To Resettle a Settler Mining Town: experiences, spectres, and recursive discourse in the deformation zone, Kiruna, Sweden.

Abstract

Using the Mining Induced Development Resettlement (MIDR) of Kiruna, Sweden, as a case study, the aim of this thesis is to articulate the experiences of inhabitants of a settler colonial mining town undergoing resettlement and what they can tell us about the recodification of colonial practices in the 21st century. Kiruna sits atop the world’s deepest underground iron ore mine. Due to continuing excavation of the ore, the bedrock upon which Kiruna is located is subsiding, causing the surface to deform. A new town centre is being constructed three kilometres east of the original, with up to two-thirds of Kiruna’s population are being moved, and half the town’s existing built environment demolished. The resettlement is fully funded by the state-owned mine, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktie Bolag (LKAB). The research focuses firstly on the selective historicism of Kiruna’s industrial heritage, reframing it from a tale of civilising a wild frontier to a history of settler colonialist expansion through the expropriation of land as a means of accumulating resources and capital. The proceeding chapter is an examination of life within the town’s deformation zone, the area of the town at risk of subsidence, using the materiality of the built environment and the inhabitants of Kiruna as informants. Next, the development plan through which Kiruna’s resettlement is negotiated and deployed is explored. The final section evidences the near total lack of futures not governed by the imaginary of LKAB, which reaffirm the selective historicism through which the resettlement is justified and enacted. These chapters contour how MIDR in Kiruna operates as a means of expropriating land for the purposes of resource accumulation, couched in an inaccessible bureaucracy, derived from an acutely biased historicism that propagates displacement recoded as development. Data was gathering during twelve months of qualitative fieldwork between September 2020 and September 2021.