Kiruna: Svappavaara

Team Berätta mig vidare explored relational methods for co-creating spaces for learning and nature education in Svappavaara.

Conditions: 45 kilometres south of Kiruna lies Svappavaara, a village with many roots. Dating back to the 17th century, the realisation of Ralph Erskine’s ideas for housing in an arctic climate in the 1970s and extensive cold-setting of housing in the 1990s, today 390 people live in a rural mining environment. Svappavaara is close to a large workplace, has a supermarket, school, sports hall, youth centre and nature, and is within commuting distance of Kiruna. Kiruna is Sweden’s largest municipality and many people dream of life outside the city centre. At the same time, several houses are deserted here.

Challenge: Is Svappavaara a potential resource for Kiruna municipality to grow beyond the city centre? A monument to untapped opportunities? The team will focus on the question: how can we in early stages, through the processes and power of design, strengthen living and housing environments in rural areas? This is to strengthen Svappavaara as an attractive living environment based on existing local needs and challenges, as well as future plans and ambitions.

Team Berätta mig vidare took its point of departure in meeting Svappavaara through presence, conversations and storytelling. The work was grounded in a method characterised by informal encounters and attentiveness: being on site, listening, facilitating conversations, drawing out stories, building relationships and engaging with everyday life. The method was developed as a way of seeking knowledge and understanding of a place—forms of insight that are often lost when places are described through data, maps and meetings in conference rooms.

By following local residents’ stories to the places they described, linking narratives to lived experience and retelling them, the team opened up new perspectives and points of entry. In this way, relationships were built with the local community as a whole.

Using storytelling as a relational method, the team developed a proposal for a design process for learning environments in Skolskogen, located adjacent to Svappavaara School. The work was summarised in a report presenting proposals for a development and management plan that responds to the municipality’s identified challenge. The report can be found further down the page.

In 2025, Berätta mig vidare continued its work in Svappavaara within the framework of Visions in the North step 2, testing prototypes on site. In collaboration with teachers and pupils at Svappavaara School, the process further explored the power of storytelling and resulted in spatial settings for nature-based learning, activities and imagination in Skolskogen.

The team’s work and final report will be presented at the concluding conference for Visions in the North on 25 March 2026. Read more and register for the conference here.

Knowledge hub

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