FTD-Serie: Serie Business English
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Business English: When the earth moves...
One of the most ambitious town-relocation exercises in history will see the capital of Swedish Lapland, Kiruna, move 4km.Mingling with the customary sounds of luggage carousels and taxis driving up to collect new arrivals at Kiruna airport is the frenetic clamour of excited barking. This airport, 140km north of the Arctic Circle, is one of the few in the world where you can shake your head at the waiting taxi line and be taken to your hotel by Husky-driven dog sled.
It is an appropriate introduction to Swedish Lapland, a pristine, untouched and frozen landscape where winter temperatures can drop to -50°C and the night skies are filled with the world's most spectacular light show, the aurora borealis. Its capital is Kiruna, a small lakeside city that would in all likelihood have escaped outside attention were it not for the fact that it is the site of one of the most extraordinary experiments in urban planning the world has seen.
Looming over Kiruna, in striking contrast to the surrounding wilderness are massive, towering mountains of mining slag that rise in terraces hundreds of feet tall, created from a century of extracting iron ore from one of the world's largest mines. The mine is the community's lifeline, dominating its economy and providing most of its employment. It gives the place a 19th-century air, enhanced by the wooden, red-painted houses dotted around the area.
This happy existence was shattered in 2004 when LKAB, the company that owns the mine, contacted the Kiruna municipal government with disturbing news. It had mined so extensively that its operations now spread under the community itself. Cracks had started to appear at depth and were heading towards the surface. Once these cracks reached ground level, large parts of Kiruna would be swallowed up and disappear.
Further investigations revealed that, starting with the buildings closest to the lake and moving inexorably further into the city, the mine would systematically devour a large chunk of downtown Kiruna. Disturbingly, LKAB had no precise idea how extensive the cracks could be but it knew that if it carried on mining the situation could only get worse. A drastic solution was needed.
That is how the decision was made to simply move the community: Kiruna could not afford to lose the mine, so instead the parts of Kiruna in danger would either be physically picked up and moved to a different location or demolished and rebuilt in the new city. "There was no doubt. We could not stop digging. So we must move," said Lennart Lantto, the city's culture minister.
The multi-billion dollar project is one of the most ambitious town-relocation exercises in history. In the course of the next few decades up to 300 houses, schools, hospitals, the city hall and a famous church will all have to be torn down or moved from their current location and the new Kiruna built 4km away. Costs, not including construction of new roads and railway lines, are roughly estimated at EUR3.3bn.
The move is being used by the city as an opportunity to reinvent itself - to alter fundamentally its very being, its atmosphere, aspirations, population and economy. What is being put in place is an experiment in architectural and social engineering in the tradition of the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham and his 19th-century counterpart John Stewart Mill. "We have a masterplan," says Thomas Nylund, the Kiruna government's chief architect. "We must keep the essence of what Kiruna is and develop it in new and exciting ways without being stuck in old ways of thinking."
Oddly, in spite of Kiruna's extreme geographical location, the community is no stranger to ideologically driven social experimentation. The founder of LKAB, Hjalmar Lundbohm, was something of a dreamer himself and, being the owner of the world's largest iron mine, he also had the resources to indulge his dreams. Realising the mine would need a community to support it, and wary of other mining areas that had become dens of iniquity, he talked to town planners, artists and writers as part of his investigations.
He was influenced mainly by two schools of thinking - the 19th-century Garden City movement founded by Ebenezer Howard in the UK and the ideas of Camillo Sitte, a 19th-century Austrian town planner. The Garden City movement believed cities should be self-contained communities surrounded by greenbelts and containing a carefully constructed balance of residential areas, industry and agriculture. For Lundbohm, these ideas dovetailed nicely with those of Sitte, who attacked broad, straight boulevards and public squares arranged for the convenience of traffic. He instead suggested copying the "design" of medieval cities, including features such as curving or irregular street patterns.
Armed with these lofty ambitions, Lumdbohm returned to Kiruna and set about construction. A casual glance at the city's street map reveals the degree to which these ideas were adopted. Kiruna twists and turns and manages to avoid the impression that it is located in one of the world's harshest climates next to one of the world's largest mines.
Nylund says he feels the history of Kiruna tugging at him strongly and believes he has a responsibility to prolong the community's century-old ideals as it evolves towards the next extraordinary chapter in its development. "We will try to preserve as many of the old houses as possible because Kiruna is unique," he says. But "the whole idea is to create a new, ideal city. [Instead of] building all wooden houses in the same style as previously, we will adapt these ideas to new plans and styles. It is important to develop the original character of Kiruna without making it a pastiche.'' Exactly what the new community will look like is difficult to say as planning has not gone that far but Nylund talks of buildings of glass, steel and wood.
Lantto believes the new community can alter Kiruna fundamentally. He says it will spur the creation of a larger tourism industry, attract new businesses and encourage younger people to stay rather leaving for the bright lights and easier climate down south. It should, over time, also allow the community to break its umbilical link to the mine. "It is very seldom that one has an opportunity to build a new city," he says. "We must build a city but remember our values."
In spite of these ambitions, the attractions of living north of the Arctic Circle are patently not for everyone. It is winter for seven or eight months of the year, yet the area is astoundingly beautiful in summer. It is a part of the world that rewards people who like to get outdoors, who appreciate physical exercise and the promise of a large fire and sauna at the end of a cold day. It offers a combination of privacy and community. And its northern location means land is extremely cheap, although the promise of the new development might soon change that.
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FTD.de, 04.05.2007
© 2007 Financial Times Deutschland,
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