Mining the City : Urban Transformation and the Loss of City Space in Kiruna, Sweden

This thesis examines the urban transformation and deformation caused by the expansion of the local Kiirunavaara mine in Kiruna, Sweden. In 2004, the local mining company, LKAB, announced that rapid ground deformations had been discovered in central Kiruna and that buildings and residents would have to be relocated in order for production to continue. This thesis is an attempt to analyze the way that local relationships to space and place become relevant during processes of intense urban loss and renewal. By analyzing discourses and statements by residents, planners and officials, I aim to highlight the historical contingencies and responses to the loss of the urban environment and the implementation of the new city centre designed to replace the old one. More specifically, I argue that a social and economic dependency on mining preclude official contestations and alternatives to the transformation while residents find alternative ways of expressing concern. I analyze residents’ relationship to the built environment and the mining company through focusing on discourses of affect and enactment. I furthermore discuss the elite visions of the new city that despite widespread dissatisfaction emphasize shared governance and sustainability and the ways they contribute to a depoliticization of the experience of displacement. Through ethnographic methods of participant observation and interviews, this thesis contributes to an understanding of mining towns and urban anthropology of space and place in the northern hemisphere