The new town will also have a town square, something which the current Kiruna does not have, and the first building was just added on it. The ribbon-cutting for the City Hall, that is also the very first edifice built in new Kiruna, took place in November 2018.

Göran Cars, the chief person under whom the plan for new Kiruna is developed has described the City Hall as “a very modern and very gold building designed,” according to the Guardian. It is the design of Danish architects Henning Larsen, and “its most notable feature is that it has an art gallery built into it – the new Konstmuseet i Norr – a rectangular structure that squats inside the atrium like a cube of potato wrapped in smoked salmon,” he said.

Danish firm Henning Larsen has inaugurated the new town-hall of Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost city, just 95 miles north of the Arctic Circle || https://t.co/NJ4ePCLBpG pic.twitter.com/8uuKo2NRea — Aromatix Team (@aromatixteam) November 27, 2018

The modern-looking City Hall, in fact, sits on a location that was previously used as a dump, and then a succession of factories and junkyards locally called the Death Valley. If everything goes well, the Death Valley should thrive with life by the end of 2020 when the entire town will be reinstated around this spot.

From the City Hall will spread avenues and streets dotted with brand new residential and commercial edifices, including culture and science hubs, and hotels to stir tourism in the area. That the project is gigantic in its nature tells the fact that some landmark buildings of current Kiruna will need to be moved, such as its huge wooden church.

In the Arctic circle Sweden’s most northern town is LITERALLY being moved three kilometres to the east! @HLArchitects‘ Kiruna Town Hall, which opened today, is the first building in the relocated town – https://t.co/CeHatm0MpQ pic.twitter.com/Sr4MdceaAO — Master Prophet (@tomravenscroft) November 22, 2018

From other buildings, such as the current railway station and the old City Hall building, some of the most valuable elements will be dismantled and then embedded into new structures. This way the architects of the new Kiruna are tapping into the creative potentials of playing with the city’s collective memory.

And is Kiruna the world’s only city that has faced such fate, to move from one spot to another? People have undertaken similar projects, but perhaps not as thoroughly as in Kiruna, in several other parts of the world. Just two such examples are Morococha in Peru and Hibbing in Minnesota.

Morococha sits in the shadow of yet another mountain which is deemed abundant enough with copper resources. Over the years, unregulated mining has sadly transformed entire neighborhoods into toxic dumps. When a Chinese conglomerate, Chinalco, took over, it initiated to relocate the entire settlement away from the health-affecting site. The new Morococha now rests some 8km from its old location, which more or less has been leveled down to dust.

Even more similar to the Kiruna case today is the historic relocation of Minnesota’s Hibbing. In the late 1910s, this town had to relocate two miles to the south again because of mining iron ore affecting the city plateau. It must have been all sweat and blood to have the town build anew, bearing in mind how scarce was technology a century ago and how few tools were at the disposal of the Hibbing population: just horses, tractors, and a steam crawler. And plenty of human hands, of course.