Wholesale building moving in Northern Sweden: Here, now and then
Carless, Tonia
Authors
Tonia Carless Tonia4.Carless@uwe.ac.uk
Senior Lecturer in Architecture
Abstract
This study is part of continuing collaborative research into the phenomena of wholesale moving buildings in northern Sweden. It raises questions about sustainability, through consideration of re-use in a moment of the further extensive application of neo-liberal ideas of both economic practice and reasoning. In northern Sweden it seems evident that the growth of financial investments through further extraction of minerals, timber and land-space for built development for housing and industry leads to further harms to the environment overall, in the pursuit of ‘growth’ and of ‘progress’. In the context of northern Sweden, this has contributed to the general changes in climate and global warming, and crucially the change and destruction in places and the occupation of territories and the associated rights of indigenous peoples and their thousands of years of stewardship of this region.
Structural moving can be understood as being central to the notion of circularity of architectural production and also specifically directed towards the agenda of de-growth. It follows ideas of working with what is already there and no demolition1 ( Land V) This paper attempts to unravel why, as a cultural, spatial, economic practice it is considered peripheral and to a great extent insignificant to either the architecture of the region, or to architectural production and theory more broadly, especially when the histories of formation of the cities and settlements of the North retain significant evidence of wholesale structural moving. It also situates the practice as a way of measuring and analyzing the spatial shifts of the region.
Questions of sustainability should be framed by practices of de-growth and need to be understood through the function of neoliberal economic models. Here, in this research it raises several important questions about places, the city and its hinterlands, this current and preceding economic moments and and questions about development. These questions are to be viewed through the lens of image making and representation of the structural move in multiple configurations
