text: Intermediate 
  Cities dont often decide to pack their bags, get up and move down the road. But thats exactly what Kiruna, an Arctic town in northern Sweden, has to do  to avoid being swallowed up into the earth.
  Its a terrible choice, says Krister Lindstedt of White, the Swedish architects company that is managing the biblical task. They have to move this city of 23,000 people away from a gigantic iron-ore mine that is fast swallowing up the ground beneath its streets. Either the mine must stop digging, creating mass unemployment, or the city has to move.
  Founded in 1900 by the state-owned Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara mining company (LK), Kiruna has grown rich off the vast amount of iron ore that is below the town but its now facing destruction by exactly the thing that made it rich. The town is here because of the mine, says Deputy Mayor Niklas Siren. Otherwise, no one would have built a city here.
  Located 145km inside the Arctic Circle, Kiruna has a brutal climate. It has winters with no sunlight and average temperatures below -15C. But the iron ore has kept people here. It has become the worlds largest underground iron-ore mine. It produces 90% of all the iron in Europe, enough to build more than six Eiffel Towers a day. And demand continues to grow.
  In 2004, the mining company told the town that its days were numbered: digging its shafts towards the city at an angle of 60 degrees, subsidence would soon lead to buildings cracking and collapsing. Ten years later, cracks are starting to appear in the ground, and they are creeping closer and closer to the town.
  The people of Kiruna have been living in limbo for ten years, says Viktoria Walldin, a social anthropologist who works with the architects. They have put their lives on hold, unable to make major decisions like buying a house, redecorating, having a child or opening a business.
  After years of dithering, the city finally has a plan for how it will proceed. Lindstedt has a plan that shows the towns streets and squares beginning to crawl eastwards along a new high street, until the whole place has moved safely away from the mine by 2033.
  A new town square is already being built, 3km to the east, with a circular town hall planned by Danish architect Henning Larsen. Twenty other key buildings will be dismantled and put together piece by piece in their new home  like an Ikea flatpack on a bigger scale. Kirunas red wooden church, built in 1912 and once voted Swedens most beautiful building, will take pride of place in a new park, and the bell tower will stand once again above the town hall. But not everything will be saved.
  I spoke to an old lady who walks past the bench every day where she had her first kiss, says Walldin. Its things like that  the hospital where your first child was born, for example  that are important to people and all thats going to disappear.
  Called the most democratic move in history, the project will get 320m from the mining company for building new facilities, including a high school, fire station, community centre, library and swimming hall. But the biggest worry for most people is where they will actually live and how they will get a house or flat.
  People are used to very low rents and very high incomes but, in future, this will have to change says Lindstedt. LK has agreed to compensate residents to the value of their homes plus 25% but many locals say this is not enough to afford a new-build house.
  A closer look at the plan shows the new town does not look like the original Kiruna at all. The current town has winding streets and detached houses with gardens. Whites plan has multi-storey apartment blocks around shared courtyards in long straight streets.
  It is an opportunity, say the architects, for Kiruna to reinvent itself into a town that will attract young people. There will be new cultural facilities and visionary things such as a cable car above the high street. But it is a vision that many of the existing residents will probably not be able to afford.