﻿Cities don’t often decide to pack their bags, get up and move down the road. But that’s exactly what Kiruna, an Arctic town in northern Sweden, is having to do – to avoid being swallowed up into the earth. 
“It’s a dystopian choice,” says Krister Lindstedt of White, the Stockholm-based architects firm charged with the biblical task of moving this city of 23,000 people away from a gigantic iron-ore mine that is fast gobbling up the ground beneath its streets. “Either the mine must stop digging, creating mass unemployment, or the city has to move – or else face certain destruction. It’s an existential predicament.” 
Founded in 1900 by the state-owned Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara mining company (LK), Kiruna has grown rich off the vast seam of iron ore below the town, but it’s now facing destruction by the very phenomenon that created its wealth. “We are symbiotic: the town is here because of the mine,” says Deputy Mayor Niklas Siren. “Otherwise, no devil would have built a city here.” 
Located 145km inside the Arctic Circle, Kiruna is subject to a brutal climate, enduring winters with no sunlight and average temperatures below -15C. But the deep deposit of magnetite has proved a strong enough magnet to keep people here. Driven by the insatiable global appetite for construction, the mine has become the world’s largest underground iron-ore extraction site, producing 90% of all the iron in Europe, enough to build more than six Eiffel Towers a day. And demand continues to grow. 
In 2004, the mining company broke it to the town that its days were numbered: digging its shafts towards the city at an angle of 60 degrees, subsidence would soon lead to the widespread cracking and collapse of the town’s buildings. A decade on, fissures are starting to appear in the ground, creeping ever closer to the town.