I can understand a timescale measured in years is less stressful than one measured in months, but it sounds almost as if they're going to the opposite extreme and inducing stress by leaving people for decades in a condemned and depopulating environment.
A move that's first announced in 2004, doesn't actually start until 2018 and should be almost completed in 2050, according to the article, sounds painfully slow.
That sounds like the opposite of the plan in the article:
When trying to imagine how Kiruna’s move will work, it helps to think of a glacier edging slowly down a valley. The ground covered in a century will be remarkable, but the place won’t change that radically from day to day. The relocation and redevelopment will be a gradual process occurring over several generations. A central tenet of the plan is that all development will be contagious; the new will be built on the edge of the old to prevent the appearance of a break in the city’s whole.
“One key strategy is leaving no one behind,” Lindstedt says. “The city needs to connect all current residents during the whole relocation process, rather than creating a new satellite. New parts of the city are placed far enough away from the iron ore extraction to reassure residents long-term, but it has to be close enough to the existing parts to keep the community together.”
>> by leaving people for decades in a condemned and depopulating environment
This isn't really happening--people have choices of where to live, and they can move if they want to. It isn't as easy as say living in Stockholm to relocate, but it's not like they're stuck. And the it's not depopulating, either, they're just moving a coupla kilometers down the road.
>> painfully slow
Ha! I sometimes feel that way too, but it doesn't really need to move faster because of the location of the iron ore under the city, and I think it makes sense to move slowly in this sort of situation. It would be a good reaction to a slow rise in sea level, too. If you give people early warning, and a long time-horizon, property values will slowly go down by the coast, and people will slowly move.
A move that's first announced in 2004, doesn't actually start until 2018 and should be almost completed in 2050, according to the article, sounds painfully slow.