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This research evaluates the role of wholesale house moving in Northern Sweden in relation to the changing economy of the region. The focus is on sustainable practice around housing provision, building resources and land use. It is a significant activity in regard to settlement practices and raises questions about sustainability, and use of land. Research draws on the history of architecture and settlement in Northern Sweden, house construction, spatial planning, land use, legal frameworks, and methods of moving houses. It will also examine societal ideas about the culture of housing, settlement and moving buildings through the discourse analysis of a single house mover, their forty years of practice and over four hundred building moves. It investigates the functions and methods of this specific spatial restructuring within the broader sphere of spatial change and urban gentrification in the region and beyond. The process is both a physical measure of reaction to particular spatial reconfiguration (due to climate and environmental, infrastructural, or socio spatial changes) and a spatial practice that is a solution to settlement distribution problems. The research pioneers studies of wholesale building moving to develop sustainable re distribution and circular economies and as an architectural research that challenges the nature of architectural production.

The panel questions how a visual, spatial research, might uncover the implications of technological and social change in Norrlands. It considers how political narratives of the region might be embedded in the space and propose new readings of cause, effect and values associated with relocation. 

The subject matter has been selected as an extra-ordinary moment of socio-spatial displacement, through capital investments, where multiple cultural layers are shifted across a landscape through the action of Husflyttningar (House relocation).

3 short dialogue exchanges will consider, 

the wider location and context of the global periphery (Arctic region), 

the construction and interior of the house and 

the connection between this and the demolition of traditional timber cottages (stuga)

Based in Umeå, Northern Sweden, this project looks at the phenomena of moving whole houses and other buildings. This practice occurs through- out Sweden, in the USA, New Zealand and other territories. Moving structures this way has occurred for over a hundred years. This research picks up the practice, initially through the potential spectacle of the event 

of moving structures, and then focuses on a more material and poetic aspect of the practice. It has not been researched in depth and much of what seems to be understood as a normal, if infrequent phenomena, raises questions about the use of resources, spatial planning and conceptions and representations of space and artifacts. There is also an appreciation of the substantial immediacy of process of moving a particular house, the aquired skills and knowledge of the mover, of materials and substances in the process and also how it stands in contrast to the production and representation of architecture and spatial plans framed through the conceptual and actual lens of digital screens. 

The process of moving a particular house became the subject of documentation, from stages of preparation to the uplift, the unsettling, moving and settling. Through re- peated visits to the sites of the house moves, it became possible to develop awareness of the history and extent of this practice. The house mover Magnus Mårtensson has more than forty years of experience of the history of house and building moving. 

Part of the research was to re-visit original sites and the new location of the house after several months. This was a photographic and video documentation and material for re-thinking the process. The form of this was further photographic and video work, to record and project the mid-summer move, along with historic materials from the public library history collection and regional museums onto and into sites, buildings and surfaces. 

This chapter has four parts. There are inserted transcripts of comments from a video interview with Magnus Mårtensson and his son Andreas Mårtensson (who had worked with Magnus on house moving). There is an historic overview of the practices of moving houses by James Benedict Brown. There is also a theoretical frame to the process of mov- ing houses and the fourth section is a description of some of the creative and potentially 

speculative re-presentation of the process and practice of moving buildings, which has been developed collaboratively with Robin Serjeant, through the Relate North Symposium at Yukon University in January 2023 

The inserted transcripts develop the spatial significance of this particular form of building moving. It allows for close reading of the economy of the production of space, through this traditional process, which is associated with restrictions on the dimensions of the space. It occurs without the use of specialist cranes and cages. 

This research uses film, photography and projection to analyse the changing space of Northern Sweden (Norrland). This peripheral region is one of the most rapidly reconfiguring spaces in Europe, with on-going programmes of corporate and state investment to exploit space and natural resources for settlement and extraction. 

The images are part of an archive of the moving of buildings, a common practice in the region. Buildings are moved in relation to changing environmental conditions and now urban land values and global property speculation. It is understood to be a distinct process of what David Harvey has described as "remaking capitalism’s geography"[1] 

Images analyse the material conditions, ideology and power in this frontier economy. The project considers an architecture of de-growth[2], challenging ideas of the expanding urbanisation of Norrland. As land values and modes of occupation change, buildings are displaced from the urban centre to increase occupation density through speculative investment. This process displaces social space and previous land formations. The city of Kirunahas been entirely displaced by expanding mine workings. The practice of relocation also has the capacity to shift large-scale historic architectures, as a distinct form of caretaking. 

In this moment of new waves of investment in mining and forestry, of urbanisation of parts of the region, predicated on an underlying and largely uncontested agenda of 'development', the archive makes other conceptions of space and architectural production. 

The images consider the wrenching of a house from its location and moving it to another location, documenting this process of detachment. It records the re-arrangements of spacebetween land and building. Displacement is illuminated through projections to unsettle, by superimposing architectures onto previous conditions.

 [1] David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism. (London: Profile Books, 2011), 180.[2] André Gorz, Ecology As Politics. (UK: Pluto Press, 1987)

This artist book is a photographic archive and text of a house move in Northern Sweden. It considers the historic, cultural, technical and material signifcance of wholesale house moving (husfyttningar) in the region, through a single, historic house move in Umeå, 2021. The main frame of analysis is the spatial politics of un-building. It is an investigation of the vernacular mobility of shifting built and occupied forms in relation to a historic and future context of urban reconfguration, a proposed architecture of de-growth in Northern Sweden. The visual work explores context through the form of the book itself. It is also a potential model that constructs and translates analysis of the space. It is a collaborative architectural work to document the house move and other spatial productions, models, drawings and collage of the space beneath and between the ground and house, image projections, exhibitions and events, as public exchange.

The book is a photographic archive and text of a house move in Northern Sweden. It considers the historic, cultural, technical and material significance of wholesale house moving (husflyttningar) in the region, through a single, historic house move in Umeå, 2021. The main frame of analysis is the spatial politics of un-building. It is an investigation of the vernacular mobility of shifting built and occupied forms in relation to a historic and future context of urban reconfiguration, a proposed architecture of de-growth in Northern Sweden. 

The visual work explores context through the form of the book itself. It is also a potential model that constructs and translates analysis of the space. It is a collaborative architectural work to document the house move and other spatial productions, models, drawings and collage of the space beneath and between the ground and house, image projections, exhibitions and events, as public exchange. 

This is an archival research on the practice of the wholesale moving of buildings in Umea, in Northern Sweden (Norrland). The focus for the research has been the space beneath the building, between land and occupation and it is understood to represent more than the increasing land values that have precipitated its move. It is a space through which to consider the material, social, political, economic and legal frameworks which construct ideas of Norrland. The space is a repository for representation, participatory and performative architectures. It is to relocate the cause and effects of economies of extraction through an architecture of de-growth. The visual spatial attempts to form connections across disparate fragments of built and lived space as an active re-insertion. In considering who owns Umea and the political narrative embedded in the physical space, there are multiple, simultaneous constructions of culture, of history, heritage and spatial occupation and these layers can be can be seen to be both transportable and re-loacable (Husflytningar). 

The shift in focus in UK higher education since Thatcherism from the production of knowledge for civic betterment to the production and consumption of knowledge by the university for revenue generation can be read through the social rearrangement of space in the university town or city. A key spatial reconfiguration emerging from the shift in economic conditions is the collapse of the modern university as a singular, ideological construct. Like ‘the city’ before it, the modern university has, at its interior, been reformed into a newly defined, fragmented public–private social space, and, at its exterior, into a devourer of the space of the local community. This article showcases excerpts from a film made by the authors entitled The Death and Life of UK Universities – a title inspired by Jane Jacobs’s critique of great American cities. Our film is a cinematic database survey of the changing space of all British universities which considers this systematic spatial reprogramming of space within the city. The two-year research project is an audio-visual critique of the way in which neoliberalism, corporatization and commercial interests have co-opted the space of the British university. Referencing the films of Charlie Chaplin and Gordon Matta-Clark and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, the film focuses on university cities, critically observing the rise of university marketing material and the consumption of the city and of local community life for university student accommodation. We ask: How are UK universities being spatially reconfigured and what are the consequences?