IN Brief:
- Skanska has secured a contract worth approximately SEK1bn from Boulevardfastigheter.
- The campus will provide around 25,000 sq m of education and research accommodation.
- Ten thousand square metres of concrete floor slabs will be resold for reuse.
Skanska has secured a contract worth approximately SEK1bn to construct a new city-centre campus for Kristianstad University in southern Sweden.
Boulevardfastigheter AB commissioned the contractor to deliver approximately 25,000 sq m of education and research accommodation, together with supporting technical areas. Construction is scheduled to begin in early August 2026 and complete in June 2029.
The campus will serve an institution with around 13,000 students and 550 members of staff. Its central location is intended to increase activity around the adjoining commercial district while placing teaching, research, employment, and public transport within a more connected urban setting.
Flexibility sits at the centre of the building brief because teaching methods, research requirements, digital systems, and patterns of space use change more quickly than the structural life of university buildings. Adaptable floorplates, accessible services, and internal layouts capable of later alteration will therefore influence both design and construction.
Preparatory work has included dismantling unused sections of the neighbouring Galleria Boulevard shopping centre. Components recovered from the existing property include taps, doors, glass partitions, façade panels, and building-services materials.
The largest reuse package covers approximately 10,000 sq m of concrete floor slabs, which are being resold for incorporation into other construction projects. Skanska describes the operation as one of Sweden’s largest concrete-component reuse initiatives.
Kristianstad Municipality, the university, Skanska, and Boulevardfastigheter have also entered a local climate agreement linked to the campus. That arrangement places material recovery alongside wider environmental and urban-development objectives rather than treating demolition waste as a separate end-of-project concern.
The programme reflects a broader change within concrete construction. A UK circular-construction plan for concrete has similarly placed greater emphasis on retaining structures, recovering components, improving material records, and moving demolition outputs towards higher-value applications.
Reusing complete floor elements is considerably more demanding than crushing concrete for aggregate. The project team must establish the slab dimensions, reinforcement, strength, condition, loading history, exposure, connection details, and suitability for removal without damaging the component.
A receiving project then needs to be identified early enough for the recovered slabs to influence its design. Storage, transport, lifting points, temporary support, certification, insurance, and installation tolerances become part of a supply chain that conventional new products have spent decades standardising.
Commercial arrangements are equally important. Careful dismantling may cost more than rapid demolition, while the recovered component only retains value when it has a confirmed destination.
Where the donor and receiving programmes do not align, storage can erode both the financial and carbon benefit. Damage during lifting, transport, or stacking can also reduce the number of components ultimately suitable for reuse.
The Kristianstad programme demonstrates how recovery can be enabled when the client, contractor, municipality, and receiving market are involved before removal begins. Materials are being treated as assets with a future route rather than waste awaiting classification after demolition.
The new campus must nevertheless maintain programme certainty while those recovery activities proceed. Existing structures can contain undocumented modifications, damaged elements, redundant services, hazardous materials, or connections that behave differently during dismantling from the original design assumptions.
Construction of the replacement facility will then move into a technically varied building programme. Universities require robust structure, acoustic control, flexible services, specialist rooms, digital connectivity, ventilation, accessibility, security, and spaces capable of handling large changes in occupancy throughout the day.
Long-term adaptability can conflict with immediate cost control. Larger service zones, demountable partitions, structural reserve, accessible distribution routes, and standardised grids may require greater investment during construction but reduce future disruption and material waste.
The city-centre setting will place further constraints on deliveries, lifting, pedestrian management, noise, dust, and working hours. Coordination with the remaining shopping-centre operation and surrounding streets will be required throughout the three-year construction period.
As work progresses, the success of the reuse programme will depend on the quantity of recovered components that reach new projects rather than the volume initially identified for salvage. Traceability, testing, careful handling, and early design integration will determine how much of the 10,000 sq m remains in productive use.
Skanska will include the contract in its Swedish order bookings for the third quarter of 2026. The campus now moves from dismantling and recovery planning into main construction, with its material strategy already under way before the new structure begins to rise.
