Sustainability & Green Transition
How can industrial heritage inform — and be informed by — the shift to fossil-free industry? Case studies from steel, mining, and hydropower.
TICCIH 2025 Kiruna was the 19th triennial World Congress of The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH), held from 25 to 30 August 2025 in the sub-Arctic mining town of Kiruna, Sweden. Organized by Luleå University of Technology in partnership with TICCIH Sweden and Norway, the Swedish National Heritage Board, Kiruna Municipality, LKAB, and Jernkontoret, the congress hosted over 300 speakers from across Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.
About the Congress
Kiruna sits above the world's largest underground iron-ore mine and is itself being physically relocated to make room for continued mining. At the same time, the wider Norrbotten region is the epicentre of Europe's green industrial transition — fossil-free steel production, rare-earth extraction, and new hydropower — on lands that have for millennia been home to the Sámi and Tornedalian peoples. It is a place where industrial heritage is not an abstraction but a daily, contested negotiation between past, present, and future.
Against that backdrop the congress theme — Heritage in Action: Legacies of Industry in Future Making — framed six days of scientific sessions, keynotes, workshops, and field excursions around the tensions and opportunities that industrial heritage poses in the 21st century.
Congress Tracks
Colonialism, Indigeneity & Land
Industrial heritage in territories of indigenous peoples: Sámi perspectives, extractive legacies, and decolonial conservation practice.
AI, Digital & New Documentation
Machine learning, 3D capture, and born-digital archives as tools for documenting and re-presenting industrial sites and oral histories.
Community & Inclusion
Who speaks for an industrial site? Worker memory, gender, migration, and the politics of inclusive interpretation.
Adaptive Reuse & Urban Heritage
From Kiruna's relocation to post-industrial cities worldwide: rethinking reuse, ruin, and the right to remain.
Education & Public Engagement
Curricula, museology, and public-facing storytelling in the next decade of industrial heritage practice.
Essential Congress Information
Program
Six days of plenaries, parallel sessions, and workshops across the congress theme.
See program overviewVenue & Accommodation
Sessions at Kiruna Folkets Hus and Luleå University of Technology's Kiruna campus.
Venue detailsExcursions
Pre- and post-congress field trips to LKAB, hydropower sites, Bergslagen, Røros, and Svalbard.
Excursion listOrganizing Committee
The academic, heritage, and industry partners behind the 19th TICCIH World Congress.
Meet the committeePractical Information
Travel, visas, Arctic summer weather, and guidance for first-time visitors to Kiruna.
Plan your visitProceedings
Post-congress papers, bulletins, and reports published in collaboration with the TICCIH bulletin.
View proceedingsFeatured Reading
Kiruna's Mining Heritage: From Malmberget to the Green Transition
An in-depth look at more than 120 years of iron-ore extraction in Sweden's far north — and the heritage challenges ahead.
Read the articleDigital Preservation of Industrial Heritage in 2026
How born-digital archives, 3D capture, and long-term web stewardship are reshaping what it means to conserve industry.
Read the article