From ore to cityscapes: Material Ecologies of Design research trip to the iron mines of Northern Sweden
Last week, fellows and affiliate researchers from the Material Ecologies of Design group traveled to Kiruna in Northern Sweden as part of their research stay at CAS. The project is led by Professor Kjetil Fallan (University of Oslo) and Associate Professor Ingrid Halland (University of Bergen).
Kiruna is home to the world's largest underground iron ore mine, operated by the state-owned company LKAB. Together with two other mines in northern Sweden, LKAB extracts 80% of all iron ore in the EU.
"Every day, 680 train cars, each loaded with 100 tonnes of iron ore, leave Kiruna for Narvik, from where it is shipped worldwide," explains Fallan, one of the project's principal investigators. "Iron is by far the most commonly used material in the world and is thus a crucial component of the designed world, from sewing needles to skyscrapers."
However, the mine is now undermining the mining town itself, requiring construction of a new town center three kilometers east of the old one, which has become a "sacrifice zone." While the church and a handful of other buildings have been moved, most of the old town will be demolished, and 12,000 of its 18,000 inhabitants relocated.
Fallan explains that this mammoth operation is entangled in contested issues pertaining to social justice, land use, and Indigenous
rights. "The recent discovery nearby of the largest deposit of rare earth elements in Europe (the Per Geijer deposit) complicates the situation even further, making Kiruna an emblem of the difficult paradoxes and conflicting interests inherent to the green transition."
Fallan and Halland's project aims to "open the black box that is the consumer product and examine its constituent parts: the ecological properties and entanglements of the materials of which it is made." The visit to Kiruna was one of several field visits the group has planned for the academic year at CAS. Previously, the group visited the old Norwegian mining town of Røros and the waste management facility at Langøyene outside Oslo, in order to gain deeper historical and cultural understanding of how the process and act of designing regulates the use of extractive materials.
For additional site - and topic- specific expertise in Kiruna, the project invited Dr. Elisa Maria Lopez (anthropologist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology) and Dr. Anna-Maria Hällgren (art historian at Umeå University). "Together we explored the old town center and the newly constructed replacement, joined an official tour of the mine, and were treated to guided visits to the KIN Museum of Contemporary Art and the Sámi Museum," Fallan details.
On 13 February, the group will host a one-day open symposium at The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters titled Extractive Efficiency: Global Systems, Global Objects. The event will examine how design culture responded to the over-exploitation of resources. The event is free to attend, and lunch and coffee will be provided for those who register in advance.
Read more about the Material Ecologies of Design research project here >