Professor lends expertise to question of how to move Swedish city

Lance Rake, professor of industrial design, recently returned from a two-week workshop, City Move Interdesign, where he worked with an international team, brainstorming proposals and ideas on how to successfully relocate a city.

Icsid Interdesign is a two-week workshop where an international team works collaboratively on a predetermined issue of regional and/or international significance. The workshop took place from March 23-April 4 in Malmberget, a section of Gellivare, Sweden. It was arranged by the Swedish Industrial Design Foundation and funded in part by the European Union European Regional Development Fund.

The City Move Interdesign program focused on physically relocating Malmberget, a mining area in Swedish Lapland. According to Anna Bellander, the communications manager for City Move Interdesign, the area is one of the most profitable in Europe. The mining company LKAB is extremely important for the community, but because of the mining, the ground could become risky and unsafe for the inhabitants.

City officials formed the City Move Interdesign workshop to brainstorm plausible ways to move an entire community. Forty people from 18 countries participated in the relocation workshop, including urban planners, architects, artists, designers, educators and students. The workshop took place in the sports arena in Malmberget. The arena was converted into a design studio and the participants were divided into six groups to work on relocation approaches. After two intense weeks of multi-disciplinary meetings, work sessions, lectures and seminars, the groups prepared presentations to present to Swedish government officials.

"It was an amazing experience,” said Rake. “It was a great opportunity to work in a way that we always say we should work- in collaboration with experts from other disciplines. These international, multidisciplinary teams were able to come up with a variety of interesting and, I hope, viable concepts that might solve some of the problems in Malmberget,” Rake said. “The interdisciplinary approach is needed because the problems are complex and interrelated- problems of politics, communication, planning, architecture and design. On a personal level, I learned a lot about putting together an effective team, and finding strategies to get the most out of tremendous talent we had available."

According to Anna Bellander, a large amount of work will be done now that the workshop has ended.

“We are compiling the workshop group work and then we will deliver it to the municipality of Gellivare,” Bellander said. “We will have a session with the municipality and the mining company to review the materials and recommend a way to utilize the learnings for the future development of Malmberget. We are also working to create an exhibition that shows the results of the workshop on tour both in Sweden and hopefully abroad, and we have a long-term plan to establish an ‘innovation/knowledge center’ in Gellivare that is a forum for exchanging knowledge and experiences for other communities on issues regarding resettlement and planned city moves.”