Runa Johannessen

In my recent paper "Colonial Grid: Energy and the Operationalization of Sami Landscapes," I trace the logic of operationalization across two cases by addressing energy production: the early twentieth-century hydropower exploitation of the Lule River in Norrbotten, and the ongoing electrification of the Hammerfest LNG facility at Melkøya in Finnmark. Read together diachronically, these cases show how energy infrastructure has long imposed a "colonial grid" on Sápmi – at once a material grid of dams, transmission lines, and wind turbines, and a metaphorical grid of resource legibility that renders land calculable for extraction while obscuring Sami land use, governance, and cosmology.

With Kirsten Marie Raahauge, I have developed the related concept of the electroscape in the article "Electroscapes: Socio-Spatial Perspectives on Energy Transition". In this article, we examine how renewable energy landscapes become sites where a global "politics of need" collides with a local "politics of value", using the Melkøya case alongside a parallel case of contested giga-windmill development in the Danish marshlands.

I currently hold a guest professorship at Luleå University of Technology and lead the FORMAS-funded research project Sami Spatial Agency, undertaken in collaboration with Verdde, a nomadic Sami art institution.

Sami Spatial Agency: Advancing Sami Spatial Planning through Participatory Design is a research project following Oadjut – Verdde's initiative working towards the first public building in Giron/Kiruna designed on Sami terms. Sami culture has long been defined by a careful relationship with land, leaving few permanent traces, prioritizing future generations over accumulated built heritage. This has made Sami presence easy to overlook in urban landscapes, particularly as Giron undergoes rapid transformation driven by mining and urban expansion that threatens to further displace Sami communities and erase Sami cultural markers.

Oadjut responds to this by asking how public architecture can be built from a Sami perspective — drawing on building traditions, material cycles, and Sami design principles developed together with Sami architect Eveliina Sarapää, cultural bearers, and local communities. Sami Spatial Agency works alongside this process, examining what contemporary Sami architecture is and can be, situated within a growing discourse on Sami spatial and cultural revitalization. The research aims to contribute to strengthen Sami visibility and inclusion in urban development in Sápmi.

The collaboration brings together Verdde, which leads the Oadjut process, and architecture researchers at Luleå University of Technology. The research is conducted by myself (PI), Meryem Saadi and Agatino Rizzo at LTU, together with Maria Svonni and Ellen B. Dalbakk from Verdde.

The project is funded by Formas – A Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development