http://online.wsj.com/home-page
Ground Fissures Forcing Entire Town to Move Over Next Two Decades
KIRUNA, Sweden–It is a tough slog trying to relocate an entire city—just ask the people of this Swedish mining town dozens of miles above the Arctic Circle.
For the Kiruna municipality, the process started in 2004 when it received an unassuming one-page letter from the state-controlled mining company Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB, or LKAB.
To extract more iron ore, it needed to dig deeper into a nearby mountain, leading to the fracturing and deformation of ground sitting beneath thousands of apartments, the City Hall, the main church and other vital buildings.
A decade later, fissures in the ground are creeping ever closer to the center of Kiruna, and some residents of this city of 18,000 may soon start packing their bags.
In March, Stockholm-based architectural firm White arkitekter AB won a competition with its proposal of a master plan for a new city shifted about two miles to the east, dubbed “Kiruna 4-ever.”
In mid-September, a winner will be picked in the design competition for a new City Hall, the first major building to be relocated.
Over the next two decades, more than 3,000 apartments and houses, several hotels, and 2.2 million square feet of office, school and health-care space will migrate east.
The massive relocation is virtually unprecedented and is raising a range of thorny issues including how to compensate property owners and how to design the new city.
White’s plan for the new Kiruna will showcase many of the ideals popular in present-day city planning, including sustainability, a bustling, densely built city center, mixed-use development and less dependence on automobiles.
At the same time, the anxiety level is rising over whether the massive project will be completed on schedule. “We should have started the process in 2009 or 2010,” says Peter Johansson, the local contracting manager at construction company NCC. “The only thing that cannot be stopped is the fracturing, and it makes me worried thinking about how we will be able to make this in time.”
LKAB, which has agreed to pay the bulk of the tab, says it is impossible to estimate the full cost of the project. But it has dished out 3.5 billion kronor ($532 million) to date and set aside an additional SEK7.5 billion for the remaining transformation.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324202304579051633807455534.html