of the main city highway.
For the sake of preserving the appearance of the old Kiruna, it is proposed to erect new buildings using materials from the dismantled buildings, and it was decided to carefully move a number of iconic structures, such as the city church, to a new place without any changes.
The authors consider the continuous dialogue between the planners, the municipality and the population to be the most important component of the project's success. The methodology of such a dialogue, conducted by a team of social anthropologists led by Victoria Valdin, is aimed at achieving results that exceed expectations. It includes various forms of interaction, communication and feedback - from exhibitions and public discussions to a “build it yourself” factory, where the remains of the old city can be recycled into new building materials.
When the old city is finally settled, its territory will be turned into a park that will facilitate the migration of reindeer, and the mines that have exhausted their resource will become one of the tourist attractions in the future. It remains to be hoped that this unique experience of reanimating a monotown will be crowned with success and can be applied to numerous monotowns of our country.
