Re-living (in) the lost modern utopia. The global village of Svappavaara.

Svappavaara is a small mining town above the Arctic Circle within the municipality of Kiruna, in northern Sweden. Here in the 1960s Ralph Erskine had the opportunity to apply a scheme for a model Arctic town that he began developing visions for a decade before and presented at CIAM’59 in Otterlo. Unfortunately, due to its proximity to Kiruna and to a recession in the mining sector, Svappavaara soon started losing residents and just a very limited part of Erskine’s ambitious plan materialised. The struggles in applying a modernist utopia to a local peripheral context are well testified by the history of the apartment block Ormen Långe (the Long Snake), a 200 metre long building conceived to shield the town from northern winds. The shrinking population, a low appreciation by locals and problematic maintenance led to the decision to demolish half of it in 2009. More recently, when just 46 of the original 88 apartments remained, new actors have appeared on the scene from all over the world: following the refugee crisis, a number of immigrants and asylum seekers live now in Ormen Långe and Svappavaara.

The case of Svappavaara embodies many of the tensions and contradictions of contemporary society: the impacts of globalised processes, such as resource extraction, to local contexts, the struggles of peripheral and sparsely populated areas, the pressure put by contemporary migrations to small communities. At the same time, Ormen långe represents an architectural materialisation of the modernist utopia, with its limits and failures, which can nowadays offer an opportunity to test innovative and experimental ways of living and promoting a more integrated and sustainable society.

The objectives of the project are: • Reactivating and reusing the abandoned public common spaces of Ormen Långe as innovative and inclusive spaces

for the social life of Svappavaara. • Engaging the current users, the building property and managers (Kiruna Kommun and Kirunabostäder) as well as

the community of Svappavaara and other actors actively in the process. • Collecting, ordering and understanding existing archive materials and historical sources and contribute to

preserving a precious surviving element of Erskine’s legacy in the northernmost part of Sweden and, soon, one of his last remaining works north of the Arctic Circle.

The common spaces in the ground floor of Ormen Långe, nowadays largely unused, will be the starting point for a new use of the building and, at the same time, will provide the community of Svappavaara with new public spaces for socialization and integration. The proposed methodology will merge historic research with the use of participatory approaches to involve and engage local actors in the definition of the reactivation strategy. The options will range from the selection of contemporary artists in collaboration with existing initiatives by local institution (e.g: Resurscentrum för Konst i Norrbotten: http://www.resurscentrumforkonst.se/), to urban farming projects to recreate the interior green spaces originally planned d by Erskine, to the involvement of associations like Hej Främling! (http://www.hejframling.se/) for supporting the program of social and free-time activities with immigrants (the contact is already established).

My plan is to concentrate the research activities in the first 2 months of the fellowships in Stockholm and to use this time for dialogue and meetings with ArkDes researchers and curators and for contacting the partner institutions and the actors involved in the activities in Svappavaara. In the following 3 months I will be based in Luleå, Svappavaara and/or Kiruna to start the reactivation process and the initiatives with the local actors. During the 6th month I will be back in Stockholm to outline the research outcome and results.

My project will trigger relevant synergies with the existing resources and the ongoing research and initiatives at ArkDes: it will valorise the archive materials of Erskine which are part of the collection; I will have the possibility to develop my cooperation with Ann Maudsley on this subject (an abstract we wrote together has already been accepted to the DOCOMOMO 2020 conference: http://docomomo2020.com/). The topics of the project are not only relevant at the national and international level, but they are also in continuity with the previous fellowships and with the forthcoming exhibition on Kiruna ArkDes is organising.

Andrea Luciani

Researcher Luleå University of Technology, Sweden Msc in Architecture and PhD in Preservation of Architectural Heritage at Politecnico di Milano, my research focuses on the sustainable management of built heritage and historic environments. During my career, my research ranged from the analysis of the indoor climate in historic buildings and museums, to the assessment of the impacts of different energy retrofitting strategies on built heritage values, to the conservation of modern architecture. Since I moved in northern Sweden in 2017, I have broaden my interests to the impacts of resource extraction activities in the local mining towns and to how these structural changes are affecting the preservation and management of built heritage. At Politecnico di Milano I have participated in the development of the conservation plan of De Carlo’s Collegi in Urbino (5). During my time at Luleå University of Technology I took part to the Swedish national research program on energy efficiency in historic buildings Spara och Bevara and I am currently leading the pilot project 2Best on the sustainable long-term management of building stocks with cultural significance (2,3). I have also studied and discussed the concept of resilience for the preservation of built heritage (4). The proposed project starts from my background as building conservator and from my interest in the preservation of 20th century architecture, while the choice of Svappavaara as case study is a result of my recent research on the impacts of resource extraction activities on the historic environments of Northern Sweden (1). Selected publications: 1. A. Luciani, J. Sjöholm (2019) The Norrbotten's Technological Megasystem as a heritage discourse: paradoxes

and controversies, in M. A. Segantini (Ed.) Tangible – intangible heritage(s) – Design, social and cultural critiques on the past, present and the future, AMPS Proceedings Series, Vol. 2, No. 15, AMPS, London, pp. 292-300.

2. A. Luciani, S. Lidelöw, S. Bhattacharjee, T. Örn (2019) The challenge of energy efficiency in Kiruna’s heritage buildings, in D. Johansson, H. Bagge, Å. Wahlström (eds.) Cold Climate HVAC 2018, CCC2018, Springer Proceedings in Energy, Springer, Cham, pp. 275-289, doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00662-4_24

3. A. Luciani, K. L. Nilsson, S. Lidelöw, S. Bhattacharjee, T. Örn (2018) Improving the energy efficiency of built

heritage in cold regions, in T. Broström, L. Nilsen, S. Carlsten (eds.) Energy Efficiency in Historic Buildings. Visby, Sweden. September 26–27, 2018, Uppsala University, Department of Art History, Visby, pp. 493-502.

4. A. Luciani, D Del Curto (2018) ‘Towards a resilient perspective in building conservation’, in Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 309-320, doi.org/10.1108/JCHMSD-07-2016-0040

5. M. Mazzolani, A. Troisi, M.P. Borgarino, S. Della Torre, D. Del Curto, C.M. Joppolo, L. Valisi, A. Luciani, M. Bellebono, A. Sansonetti, G. Maggioni, E. Barberis, N. Bazzoli, L. Baratin, G. Scicolone, F. Gasparetto, F. Fraternale, G. Giglioni (2017) Giancarlo De Carlo" Collegi" in Urbino. Conservation Plan, The Getty Foundation, Los Angeles.

Erskine in Svappavaara

Ormen Långe yesterday and today

Ormen Långe, South façade

Extracts from Erskine’s plan for Svappavaara

Current conditions of the spaces in the ground floor of Ormen Långe