Göran Cars: It started with the mayor and what she saw as urgent was to make a plan that met the expectations of the residents because when you are forcing people to leave their homes, they expect something really good as a replacement. The city had to be relocated due to the fact that the iron ore production demanded removal of the city. I've been a professor at the institute for a very long time, and by chance I met the mayor of Kiruna in 2012 and we started discussing urban planning, and then I suddenly got an invitation to move to Kiruna to take responsibility for making a plan for the new city. But there is one major participant that is absolutely instrumental in making the Kiruna move project at all possible and that's the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and that's where you come in, Professor Cars.
Our guide is Ann Holmes who lives in Sweden and once reported for SBS.Īnn Holmes: There are many stakeholders involved in the extraordinary project of moving the city of Kiruna the iron ore mine LKAB, the municipality, the government, the politicians, the urban planners, the architects and other experts, and, not least, the people. But the next challenge is moving the whole city, and that's what The Science Show is about today, and how you move buildings and thousands of people and do so in Lapland. Well, now the space station is up and running and doing fine. And, by the way, it's within the Arctic Circle.
The question loomed what could they do to reinvent their industry? So they asked a very clever scientist. Robyn Williams: 30 years ago, a mining town in Sweden looked like a running out of jobs.