The Sustainable Land Allocation project recently gathered for its second meeting, this time in Boden. The project is a collaboration between the municipalities of Boden and Luleå and the construction industry. The project aims to create uniform criteria for sustainable land allocations.
The municipalities of Boden and Luleå join forces. Accumulated experience and skills are used in collaboration between municipalities and construction industry players. During the spring, three workshops will be held with municipal officials and stakeholders from both Luleå and Boden municipalities. Together they are exploring appropriate criteria for land allocation to reduce the climate impact of new buildings. The aim is to create equal predictability for construction industry players in terms of land allocations in the two neighboring municipalities. It is also hoped that the series of workshops will contribute to knowledge enhancement and creative and idea generating discussions.
The second workshop was recently held in Boden with around 20 participants. It was also clear that coming together across municipalities and responsibilities is rewarding on many levels.
“It is good that the industry partners and sit down all together, from LTU, architects and municipal officials, and talk about how different things should be designed to be good”, says Dennis Wikstén, one of Boden’s major private property owners.
The second workshop allowed them to work creatively with dialogues and discussion topics to address issues from different perspectives. Among other things, they discussed what constitutes good and bad land allocations, conflicts of interest, ranking of climate requirements, and justifications for the choices made. The groups also discussed the vision of Luleå, Boden and Norrbotten.
“It’s great that we have a dialog about this, and get to listen to so many different perspectives in a single forum”, says Ellen Bäckman, Lindbäcks Bygg, who works throughout Sweden but is based in Norrbotten and a major player in the societal transition construction project in Boden.
The background to the project is that housing construction is a high priority in the two expansive neighboring municipalities of Boden and Luleå. An increasing number of attractive and sustainable living and housing environments are being created to meet the demands of new industrialization. The challenge is to reduce the climate impact at the same time as the population and construction increase dramatically in a few years.
The project Sustainable land allocations takes place within the framework of the North Sweden Green Deal’s efforts. North Sweden Green Deal is run by Region Norrbotten and Region Västerbotten. Collaboration partners for Norrbotten are the municipalities of Norrbotten, Luleå University of Technology, the County Administrative Board of Norrbotten, Swedish Lapland Visitors Board and the municipalities of Boden, Gällivare, Kiruna, Luleå and Piteå.
The workshop series is led by consultants from Sweco.
Read more about the project HERE
