Back to the Land of the Future:

This presentation and book chapter draft for an edited volume (in review) examines the socio-spatial production of the “New Norrland”: a state development vision for five northern Sweden communities as key sites for the national “green transition” towards climate neutrality. All five towns also exist on Sámi Indigenous homelands, and in the main case study city, Kiruna (in North Sámi, Giron), settler colonial urbanization, ecological change, and mining industry have impacted the Sámi lifeworld for over a century. Focusing on Kiruna’s urban history and contemporary visions for its future, I will discuss how socios-spatial imaginaries articulate state and corporate ambitions for the north to wider non-local publics, highlighting the relationship between the projection of the north as a future frontier, the production of the Swedish nation, and the continued implications of this socio-spatial dynamic for Indigenous/human rights and environmental justice in northern Sweden/Sápmi today.

Bio: Elisa Maria López is a postdoctoral Researcher at KTH Architecture. She is a cultural anthropologist with a historical orientation, specializing in urban environmental anthropology and the anthropology of extractive resource industries with a regional focus on the Nordic Arctic and sub-Arctic. 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. Her postdoc project at KTH, “Greening the Arctic: Making Northern Industrial Cities”, is funded by the Swedish Research Council and the Lars Erik Lundberg Foundation, and studies urbanization processes, practices, and visionsassociated with “green transitions” in northern Sweden and Norway/Sápmi.

In Fall 2023, she was also a Guest Researcher at ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, where she conducted research in the collections on 20th century Swedish worker housing and company towns.

Please contact elopez@kth.se for copy of manuscript.

The opponent for the session will be PhD Candidate Anna Livia Vørsel.