Making land extractable: assembling an iron ore mine through spatial planning

Spatial planning is commonly conceptualised as a regulatory mechanism for managing competing land uses; however, this perspective tends to obscure how planning actively shapes land use. Responding to calls for relational approaches to land, this article examines how spatial planning enacts mineral extraction through embedded socio-material relations. Drawing on assemblage thinking and a qualitative case study of the Pajala iron ore mine in northern Sweden, the analysis traces three interrelated planning practices: ‘filling and emptying' land, mobilising history and shaping interest and accelerating extraction, which configure land as a site of extraction. The article reveals that planning does not merely manage land but mobilises technical artefacts, historical narratives and urgency claims to enact mineral extraction as a matter of ‘public interest,' while constraining deliberative spaces and depoliticising value conflicts. The article advances a relational and practice-oriented perspective on spatial planning, which challenges essentialist notions of land and highlights planning’s role in reproducing extractive logics under the guise of sustainability. These insights underscore the need for planning scholarship to critically engage with the paradox of the green transition: achieving decarbonisation through intensified mineral extraction while ensuring that spatial planning contributes to more equitable and sustainable trajectories rather than reinforcing extractive imperatives.