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This is an interesting article to me, and fairly near to my heart--I'm the founder of a small "remote-enabled" startup based in Washington State that moved to Kiruna for a year. I'm 6 months into the trip now, typing this within site of the mine in question.
The interesting part of this article to me was the part that discussed the anthropologist's findings, towards the end of the article. It confirms what I've seen anecdotally as well--the men are mostly ambivalent, some slightly optimistic, and the women are slightly anxious. It's a big project, but the timeframe of multiple years greatly reduces the stress on people. The businesses are changing plans slowly to accommodate, as are government offices and government-owned housing authorities, but there is no rush.
I've already seen a bit of the effect on my emotions--the first time I traveled here, I got on and off at the old train station, which is now on its way to demolition. Physical places that hold memories are for me a sort of safety, and seeing them go is slightly painful. It would be hard, I imagine, to watch my parent's home be destroyed.
Overall, the move makes me confident of mankind's ability to cope with climate change. Kiruna is only a small town, and it's moving only a short ways away, but it is a massive undertaking that requires a lot of money and (perhaps more difficultly) a lot of cooperation. If Kiruna can do it, larger towns can too, at least when faced with an obvious existential threat.
I can understand a timescale measured in years is less stressful than one measured in months, but it sounds almost as if they're going to the opposite extreme and inducing stress by leaving people for decades in a condemned and depopulating environment.
A move that's first announced in 2004, doesn't actually start until 2018 and should be almost completed in 2050, according to the article, sounds painfully slow.
"condemned and depopulated"
That sounds like the opposite of the plan in the article:
When trying to imagine how Kiruna’s move will work, it helps to think of a glacier edging slowly down a valley. The ground covered in a century will be remarkable, but the place won’t change that radically from day to day. The relocation and redevelopment will be a gradual process occurring over several generations. A central tenet of the plan is that all development will be contagious; the new will be built on the edge of the old to prevent the appearance of a break in the city’s whole.
“One key strategy is leaving no one behind,” Lindstedt says. “The city needs to connect all current residents during the whole relocation process, rather than creating a new satellite. New parts of the city are placed far enough away from the iron ore extraction to reassure residents long-term, but it has to be close enough to the existing parts to keep the community together.”
>> by leaving people for decades in a condemned and depopulating environment
This isn't really happening--people have choices of where to live, and they can move if they want to. It isn't as easy as say living in Stockholm to relocate, but it's not like they're stuck. And the it's not depopulating, either, they're just moving a coupla kilometers down the road.
>> painfully slow
Ha! I sometimes feel that way too, but it doesn't really need to move faster because of the location of the iron ore under the city, and I think it makes sense to move slowly in this sort of situation. It would be a good reaction to a slow rise in sea level, too. If you give people early warning, and a long time-horizon, property values will slowly go down by the coast, and people will slowly move.
Off topic, but I would be interested to hear more about how and why you ended up temporarily moving to Kiruna. Seems pretty random. But, as someone currently participating in Startup Chile, the idea of picking up and moving around the world with your business is pretty interesting.
>> how
I own Silvertrek Systems, which is a technology-oriented bookkeeping business, basically. We've been remote for a while, with one employee in Alaska and one in Minneapolis, and the rest of us in "World Headquarters" in Battle Ground, WA, a suburb of Portland OR.
We have a fairly strict meeting once a week, (one hour, same time every week, all hands on deck) but other than that people work when they want to, with the requirement that there's at least a 4 hour overlap with the people they work with. I work M-Th from 1pm to midnight to make this happen.
Skype, Google Hangouts, Basecamp, AWS Windows Server, Freshdesk, T-mobile's awesome international service, and a few other tools make it possible.
>> Why
Quite simply, we wanted to experience living abroad. My mom was born in Sweden, and my wife is a double citizen, (although born and raised in the US). We've always spoken Swedish to our children, and we wanted to get a good base for them. It's so much easier for them to get a grasp of a second language when they're young. My wife's sister lives in Kiruna, so that's where we landed, in Artic, with Northern Lights dancing overhead during the months that we aren't listening to birds chirping under the midnight sun.
That sounds like a great experience, good luck!
Very inspiring story, both personally and in terms of the business. Congratulations!
Did you say Chile? well, a few years ago my entire city moved 10feet away in 4 minutes. That was an interesting experience too.
http://www.wired.com/2010/03/chile-earthquake-moved-entire-c...
The title is incorrect. It is only the downtown area that will be relocated, not the whole city. And it will be moved 2.5 km, not 9 km. The downtown area is currently geographically located on the west edge of the city, and will move to the east edge of the city, see the map in this article: http://ecosistemaurbano.org/english/ecosistema-urbano-prequa... I have no idea where the "9 km" claim comes from. It is not quoted in the article. This is possibly a mix-up with an unrelated city mentioned in the article (Newtok in Alaska) which is considering relocating "9 miles" away.
Edit: @troymc: the BBC article is likely incorrect. Notice it quotes no sources. Maybe it assumed the whole city will move. Or maybe it takes into account population growth from people moving from other cities to Kiruna, because of the mine's expansion and increased economic/job opportunities. Either way, it is pretty obvious from all the relocation maps you find online that only the western edge of the city will move. Even the rendering at the original article http://nextcity.org/images/made/2033_plan_1200_862.png shows that only the western edge will disappear (compare it with a Google Maps satellite view).
That's correct, it's only the "Centrum" that is moving, and it is moving to another part of the city. The place that it is moving to is currently an lightly used industrial zone, with a few random residences.
However, the Centrum includes a large part of the city's population. The town is not a sprawling suburb town. Many of the workers at LKAB live in multi-level apartment buildings owned by the city/county, and most of those are in the affected area.
A BBC News article says, "Over the next 20 years, 20,000 people will move into new homes, built around a new town centre…" [1]
Wikipedia says the population of Kiruna is 18,148 (from the 2010 census). [2]
In other words, almost everyone in Kiruna is moving, eventually.
Also according to Wikipedia, it is going to put the city centre here [1]. While big parts of the town will be torn down there are at least some areas that will remain.
[1] https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=67.848757,20.2993544&z=15&ci...
Kiruna is in an unfortunate predicament, but if I had a company willing to relocate my home, family, and community 10 miles down the road in order to save the only job I would ever have in the region (and a well-paying one, at that), I think I'd be pretty happy about it.
And this is far from the only city to have ever been moved (as the article noted). A much more tragic story is that of those towns and villages in Palestine, where communities of over 700,000 people were uprooted and families forced to relocate wholesale to refugee settlements when Israel was declared in 1948. These settlements in Gaza and West Bank that have retained the names of the original communities whence their inhabitants came several generations before.
It's in a predicament, but I don't know if I agree that it is unfortunate. It actually gives the entire town a goal, and I think it's going to revitalize the town and the people that live in it.
"Meanwhile, the imminent move offers people little incentive to refurbish their properties and as an inevitable result, the city has become rundown."
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kiruna,+Sweden/@67.8553152...
Looking around the place, while it's not exactly Paris it does seem the author has a different definition of "rundown" than most people.
It might be rundown compared to some places, but I disagree with the assessment that town is rundown as a whole. The mine is slowly buying up the properties that are going to be affected, and are tearing down the buildings.
A single click on the street view and I move from summer to winter. Magical.
In 1900, Galveston, TX, was moved about 10 feet vertically. After a major hurricane, a big seawall was built. Then the buildings behind it were jacked up and the ground filled in,. It worked quite well; when the next hurricane hit in 1910, the damage was far less.
Chicago too, though for sanitation reasons much more than flooding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
Both Prague and Portland were raised by a level. So too have other cities around the world.
Chicago is built over an old onion swamp.
Was it the whole island or just the building along the Seawall? It doesn't appear to be 10' above sea-level in many places, but I could just be a bad judge of height. They did rebuild and continue to build new on pylon foundations though.
Even so, my dad's house still had a foot of water in the living room during Hurricane Ike.
It was the whole town in 1901, which is about the eastern third of the island, but not the whole island. The seawall goes to about 7 Mile Rd; past that it's the natural height of the barrier island--which is not much. The end of this video has some photos of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beGT8OkWwBE
Since the wall was built, development has happened west to the unprotected parts, where structures are built elevated over the much lower grade. Mostly they survived Ike, though the beach receded significantly, leaving the closest houses to the beach on the beach.
Over on Bolivar Peninsula, the 10' and 12' were mostly swept away. Only the highest (and luckiest) survived. Even 14' stilts weren't proof against the storm. The famous "last house standing" was 15' above grade on land 8-9' above sea level.
See http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/09/18/ike.last.house.standing/ind... and http://www.chron.com/news/hurricanes/article/Owners-return-t...
The new houses are being built higher, to 14'-22', with much larger pilings, based on the example of the few structures that did survive.
Very interesting. Thanks for the links!
> Located well within the Arctic Circle, the bleak, almost unpopulated region around Kiruna
That sentence makes me think of some of the s__t-hole mining cities and towns in and around the Arctic around here in Alaska / Yukon and NWT.
The photos in the article show that by North American standards, it's an extremely beautiful city.
I think only two of those pictures were actual photographs of the city; the rest were artists' depictions of the new city. Of the two photos, the first is from a great distance, in winter, and could portray a pretty nasty-looking place covered in snow; the second is of wilderness on the outskirts (?) of town, again covered in snow.
No idea if Kiruna is actually a nasty-looking place or not, but it's possible.
Everything looks nice when covered in snow or filmed from far enough away: https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=2...
But more realistically, here's downtown Kiruna today: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiruna#mediaviewer/File:Kiruna...
You can see for yourself in Google Maps; http://tinyurl.com/jvm8owu
It is a nice city. I'm glad to live here, and it is nothing like some of the cities I've visited in Alaska or Wyoming. It's well planned and a very livable city.
Interesting. I expect if I were moving a city I would first build a layer for transport and utilities, and then build the city on top of that. In the past we've built cites on the ground and then dug sewers and subways etc underneath. But if you built first a layer that was going to be the "underneath" of the city, and then built the city on top (including parks and lawns and what not, you could really do a good job of making sure the connections were solid.
You may be interested to visit (or at least read about) Milton Keynes, then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes
It's notable for three things, to me: the perfectly planned grid of roads with bike paths, Bletchley Park, and the weekly gathering of car tuners and tweakers in a huge parking lot that fills with neon light and surplus bass.
The problem, of course, is that there's always a resource that's limited. There's not unlimited funds to build ideal utilities etc in a small town...
Reminds me of town of Most (my grandparents lived near): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_%28Most_District%29
Big part of Most was demolished (and a new center was built about 2-3 km away) to allow for mining, only the church was moved, which was an interesting engineering accomplishment.
Ah, yes, "plan B". That was a great episode of the Simpsons'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trash_of_the_Titans
On a more serious note, it's kinda scary to what lengths people will go to continue doing what they've always done, even if it destroys their very homes. I'm not saying they're wrong to want to keep their jobs, but, humans operate on such a huge scale and without a lot of foresight, and it's scary to think of how that will play out with 9 billion humans today and even more tomorrow.
> On a more serious note, it's kinda scary to what lengths people will go to continue doing what they've always done, even if it destroys their very homes.
The thing is, in this case, not continuing to do what they've always done would effectively also destroy their homes. The mine is the town, and ceasing production to save the existing town site would just result in a lot of empty buildings once ~60% of the population has to move elsewhere for work, and the remainder follow because they were only there to support the miner population.
Exactly. In fact, a similar thing happened to Kiruna some years ago, when the iron price stayed low for some years. The mine slowed production, and house prices and rent prices followed accordingly. It was a hard time for the residents here.
The iron price recently dropped, but for many years it's been high, and it is currently quite hard to find somewhere to live, especially because of the price controls on rent.
I like the idea of high density right to the edge of town. You get all the walkability but also green (or white that far north) space right nearby. I think the ideal might have some characteristics of fractals to allow all the dense areas to border on the empty areas.
AARGH - why is this article talking about a city in Sweden, using kilometers all over the place, and then suddenly, temperature is given in Fahrenheit???
Towns move. Shawneetown IL was moved a couple of miles away from the Ohio River, after the flood of 1937 wrecked the original location.
Huh. Every summer Iowa moves a town of 20,000 people 400+ miles across the state, on bicycles. Its called RAGBRAI.
I'm surprised that mining iron in such conditions can be profitable. Isn't it incredibly abundant (~5% of the earth's crust)?
Most of the iron in the crust is bound in silicate or carbonate minerals, and energetically expensive to extract.
FWIW, the Kiruna orebody is the biggest known continuous body of iron ore in the world, 4 km wide, 80 meters thick on average, and of unknown length. See https://www.lkab.com/en/Future/Urban-Transformations/Why/Wha... .
Or quoting from http://www.mining-technology.com/projects/kiruna/ :
> Since mining began at the site over 100 years ago, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB (LKAB) has produced over 950Mt of ore, yet only one third of the original ore body has been extracted.
Also, the iron ore in Kiruna is magnetite, and particularly rich in iron. This allows the iron to be extracted using magnets rather then the chemicals needed for hematite, the more abundant cousin of magnetite. Also, the trains used to transport the iron pellets to the coast for sea transport use very little energy, due to the regenerative braking used during the loaded trip down to sea level.
The part about trains sound really interesting. Do you mean that the energy gained through regenerative braking while a loaded train moves downhill is enough to move an empty train back up the mountain?
If so, how do they store the energy? Do the trains carry massive batteries, or do they draw power from (and contribute back to) the grid?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iore - "From Riksgränsen on the national border to the Port of Narvik, the trains use only a fifth of the power they regenerate. The regenerated energy is sufficient to power the empty trains back up to the national border."
It's pumped into the grid.
Yes, it's relatively abundant, but for the ore to be rich enough to be worth processing, you have to go where the veins are.