A City That Is Moving 9 Kilometers Down the Road
nextcity.org
nextcity.org
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.
http://www.wired.com/2010/03/chile-earthquake-moved-entire-c...
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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).
Wikipedia says the population of Kiruna is 18,148 (from the 2010 census). [2]
In other words, almost everyone in Kiruna is moving, eventually.
[1] https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=67.848757,20.2993544&z=15&ci...
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.
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.
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.
Even so, my dad's house still had a foot of water in the living room during Hurricane Ike.
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.
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.
No idea if Kiruna is actually a nasty-looking place or not, but it's possible.
But more realistically, here's downtown Kiruna today: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiruna#mediaviewer/File:Kiruna...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It's pumped into the grid.