Writing Wednesday: Fixity in the Age of Mobility

As readers of this blog know, I’m toiling on the final revisions of a small book project. I’ve outlined the book here. And posted the first and second parts of the third chapter here and here.

Below is the final part of the third chapter which begins to inch us forward from meditations of petromodernity and post-war mobility to the distinctive role of photography in this discourse. 

I’ve nearly completed revisions on the final chapter and will meet with a prospective publisher at the ASOR Annual Meeting on Friday. I’ve also found a reader for the manuscript who I hope can offer me some feedback prior to the final submission. I’m excited about this project because it is so deeply embedded in practice whether through its fragmented form of composition or through my growing interest in photography. Whether my excitement materializes into an interesting (much less useful) book is yet to be seen.

3.3. Fixity in the Age of Mobility: The Suburb

In his classic essay on the changing character of American domesticity, James Bickerstaff Jackson noted in his “Westward Moving House” the tension between the increasingly fluid and flexible homes of mid-century America and the tendency of homeowners to idealize turn-of-the-20th-century prototypes (Jackson 1953). While Brink Jackson’s famous essay focused on the farm houses of three successive generations, he nevertheless showed that the American housing remained suffused with nostalgia even as it embraces new forms. Such nostalgia for a idyllic permanence manifest itself in the use of brick facades, for example, on wood framed homes, the mid-20th century adoption of the colonial style, and the naming of streets after trees associated with old growth forests: oak, maple, walnut, poplar. Developers bestowed subdivisions with names that reference the English countryside. I grew up in an East Coast suburb adjacent to a mid-century subdivision nobly called Westwood Manor and on the rural sounding Wheatfield Drive (Chase et al. 1992). These names complement the manicured lawns and curving roads to simulate the natural landscape in more literal ways. In other cases, the arrangement of these homes around churches, schools, parks, and sometimes simulated main streets deliberately evoked the idealized images of earlier colonial period communities (Jackson 1985 for the classic study). Thus the suburb blended allusions to timeless character of the countryside and rural life with an architecture suffused with a nostalgic view of the permanence.

The sense of permanence associated with turn of the century homes and their colonial predecessors — however illusory — exerted a formative influence over the post-World War II suburb even as suburban residents became ever more mobile. Residents of various subdivisions increasingly saw their homes as more temporary accommodations appropriate for various stages of their life (Whyte 1956). On a daily basis, suburban nodes around post-war cities fueled commuter culture and the corresponding shifts to the landscape. As a Sefryn Penrose documented in the U.K. and Delores Hayden did for the US (2006), automobility produced suburban sprawl which required networks of roads, highways, petroleum stations, and parking lots that transformed both suburban and urban landscapes. This same network of highways enabled the growth of suburbs and mobility which offered urban and suburban residents pathways outward from sprawl for recreation and work. The paradox then arose between the mobility of offered by roads and imagined fixity offered by suburban life.

In the post-World War II decades that saw the emergence of the imaginary permanence of the the suburb (or Jackson’s “westward moving house”), the trailer court emerged as a practical response to both post-war housing needs and increasing mobility of the American population (Wallis 1991). Bickerstaff Jackson turned his attention to trailer courts of the four-corners region which served to house labor for the coal mines in the area as emblematic of this increasingly mobile society. These may appear to the dimetric opposite of the fixity that this section is seeking to explore especially as Jackson saw these trailers as exemplifying “an anti-urban, antiformal utopia” suitable for new forms of provisional settlement. The residents of these trailer courts “are wanderers in a landscape always inhabited by wanderers. They never settled down. The way they came out of nowhere, stayed and, then moved on without putting down roots, without leaving more than a few halfhidden traces behind, makes them forever part of this lonely and beautiful country.” The tension between the traces left by the residents who are simultaneously “forever part of this lonely and beautiful country” and their ability to ”move on” emphasized the two axes of fixity and mobility in the 20th century (for a fascinating study of this paradox see Krakhmalnikov 2017). The aerodynamic shape of the mobile home, the network of highways and roads, and the car carve deep traces into the landscape of the American west. These deep traces, much like the brick facades of wood framed suburban homes gesture towards permanence even as they make possible the ephemeral transit of residents in these landscapes.

Jackson’s seemingly paradoxical descriptions of the trailer courts in the four corners region might apply to our vision of workforce housing sites throughout the Bakken. Jackson’s eloquent description in certain ways anticipated the spaces described by Charles Hailey in his 2009 book Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space and Slab City (2018). For Hailey the ad hoc nature of camps strains their capacity for order. Sites like the abandoned Marine base at Slab City (Haily and Wylie 2018) or those associated with the seasonal arrival of retirees in RV at Quartzsite, Arizona exemplify the self-organizing nature of campsites which seemingly develop spontaneously in uncovered areas (Bruder 2017). Despite mobile nature of the RVs and denizens who inhabit these sites, they also demonstrate certain affinities toward the performative permanence of the suburban subdivision. Fences, gardens, artwork, amenities, and efforts to personalize campsites inscribes the ungoverned space with gestures mimetic of private property, suburban life, and individual identity. In the first quarter of the 21st-century, it would appear that even the “wanderer” looks to suburban placemaking strategies, themselves a parody of 19th-century or even colonial homesteads, to endow their surroundings with a sense of place. This is not unique to the Bakken. Leontina Hormel’s study of a trail park outside Moscow, Idaho argued that the residents relied on one another and created form of “commons” grounded in a form of mutualism that emerges from shared circumstances, familiarity, and trust (Hormel 2023). Despite the tendency to see trailer courts as places of temporary residence, many trailer parks house residents consider them their longterm homes. The mobile homes that populate colonia type settlements on the US side of the Mexican border feature similar sense of community. In these subdivisions, developers make lots available for trailers with the promise of future development of infrastructure associated with permanent housing —particularly water and sewage — in a deliberately optimistic and sometime deceptive view of their economic future (Ward 1999). These settlements aspire to the kind of permanence of a traditional American suburb with amenities and plan to build typical suburban homes to replace their mobile ones. Colonia residents also adapt their mobile homes to accommodate their changing family and social situations. In these contexts, the mobile home or the RV gives up some of its mobility in the name of an aspirational stability.

The suburb, the colonia settlement, and the mobile homes in the American West embody the tension between mobility and fixity at the center of petromodernity. Oil has not only provided but also required a society of unprecedented mobility. Automobility allowed for the growth of suburbs which, in turn, modeled themselves after rural and rustic fantasies to evoke a sense of permanence and persistence. The sense of persistence and fixity followed the movement of workers, tourists, and travelers west. Work force housing sites — like those on the Bakken — camp grounds, squatter settlements, and even the aspirational settlements like colonias, take on or anticipate features of suburban life. In the work force housing sites in the Bakken we witnessed owners decision to make gardens, set up dog runs, plant trees, and create outdoor space for dining and socializing, These features deliberate evoke the memory of suburban landscapes that may have been lost during the subprime mortgage crisis. At the same time it offers an aspirational gesture toward a future permanence where gardens and trees become permanent fixtures in ones domestic space.

The tension between mobility and ephemerality, on the one had, and fixity and permanence, on the other continues across the entire Bakken landscape. Roads, pipelines, and even deep boreholes through the earth’s crust further inscribe the landscape with permanent (or at least long enduring) marks necessary to facilitate the extraction of oil. These landmarks, despite being associated with the ephemerality of a “boom” likewise leave “halfhidden traces behind” making ”them forever part of this lonely and beautiful country.” The viscous oil that flows through buried pipelines, the traffic on the roads and rails, and the industrial installations necessary to store and process oil and gas create anchors that resist the precarity of a landscape defined by motion and create persistent conduits that shape the movement of people and oil across “petroleumscapes.” This creates a kind of intriguing paradox where the permanent traces of supermodernity finds an awkward parallel with the aspirational permanence of the mobile workforce. The viscosity of oil and the investment in its extraction require a workforce who both invests in permanence, but values mobility.

The tension between movement and fixity is important to this project both because it contributes to how people arranged their lives in workforce housing camps in the Bakken, but also because it informed the use of photography to affix fragments of experiences and memories to celluloid and paper. Around the same time that Brink Jackson traced the westward movement of homes and the trailer courts inhabited by mid-century wanderers, a group of photographers dubbed the “New Topographics” after a 1975 exhibition introduced a style of photography that emphasized the massive scale of human interventions in the western landscape (Jenkins 1975). They often juxtaposed roads, parking lots, suburbs, and industrial sites with dramatic natural backdrops placing their work in conversation with the more idealized landscapes of Ansel Adams and photographers operating in the pre-war landscape traditions. Mark Truscello (and others) have traced the influence of the New Topographics on contemporary photographers interested in landscapes shaped by extractive industries and fossil fuels. Truscello argues that Edward Burtysky’s photographs of pipelines and other petroleum infrastructure in his book Oil deliberately contrasts the movement inherent in oil (and made possible by its use) and the static nature of the photograph. Truscello draws upon James C. Scott (1999) to contend that the static nature of the photograph paralleled the cadastral map which delineates property ownership at a given moment in time. For Scott, the cadastral map froze the complex workings of capital making it susceptible to state authority. For Truscello, Burtysky’s photographs captured and isolated “the arborescent thought that captures flows in a constant struggle with rhizomatic, open multiplicities” (Truscello 2012, 193). For our purposes, it is valuable to see how photography both “captures” and stabilizes the flows present in petromobility, while also requiring us to acknowledge the potential of these photographs as pregnant with “open multiplicities” of excess meaning. We will continue this line of thinking in the next and final chapter.