Writing Wednesday: The Suburb

I keep chipping away at my book project. The following section is pretty unsatisfying, but I re-read some work on the New Topographics and think that I have a more potent final paragraph in the works. 

This is the final section of the third part of my little book project on oil, photography, and the Bakken (you can check out the outline for my book here). The previous section considered the mobility that is both a characteristic of oil and made possible through it. This section considers the role that oil plays in new concepts of permanence, fixity, and stability. In moving from mobility to fixity this section sets the stage for the final section on photography, fragmentation, and archaeology.

It’s been slow going this semester because I have too much on my plate, but as a colleague told me on a recent run “forward is a pace” and I’ll keep going forward.  

3.3. Fixity in the Age of Mobility: The Suburb

In the “Westward Moving House” James Bickerstaff Jackson noted 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. While Brink Jackson’s famous essay focused on the farm houses of three successive generations, he nevertheless showed that the American dream 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. 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. 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. 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 contrast to the imaginary permanence of the farmhouse or the suburb, 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. 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, and efforts to personalize campsites inscribes the ungoverned space with gestures mimetic of private property, cultivation, and individual identity. 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. The mobile homes that populate colonia type settlements on the US side of the Mexican border use similar strategies to anticipate the arrival of amenities associated with permanent housing —particularly water and sewage — in a deliberately optimistic 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 subtle features of suburban life. In our work force housing sites, the owners decision to make gardens, set up dog runs, plant trees, and create outdoor space for dining and socializing deliberate evokes 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. Similarly 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, no matter how subtle in the landscape, form persistent conduits that shape the movement of people across “petroleumscapes.” 

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. The next section will shift our attention to the development of photography as another method to challenge the sometimes frenetic mobility of the modern world.