Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how urban histories and futures are transformed by industrial development. Drawing on fieldwork in two northern Nordic industrial towns, the paper examines how "green transition" projects are making/unmaking urban residents' relations to past, present, and future city space.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates how urban histories and futures are transformed by large-scale industrial development.

Drawing on recent fieldwork conducted in 2022 and 2023 with urban planners and residents in Mo i Rana, Norway, and Kiruna, Sweden, the paper examines how "green transition" projects in both sites are making and unmaking local urban historical pasts and anticipated futures.

Kiruna and Mo were both established in the early 20th century to support resource extraction, with companies building housing, schools, and other services to attract and retain industrial workers. Urban planning and architecture thus played an important role in materializing ideal industrial social and spatial orders in Kiruna and Mo, both initially developed as single-industry towns that until recently, faced uncertain futures and deindustrial decline. However, in 2021 Mo i Rana was chosen as the site of the Freyr lithium-ion factory – the largest in the Nordics – with national and regional ambitions to re-make Mo i Rana Norway’s “green industrial capital” . In January 2023, LKAB announced it had discovered one of Europe’s largest deposits of rare earth minerals in Kiruna, and that mining these deposits would be central both to the city's and to Sweden's sustainable futures.

Accordingly, this paper asks: What utopian visions for space and society underlie these “green” industrial projects? How are industrial cycles associated with utopian and dystopian development in Mo and Kiruna understood by local people? What are the social and political implications of making/unmaking urban space to materialize ideal industrial futures?