Consulting engineer Sweco is helping Sweden’s most northerly city move 3km to the east to make more room for its iron ore mine.
The Stockholm-based firm will act as lead consultant on a new hospital for the city of Kiruna, a mining town of 17,000 people that sits on ore deposits at the world’s largest underground mine.
Since 2014, the city has been incrementally taking buildings down and rebuilding them in new locations to the east under a 100-year master plan devised by Swedish architects White Arkitekter.
Before that Sweden’s state-owned mining firm LKAB, which founded Kiruna in 1900, had been digging so close to the city that it was in danger of sinking.
The city opened its new city centre in September 2022.
The hospital contract was awarded by the council of the Norrbotten region.
It will be built on a site LKAB has finished with.
Sweco said the new hospital will be similar to the old one but “improved, rationalised and future-proofed”.
The new hospital is expected to be ready before 2031.
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