Every morning between 1:15 and 1:45, the largest underground iron ore mine in the world, in Sweden’s northernmost city, begins blasting. One way to locate your proximity to the Kiruna mine is by placing a full glass of water on your nightstand and setting an alarm. If you wake up and see ripples, you’re near the damaged buildings, in “Old Kiruna.” Some locals call this part of town the Wrong Side. Near the church or the hospital, the explosions can feel like tiny earthquakes. About a mile east, you can’t feel a thing.
Almost seventy-five years of underground ore mining has caused the surface of the earth in Kiruna to sink, collapse, and crack. In 2004, the company in charge of the mine, LKAB, announced that the city center would need to be relocated. About six thousand residents—a third of the population—would need to evacuate; the city center would be demolished, as would Kiruna’s schools, hospitals, and some one thousand places of work. Historic buildings, including the church, would be transported to the new city.
In 2014, Kiruna began its migration two miles east. “When people hear that we’re designing, creating and building a whole new city from scratch, they think we’re doing a utopian experiment,” Mikael Stenqvist, an architect at White Arkitekter, the firm hired to design the new city, told the BBC that year. But the project is more akin to crisis management. “If this project goes wrong, the survival of Kiruna, its inhabitants and its economy is at stake.”
A town ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle does not need two city halls, two high schools, and two fire stations. To establish a new city, the old one must die, and this project to destroy and rebuild central Kiruna—known as the “urban” or “social transformation”—has now been ongoing for more than two decades. In August 2023, when I visited, the city had entered a period of heavy demolition. Leaving the old city intact would have been a safety hazard. Cracks were appearing in buildings, and ground deformations were moving further east.
Demolition has a psychological function too. It allows residents to stop shuttling back and forth between the old and new cities, between past and future. “It’s not the end of the world. It’s way beyond,” read one LKAB-branded vinyl banner hanging from a construction fence in the new city. LKAB, the state, and Kiruna’s chairman of the municipal council, Mats Taaveniku, are marketing the move as an economic and cultural upgrade. “If you ever thought about moving to Kiruna, now is the right time,” Taaveniku told me from his office in New Kiruna. His goal was to grow the city’s population to twenty-five thousand people by 2030. I asked him about the hospital, which did not currently have a maternity ward. “We have to build it right now,” he said. Many things seemed to be underway “right now.” “We can’t wait anymore,” Taaveniku continued, forcefully. “This crack line moves very fast.”
That summer I had won a writing fellowship from an obscure British foundation that had brought me as far as Fjällnäs, and after learning about the migrating Arctic city from a friend’s sister who ran a dog-sledding business in the north, I used the rest of my prize money to take two more planes up to Kiruna. About halfway through my second flight, an attendant announced that we would be making an emergency landing in Luleå, a coastal city on the Gulf of Bothnia, because a passenger had suddenly become very ill. The woman seated one row behind me explained that the hospital in Kiruna no longer performed surgeries. It was better to be sick in Luleå.
When we landed in the city some hours later, I boarded a bus outside the airport filled with backpackers, destined for a night at a hostel before setting off for Kebnekaise, Sweden’s highest mountain, or another campsite even farther north. When I told a fellow passenger that I was there not to hike or camp but to see the city, her face twisted in confusion.
Kiruna is shaped like an isosceles triangle. The long side of the triangle, European highway E10, runs diagonally across the top of the city. The two shorter sides, the city’s edges, meet in a residential area in the southwest corner of town. Further west is the town’s namesake mountain, Kiirunavaara, and the iron mine. Driving around in my rental car, I discovered that I could see the mine from almost anywhere, as if I were orbiting it. After taking a turn, I’d look up and once again confront the flat-topped mountain, the lone smokestack, and the big black pit. During my trip, I encountered pamphlets, signs, videos, and other LKAB-branded reminders that the mining company was stewarding Kiruna toward a kind of rebirth—a message that seemed incongruous with this landscape, which was pushing the town away.
LKAB’s iron mines at Kiirunavaara and Luossavaara, a neighboring mountain, were already in operation by the early 1900s, soon after the Swedish state began extending railways to connect Kiruna to an older mining settlement seventy-five miles south and the port of Luleå. As mining expanded, workers from southern Sweden resettled north for higher wages, and in 1910, LKAB built a model industrial city next to the mine on land home to Indigenous Sámi reindeer herders: the beginnings of Kiruna. In exchange for local tax exemptions, LKAB paid for town infrastructure including a fire station, a hospital, and a church. The Swedish government gradually bought up shares in the company until it was nationalized in 1957.
Today, LKAB employs about a third of Kiruna Municipality’s twenty-two thousand residents. “To be an inhabitant of Kiruna is to be in relation with LKAB, whether one works for the company or not,” the anthropologist Elisa Maria López wrote last year. She describes the city’s relationship to LKAB as not simply dependence but an “impossibility of refusal,” in part because the company is funding the construction of most buildings in the new city center. To refuse this corporate relationship, either as a city or a resident, she writes, would mean to leave.
I had expected Kiruna to be quiet, but the gloominess surprised me. The city had been effectively split in half, and neither side was fully functional. As I walked through Old Kiruna, construction workers were tearing down a pair of 1960s high-rise apartment buildings facing the mountain. The balconies, which resembled slim steel cages, had been modeled after elevators in the mine. Nearly every business had already relocated to the new city center or shut down permanently. The nightclub, Royal, had closed in March, and its new location wouldn’t open until the next year. The owners publicized the news by hanging a small yellow sign in the window, made to look like a funeral announcement.
My first destination in the old city was the church, a colossal red wooden structure that LKAB’s first mine manager—Kiruna’s so-called founding father—had requested be modeled after traditional Sámi architecture. Inside, the air inside smelled not unpleasantly of attic. The church stood on a hill, and through the windows land stretched out to the horizon; the mine was momentarily invisible. I followed Sara, a church custodian, to the altar, where a pastel painting of the town depicted a cluster of trees being struck by six beams of light. She pointed at the wooden molding below. It was pulling apart from itself, like cracks on a baguette. “Now it’s spread,” she said, touching the inside of the gap, which made me wince. She measured the crack using her fingers. “It’s getting fingers here,” she said. She stomped, trying to locate the uneven ground: “You can feel it in the floor.”
Interviewing locals in Kiruna was extremely easy. Everyone wanted to talk, and most people wanted to take me on a tour of their favorite cracks. Not long after meeting Sara, I drove to meet Timo Vilgats, a high school history teacher and Airbnb host, at his house in New Kiruna. Timo has a round, pink face and a scraggly beard with alternating sections of orange and gray. He wore waterproof pants and a Jack Daniel’s parody T-shirt advertising the country of Ireland. He loved Ireland. He loved emotions. He was sad because many people in Kiruna concealed any dissatisfaction or resentment about the changes being forced upon the city. We sat around his kitchen table with Margit, his Airbnb guest, and shared a package of cookies.
“It’s so crazy,” Timo told us. “I was invited to have a speech on a memorial for the old city. I was a little bit the toastmaster of that event.” He urged the room of thirty people to protect their humanity by making “room for our feelings.” “One lady there, she was about eighty years old. She was very, very close to crying because she lived in one of the two big houses that is just now going to be demolished. She was so sad because people said to her, ‘Oh no, you have a lot of money because you sold your flat! You have a lot of money. You can buy a nice new flat.’ She was so sad about that comment. She said, ‘No, I don’t talk about money. I don’t need money. I just want to live here.’”
The survival of a mining town depends on the “life” of the mine, but mining is incompatible with living. In 1919, a Minnesota town surrounded on three sides by an iron mine started relocating two hundred buildings about two miles south to accommodate a mine expansion. A gothic church in Most, in the Czech Republic, was moved half a mile in 1975 after the town’s historic center was demolished to create more space for a lignite mine. The town of Chuquicamata, in the desert of northern Chile, was dismantled after residents were relocated about nine miles away to Calama, to escape pollution from an open-pit copper mine.
LKAB presented its first proposal to expand Kiruna’s mine and relocate the town in a five-sentence letter to the Kiruna Municipal Council in 2004. Attached were documents detailing the “forecasted influence” of mining on the city twenty and thirty years into the future. But the timeline for evacuating and rebuilding changed repeatedly. Four years after its initial ominous warnings to the Council, LKAB’s board approved the construction of a new level in the mine that would expand its lifespan by another thirty years but require even more people to evacuate. Residents were left confused about both the severity of the deformations and when they would have a new city. LKAB had agreed to cover costs related to the relocation, and the city had agreed to rezone municipal land for the mine, but it was less clear who would cover which expenses and how the two entities would work together on city planning.
Three years ago, with the construction of New Kiruna well underway, LKAB announced that it had found Europe’s largest known deposit of rare earth minerals—ingredients for electric car batteries and wind turbines not currently mined on the continent. Extracting them would again come at a great environmental cost, threatening reindeer migration routes in the area. And then last summer LKAB announced that an additional six thousand people, now two-thirds of all residents, needed to move within the next decade to accommodate the latest expansion.
On my second day in Kiruna, I signed up for a tour of the mine. I had been given a free press pass, but I wondered where everyone’s ticket money was going—to the city, the state, or to the state-owned mine? This seemed like a fundamental question in Kiruna. After a short bus drive out of the old city and past a small lake (Luossajärvi, now partially drained and polluted with sulphate and nitrate), we entered the LKAB campus. Passing the employee restaurant and changing rooms, we looked up to a terraced cliff, which resembled rows of an amphitheater from which a Norse god could observe the city. Patches of green grass dotted the surface of the mountain, as though it had been shorn. We arrived at a narrow, inconspicuous tunnel cut into Kiirunavaara and slowly followed a paved road down to a showroom about 1,800 feet below ground, still several thousand feet above any operational mining level.
We stepped out, donned our LKAB-branded hard hats, and made our way through the dark, cold exhibition space. Neon blue spotlights affixed to the cave walls created an amusement park atmosphere. A company representative, whose grandfather had worked in the mine, showed us a retired yellow mining truck and led the group to a small screening area to watch an animation video about sub-level caving, a process in which a remote-controlled drilling rig cuts long holes upwards into the ore body and fills them with explosives. These are detonated once a day, sending small earthquakes through parts of the city. The ore is removed, loaded onto chutes, and transported to a crushing facility above ground. Water and chemical additives are mixed into the ground iron ore, and a machine rolls this slurry mixture into small, highly concentrated pellets, a package of which I was handed on my way out. Over the next few days, the black spheres transferred a thick, cloudy layer of soot onto the inside the plastic bag. Every day, four trains filled with the pellets arrive at the port in Luleå. LKAB says that it mines enough iron ore to build six and a half Eiffel Towers every day.
After the tour, I ate lunch at a Burger King in a strip mall—bottom of the triangle, about five minutes west of the new city center—and drove back to Timo’s.
“Did you eat?” Timo asked when he opened the front door.
“Yes,” I said. “Did you?”
“I am a little bit fasting,” he said.
I asked him what that meant. I was considering the cookies from earlier.
“It means I just eat when I’m hungry,” he said, and started walking toward his car.
Timo insisted on doing the driving to the old high school so that I could look outside the window and pay attention. He narrated the drive, stopping just once at a wide, deserted field. Scattered across the grass were low steel structures—remains of old homes, Timo said, which had been left behind as art. From the car he pointed to a patch once occupied by his house and his kids’ swing set. He had given this tour before, once to a documentarian. He told me, “I’ve been here so many times that I will just say: Very nice area, I can long for it, it’s a part of my personal history, kids was small, and so on, and so on. A little bit of sad mixed with nostalgia.”
We got back in the car and continued driving. “Let’s go to my school and see what has happened there,” Timo said. We turned one last corner and parked the car outside a long, low building. The columns outside were wrapped in slabs of steel, which he said acted as reinforcement. Inside, the lobby floor was covered with endearing trash, little remnants of high school lives. A single flip flop, a metal cap from a Coke bottle, broken mechanical pencils.
Timo led us down a dark hallway toward his office. “Here you have a nice crack,” he said, pointing to a sharp zigzag crawling down from a split in the windowsill that had been duct-taped over. “It’s a big, lovely one.” Beside the crack, on the white wall, someone had written “P. 12” in black marker. Along the crack, which splintered off into smaller cracks like rivers on a map, LKAB employees had left annotations using a code or numbering system. A few columns near us were also wrapped in white-painted steel. The school was filled with such temporary solutions. Even the cracks on the ground had been obscured with little plastic covers. “It’s easier,” said Timo. “What you don’t see don’t exist. So . . . do you see me now?” He laughed quietly.
Timo’s side of the office had been cleared out, save for a few Swedish history books and a matte black mannequin of a woman’s torso. He shared his office with a colleague who had been away for several months after having had a stroke. Timo didn’t want to touch his colleague’s things, but he also knew that they would be moved eventually. Teachers were allowed to bring two cardboard boxes of supplies to the new school. Any bigger objects—furniture, computers, speakers—needed to be marked with Post-its. Unmarked items would get thrown away before demolition began.
For the next hour, Timo and I shopped around the school. An alarm sounded the moment we stepped inside the teacher’s lounge, but Timo was unfazed. When I complimented a set of four wicker chairs, Timo shrugged and said, “Take it.” When I picked up a wooden flute, Timo played a few notes and said, “That’s a gift to you.” I found an old coffee mug that said “Kaffe” in brown text. Timo looked inside, made a face, and tipped the cup so I could see the bottom. It was covered in a layer of sticky brown tar. “Do you know what that stuff is?” he asked me. He ran to the sink, washed out the chewing tobacco, and held out the mug. “Take.”
He found two plastic shopping bags, one for each of us.
“This is expensive,” he said, resting his palm on the top of a floating shelf. “I’m not the only one who could think to come here with a screwdriver, take it away with my car.”
“Would anyone notice?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Nobody cares. But we are honest people.”
He found books he could not imagine leaving behind. “I am so sad,” he said. “I still have to take one more book. One more book every time. Of course I need that book.” Next bookshelf. “Oh, I think I need a copy of this one.” Next bookshelf. “This is a very interesting book, you see it’s completely new, it’s never used. Very important. The time of industrialization of the last two hundred years. Very important. I didn’t know that I needed this.” Next bookshelf. “Oh my god, this is so important. You would be crazy . . . Oh my god, this is not possible to leave. It’s a local history.”
We stopped shopping when our bags were full. Timo closed the door behind us and the alarm quieted. We walked down the dark hallway and a tall, thin man appeared at the end. It was the music teacher, Max.
“What are you doing?” Max asked us.
Timo looked down at our bags. “I am not stealing, and she is not stealing.”
Max disappeared down the dark hallway.
Timo and I walked to the library, passing a door spray painted with the words “GOODBYE MY SCHOOL.” Timo asked me to take a photo of him standing next to it. Before we walked inside, he said, “I will not cry. I’m not in that mood.” But the library was neat and intact, and the bookshelves still held books. I was surprised to see a potted plant, something fresh and living.
“For several months I was picking flowers,” Timo said. “No one will see this one, I take it. Beautiful flowers. Now they’re all thrown away.” He breathed in. “I should have been more brave. Because there was flowers that I didn’t take—big ones. I took only what I thought no one would see.”
Early the next morning, I drove back to Timo’s house. We each drank a cup of instant coffee, said goodbye to Margit, and headed off on foot to the new city center. School was starting next week, and today Timo would see the new building for the first time.
We took a paved walking path parallel to Ore Road, one of the main streets in New Kiruna, and ended at City Hall, where the iron clocktower from the old town hall had been installed outside. Across the street stood a modern hotel whose sloping roof had been modeled after Kebnekaise Mountain. As we walked east into the pedestrian shopping quarter of New Kiruna, the paved road near the government buildings became an unfinished gravel path. Most homes in Old Kiruna had been painted bright colors to stand out against the dreary sky in winter, but the new buildings and apartments here had been painted gray. The narrow streets and low buildings gestured at quaintness, but the reality was impersonal and depressing. Some residents had reported that the new city felt colder and windier than the old one. Our route was continually interrupted by road closures and chain-linked fences. We stopped to read a banner hanging from one fence: LKAB was constructing a nightclub, two restaurants, and accommodations for six other exciting businesses on this very block.
We improvised a route and made it to the new school ten minutes later. The front doors opened into an airy, spacious hall dominated by light-wood furniture. We wandered until we found Timo’s office, which was in fact a cubicle. He opened a cardboard box and unpacked his stuffed animals. He had been assigned two floating bookshelves next to the desk, but they were short, and he was concerned about space. He touched the wall. He knocked on the wall. He said the wall felt weak.
Timo’s new classroom had large windows that looked out onto the parking lot and Tuolluvaara, another mountain from which iron was once mined. The back wall had been covered in cloth panels to absorb sound, and Timo seemed to appreciate the design. He’d spent the last twenty years teaching in the same classroom, he told me, and he had loved that room. He hadn’t noticed the echo, nor had he consciously recognized that he’d been adjusting his voice depending on the number of students in class. But in this new room across town, it dawned on him that an echo had really been there all along, slowing him down and wearing him out, he said, “like the passing of smoke” from someone else’s cigarette.
In August 2025, two years after I left Kiruna, I watched a livestream of a 224-wheel trailer carrying the church to a plot between the graveyard and the new city center. Contracting firms had gradually widened the roads and removed lampposts and road signs, then performed tests using trailers fitted with weights to simulate the church’s 670-ton mass. It was raised off its old foundation to a height of 4.3 feet and driven during daylight hours for two days.
On day two, a Swedish news service filmed Timo on his front porch as he watched the church creep down a road behind his house. “It’s not every day you get a new neighbor that’s just passing by,” he said in Swedish. His amusement was tempered with melancholy, though perhaps it was the other way around. Timo looked at someone just right of the camera. “Before the church came here, this used to be a resting place for reindeer. Sometimes we misrepresent history and say the story begins when the railway and LKAB popped up here. That’s just nonsense. And a glaringly obvious revisionist history.” Timo intimated that the church belonged up on the hill, not down here, but New Kiruna was his “nearest neighbor” now, and he wanted them to have a good relationship. “I don’t want to dig my own grave,” he said, “by becoming a bitter old man.”
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