Elisa Maria López, postdoctoral researcher in Architecture, Culture, and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

This talk focuses on the social, ecological, and spatial production of Giron-Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost city and ‘capital’ of the Ore Fields (Malmfälten) region. In 2004, the Swedish-state owned mining company LKAB informed Giron-Kiruna Municipality that ground deformations from underground mining were destroying Giron-Kiruna’s urban center, and to continue mining six thousand residents as well as most of the city’s businesses, social services, and schools, two highways, the railroad, and infrastructure would need to be relocated within the next thirty years. For Giron-Kiruna’s Indigenous Sámi people on whose unceded homelands the city and mine were built in the 1890s, this expansion of mining also entails further large-scale dispossession, and destruction of reindeer grazing lands, migration routes, and calving areas. This mining-induced displacement and resettlement megaproject has since been popularly known as Giron-Kiruna’s “urban transformation” (stadsomvandling), and by LKAB and its owner the Swedish state as “societal transformation” (samhällsomvandling).

Based on sixteen months of multi-sited anthropological and historical research conducted between 2012 and 2023 – thirteen as a full-time resident of Kiruna– this talk considers how the social production of spaces and natures (Lefebvre 1991, Smith 2008) as edges facilitates a “modern topography of power” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) . Applying what I call edge heuristics  to apprehend radical transformation and power relations from and through the margins, I will show how forms of social, ecological, and spatial fragmentation by state and corporate actors have continually re-produced Giron-Kiruna as an edgy zone of exception. On the other hand, I show how existing socio-ecological edges native to Giron-Kiruna have informed Indigenous Sámi political orientations and responses to extractive settler colonialism, as well as how socio-spatial fragmentation is transforming relations between residents and LKAB in unruly and unexpected ways.

Elisa Maria López is a postdoctoral researcher in Architecture, Culture, and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Architecture who earned her PhD in anthropology from Uppsala University in 2021.  An environmental anthropologist with a historical orientation,  her research spans themes of urban and environmental history, resource-society relations, and colonial forms of knowledge production to architectural, urban planning, and design practices with a regional focus on the Nordic Arctic/Sápmi.