Elisa Maria López Koch

I am a cultural anthropologist with a historical orientation, specializing in urban environmental anthropology and the anthropology of extractive resource industries, with a regional focus on the Nordic Arctic/Sápmi. My research spans themes of urban and environmental history, resource-society relations, and Indigenous and colonial forms of knowledge production, as well as architectural, urban planning, and design practices. Both in my work on mining-induced displacement and resettlement and “green” industrial urbanization, I examine historical sources alongside individual and community narratives to understand how social issues are negotiated between people, corporations, and state institutions in the spaces of everyday life. Since 2012, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden, Norway, and Japan, with the majority of this research in the far north of Sweden/Sámi. My doctoral dissertation, “Transforming Kiruna: Producing Space, Society, and Legacies of Inequality in the Swedish Ore Fields” (2021) explored how space, nature, and difference are produced and negotiated in the city of Kiruna, a Swedish industrial heartland and Sámi Indigenous homeland currently experiencing mining-based population displacement and urban transformation.

Currently, I am a postdoctoral Researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Architecture. Since September 2022, my research has been funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) group project “Utopia 2.0: Nature-Thinking in Nordic New Towns Past, Present, and Future” (P.I: Associate Professor and docent Jennifer Mack) and by the Lars Erik Lundberg Foundation through September 2026. My postdoctoral project, “Greening the Arctic: (Re)Making Northern Industrial Cities,” investigates how two northern industrial communities (Kiruna, Sweden, and Mo i Rana, Norway) have been transformed at social, spatial, and temporal scales since becoming selected sites of national "green transition" projects. Combining research methods and theory from anthropology and critical architectural studies,  includingin situethnographic fieldwork, this project examines urban planning practices, architectural histories, and residents' experiences of industrially-driven socio-spatial change over time.

During Fall/Winter 2023-24, I was a Guest Researcher at ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, conducting research in the museum collections on company towns and worker housing in 20th century Sweden.

At KTH, I've been a course designer and teacher of a master's seminar in architecture, "Nature, Culture, Space: Anthropological Approaches to Environment" (taught Spring 2023 and 2024), and co-teacher of the PhD course "Architectural Humanities", together with Associate Professor and docent Jennifer Mack and Dr. Malin Zimm (Fall 2024–Spring 2025).

As of June 2026, I am completing work on my first academic monograph (under contract with University of Pittsburgh Press), with the working title Edge Effects: Urban Indigenous and Industrial Ecologies in Northern Sweden.

Recent publications:

López, Elisa M. 2026. ​​”Back to the Land of the Future: (Re)making an Industrial Heartland and Indigenous Homeland for Sweden’s ‘Green Transition’”. In Decolonizing the Sustainable Development Goals: Community Perspectives, Social Justice, and the Challenges of Pluralism.Reetta Toivanen, Vladislava Vladimirova, and Carl-Gösta Ojala, eds. 103–120.  London: Palgrave McMillan. Open Access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-14263-4

López, Elisa Maria.  2024. “Tears of Blood for the Cracking City: Urban Infrastructure of Extraction and Everyday Life in Kiruna, Sweden.” kritisk etnografi: Swedish Journal of Anthropology, ISSN 2003-1173, Vol. 7, no 1, p. 63-79.DOI: 10.33063/diva-544571

**N.B.: I now have a double surname, but will continue to use only López in publishing and other academic work as before.

Contact:elopez@kth.se