Rural or medium-sized city areas. Inhabitants heading for larger cities. Decreasing business network in the area of origin, increasing population loss. The elements that create this vicious circle are not foreign to Spain, but they are not exclusive to our country. Migration to large cities is a challenge for the development of medium-sized and small cities throughout Europe. However, it is possible to reverse it. In the regions of Västerbotten and Norrbotten, the northernmost in Sweden, they are on the way to breaking this circle. In fact, a medium-sized city has already managed to do so. Exactly 100 years ago, the discovery of a gold mine near Boliden, a town in northern Sweden that gave its name to the mining multinational, brought about a first golden age in the area. Engineering and mining companies, the influx of new people attracted by the golden song and the reaffirmation of its position as a trading point for the export of minerals from the area, made the neighbouring town of Skellefteå, located 200 kilometres from the Arctic Circle and which has now broken the vicious cycle of depopulation, an important point even back then.Skellefteå, Sweden. Photo courtesy of the municipality. Patrick DegermanSkellefteå's decline began in the mid-1990s. Sweden experienced a major financial and real estate crisis that hit industry particularly hard and spurred migration to larger cities in the south of the country. Skellefteå had a population of 75,822 in 1994, and in 2004 it had a population of 71,786. The number remained more or less stagnant until 2015, when the trend began to change again and it skyrocketed from 2019 onwards. Today, the city has reached a new historical population peak with 77,869 registered inhabitants. How did this happen? Two main factors explain the change. On the one hand, a plan promoted by the city itself and, on the other, the installation of the first gigafactory of batteries for electric vehicles in Europe: the Northvolt factory.
Aware that the city was losing strength, local authorities began to promote a strategic plan in 2015, drawn up through a public consultation, which set the goal of revitalising Skellefteå. In an interview held during a trip to the area paid for by the Swedish Embassy in Spain, Anja Palm, head of the business area of the Skellefteå City Council, and Helena Renstrom, head of Expo2026, a global event they are organising, say that the main axes of the strategy were based on promoting the city both internally and externally, reviewing the resources available to them and promoting a university campus so that young people do not have to go abroad to study. In terms of education, given the difficulty of creating a university capable of competing with institutions in the rest of the country, what they are doing is a new model, unprecedented in Sweden, consisting of a single campus in which they encourage the installation of branches of several different universities. In terms of the balance of resources at its disposal, the jewel in the crown is Skellefteå Kraft, the municipality's publicly owned electricity company. After the crisis in the mid-1990s, a process of privatisation of public companies began throughout Sweden, with one of the exceptions that maintained its status as a public company. However, it should be noted that the concept of a public company in Sweden differs from that in Spain. Fredrik Jonsson, the company's head of strategy and development, explains that the company's objective is to provide the best possible service to the municipality and Sweden, and to do so, its mission is to make a profit in order to return money to the public coffers. Its objective is to be profitable, and despite being public, it is possible to lay off employees and it is not necessary to pass a competitive exam, since, in Jonsson's words, «it works like any other private company, except that it is publicly owned.»
Skellefteå Kraft headquarters in Skellefteå, Sweden. Image courtesy of the company. Jonas WestlingJonsson says the fact that Skellefteå had this energy company, which controls the electricity grid and generates only renewable energy, was one of the key factors that attracted Northvolt's gigafactory to the city. Sources from Northvolt itself confirm this. “We were able to obtain the land we needed, we had access to renewable energy at a competitive price and the town had an industrial past, which was also important because we have auxiliary companies nearby,” says Jaani Heinonen, spokesperson for Northvolt, before adding to the list of reasons for setting up there the access to raw materials thanks to the mining activity in the area and good logistics at the request of the port and airport near Skellefteå. Co-founded in 2016 by the firm’s current CEO, Peter Mikael Carlsson, the former vice president of Tesla’s supply chain, Northvolt is Europe’s big bet on the manufacture of batteries for electric cars on the Old Continent. Sponsored by Volkswagen, Scania and large investment firms, Northvolt has the ambition to manufacture “the greenest battery in the world” in Europe. To do this, among other plants, they have built the megafactory on the outskirts of Skellefteå that has been the key to revitalising the municipality. With almost 4,000 employees at present and with a forecast of reaching more than 5,000, when it is fully operational, they expect to manufacture the equivalent of enough batteries for a million cars per year.
Aerial view of the Northvolt megafactory in Skellefteå, Sweden.NorthvoltThe pull effect of this project has made Skellefteå a rare exception in several ways. While Sweden is toughening its immigration policy due to integration problems that have shaken the beliefs of part of the country, the city is launching campaigns to attract people from all over the world. When there is a lack of work in other regions of Europe, including in Sweden itself – its unemployment rate has climbed to 8.3%, the third worst figure in the Union – in Skellefteå there are more jobs than unemployed people. Specifically, according to the data from the public employment service for the month of May, 1,098 unemployed for 1,318 new job offers.
Both local employers and Northvolt need engineers above all. However, there is a shortage of hands at all levels. The city council explains that the city needs teachers, doctors, construction workers, firefighters, administrative staff, cooks… On the Skellefteå job portal, there are plenty of technical vacancies. Saleta Beiro, a digital strategist, and Néstor Noyón, maintenance manager at Revolt, part of Northvolt, are two Spaniards living in the city. Noyón explains how this rapid growth is impacting housing prices. “Right now, the situation is that buying is more convenient than renting, because with so much demographic boom, the rental supply does not match the demand and prices are rising,” he says. The price increase also affects buying, but the square metre is still below the national average, according to data from the city council.
Photograph of the streets of Skellefteå. Image provided by Visit Skellefteå.Visit SkellefteåBeiro, for his part, gives an idea of the cost of living in relation to salaries. The average salary in the municipality is around 30,000 crowns a month after taxes, which is around 2,700 euros at the current exchange rate. “If you come to work as a waiter, it is around 20,000 crowns, and if you come to work as an engineer, the price goes up even more,” he adds. According to what this newspaper has been able to verify on real estate portals, the price of a house varies enormously, but there are some starting at 72,000 euros at the current exchange rate, while the most common is usually around 160,000 euros. Asked what is the best and worst thing about living there, Beiro and Noyón responded that the best thing is the quality of life in general and the working conditions, the worst thing is that in winter there is hardly any sunlight because it is so far north. Last winter, which was particularly harsh, temperatures reached 37 degrees Celsius below zero at the worst point. Skellefteå is a city that is in full swing because the Northvolt plant is already a reality. However, there are other cities in northern Sweden that also have large industries planned that will start producing in the near future. Gällivare, Boden and Luleå, three cities north of Skellefteå, are going to host projects related to the production of steel in an ecological way, while the last one will also be the headquarters of a plant for fertilizers made from green hydrogen, partly promoted by Fertiberia. Riding a wave of green industrialization supported by cheap renewable energy, northern Sweden shows the way to break the vicious circle of depopulation.
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