Underneath Norrköping: An Urban Mine of Hibernating Infrastructure

Abstract

Abstract:This study examines the subsurface infrastructure in the Swedish city of Norrköping from an urban mining perspective. Urban mining is a broadly defined term for different strategies that regard the built environment as a resource base for materials. In this study, the focus is on three base metals that exist in large quantities in infrastructure parts: iron, copper and aluminium. A special focus is given to the parts of Norrköping's infrastructure that are not in-use and thus constitute a "hibernating stock" that contains recyclable metals.The main results of this study are twofold. First, a quantitative assessment of the hibernating stocks of urban infrastructure gives answers to how large the stocks are and where in Norrköping they are located. This was performed using a spatially informed Material Flow Analysis to arrive at a recycling potential in terms of weight and spatial concentration. Second, a qualitative assessment was made regarding how these hibernating stocks of urban infrastructure come into existence. An infrastructure studies perspective was used to outline three patterns with their own sets of "hibernation" logics. These logics give rise to different prerequisites for the implementation of urban mining in practice.A main argument of this study's cover essay is that both of the above outlined kinds of knowledge are needed to engage in urban mining with confidence. Thus, the main focus of the cover essay text is to describe how the two different perspectives of Material Flow Analysis and infrastructure studies were combined into a coherent research approach.

Toward Social Material Flow Analysis: On the Usefulness of Boundary Objects in Urban Mining Research

“…Hibernating stocks of copper in the urban infrastructure of Norrköping, Sweden (reproduced from Wallsten with permission), comparable to previous GIS‐based MFA studies that estimate only the size and spatial distribution of in‐use stocks (cf. Van Beers and Graedel ).…”

“…Nakamura and Sato 2011;Castán Broto et al 2012;Hodson et al 2012), a message that is not new to the MFA discipline. Examples of how interdisciplinarity can be achieved are, however, much more rare, and so the next section describes a case study that engaged explicitly with that in concrete research practice (Wallsten 2013).…”

“…The research design thus had to support both the stocks and flows perspective and quantitative assessment of an MFA analysis (Wallsten et al 2013a) and allow for recontextualization in qualitative process terms with a sociotechnically informed perspective (Wallsten et al 2013b). Together, these two refereed articles constituted the case study (see Wallsten 2013).…”

“…To further develop the quantitative assessment with qualitative explanations on how, when, and by whom material flows are sustained, MFA must from the outset be rigged to fit with a complementary social science research approach. I exemplify my argument with a description of an already-conducted case study of the hibernating stocks of subsurface urban infrastructure in Norrköping, Sweden (Wallsten 2013). Hibernating stocks is a concept that originates from within the MFA community and is used to classify materials that have been taken out of use, but not yet entered the waste sector (Bergbäck and Lohm 1997).…”

The Urk World : Hibernating Infrastructures and the Quest for Urban Mining

“…Since the article is a re-write of the methodology sections of the cover essay of my licentiate thesis (Wallsten, 2013), no empirical material was explicitly collected. As such, the article synthesizes the main methodological arguments of my licentiate thesis with the ambition to inspire future researchers to engage with similar approaches.…”