How to Move a Town
Kiruna, Sweden, and the Kirunavaara mine. Historic houses have been moved to what will be a new part of town.
Photographer: Klaus Thymann for Bloomberg BusinessweekAppropriately, it was the dog musher who broke trail.
Sune Stralberg, 66, is a national champion musher, a maker of dogsleds, and owner of Bjorkis Hundprodukter, a one-stop shop for organic kibble, spare sled parts, and dog leads and harnesses. All of this makes him a local celebrity in his hometown of Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost city. He has the white beard and jovial affect of a skinny Swedish Santa and speaks in lovely, lilting sentences, even when he’s recounting painful memories, such as one from three years ago, when he was forced to move his shop out of its longtime home and into a strip mall 2 miles down the road. He had little choice—the ground beneath the old shop was on the verge of collapse, like much of the rest of the town. “I already knew that I would move because of the iron,” Stralberg says with a shrug. “Everyone knew.”