Which Landscape? Material Traces of an Integrated Design and Research Approach in Kiruna

In 2012, the City of Kiruna organized an international competition for a masterplan that would envision and inform the town’s partial relocation in the following years, as the ground below its western section subsides over the largest iron mine in Europe. Two years later, as the winning masterplan proposal was being incorporated into the new comprehensive Plan, a consortium of technical universities was awarded European funding for a project which would develop an interdisciplinary proposal titled Green/Blue Infrastructure for Sustainable, Attractive Cities for the transition of the town’s entire water infrastructure and promote an understanding of Kiruna’s urban transformation as the transformation of a complex landscape system. This landscape is the arctic landscape of slow-growing vegetation, northern lights, recreational activities and traditional livelihoods, tangled with the productive infrastructure of growing extraction activities and the (static, but partly moving) material fabric of the settlement: this landscape is shaped by – and in turn shapes – a number of political, social and economic tensions, interests and perspectives that pull decision-making processes with varying strength, and towards different directions. Within such a complex landscape system, projects as the city masterplan and the Green/Blue proposal construct their space of effectiveness as objects-in-the-world, prodding and engendering specific actions and reactions, and continuously negotiating their agency with other, ongoing trajectories of change. The paper attempts to define a collectively constructed notion of landscape as a sociotechnical imaginary by tracing the unfolding of these projects as they intersect with dominant narratives, analyzing some relevant nodes in their development, and reflecting on the socio-political implications of an integrated landscape-based design and research approach as it precipitates on the ground.