Kirthan Shekar
Urban Transformation and Sustainability
Designing Devolution: Extraction Infrastructure Transformations for a Post-Capital Norrbotten
The project critiques the extractivist approach in Kiruna, Sweden, where centralised capitalist structures have led to environmental degradation, community displacement and the marginalisation of indigenous Sami communities. It challenges the traditional post-extraction strategies of repair and diversification, arguing that they often normalise the destruction without giving true agency to spatial design. ‘Public’ spaces are absent in extraction landscapes, which gives engineering and politics agency in guiding these landscapes.
To address this, the project proposes decentralising power to enable spatial and institutional transformations. At the city scale in Kiruna, this involves creating economic guilds and indigenous commons mediated through introduced public spaces. At the territorial scale, it focuses on using infrastructure and settlements as guides to diversify economies and promote degrowth to concentrate along the Norrbotten Technological Megasystem.
The goal is to empower spatial design in rethinking extraction landscapes, moving towards a post-capitalist future that is culturally sensitive, socially inclusive and ecologically careful, providing space for negotiation and coexistence of nature-cultures.