Sprawling Landscapes

I spent some quality time this past week with D. Hayden’s A Field Guide to Sprawl (New York 2004). This is a fantastic book. It provides some (mildly tongue and cheek) definitions for the various types of sprawl visible in the American landscape. The great thing about this book is that it provides an archaeological typology to sprawl in action. Most of what we see in the Bakken would fall under her categories of “Manufactured housing” (70-71) or “Truck City” (112-113). Hayden astutely notes that built homes are to mobile homes as mobile homes are to R.V.s. Over 10% of the new housing (and more in the West) are not mobile homes. Truck City, of course, derives its name from John Bickerhoff Jackson’s famous essay of the same name that explores role trucks and truckers played in the expansion and decentralization of American business (and ultimately American consumer culture and life). For the Bakken Oil Patch, trucks have played a key role in integrating the periphery with the core by bringing equipment to the Patch and moving raw material out of the Patch.

Hayden’s work provides us with more than just a technical vocabulary, and provides us with an approach to one of the more curious challenge of documenting the workforce housing in the Bakken. Unlike most (although by no means all) habitation sites studied by archaeologists interested in the “contemporary past”, The Bakken is not abandoned. Abandoned sites make life easier for archaeologists because the processes associated with abandonment fit so much better into longstanding conversations about archaeological remains throughout time. In fact, most of the sites that archaeologists explore have undergone some kind of abandonment.

Still functioning sites pose new problems. Some of these are ethical and deal with the ways in which we go about documenting lived spaces. But in many cases the issues are practical. While all sites undergo formation processes, sites that continue to be occupied – particularly sites designed for short term habitation – are likely to undergo rapid changes in short periods of time. Our efforts to document a site at a moment provides just a momentary insight into a larger set of quickly moving processes (that might, in fact, move even more quickly in our contemporary age than in past centuries). While Hayden’s book does not provide a solution to the problem of change, she does demonstrate how aerial photographs use as a way to document dynamic landscapes like those characterized by various kind of non-urban sprawl.

For a more punk rock view on sprawl go here.