Paper Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Acclimatizing Extractivism: Mobile Buildings and Rotational Urbanism in Western Siberia, 1970s-80s

Thu, November 21, 2:00 to 3:45pm EST (2:00 to 3:45pm EST), Boston Marriott Copley Place, Floor: 4th Floor, Grand Ballroom Salon D

Abstract

In 1977, a rotational settlement from fourteen barrel-shaped wagons was erected near the Noyabrsk railway station amid the Western Siberian taiga. These mobile living units, praised by contemporaries for their ‘thermal effectiveness’ in the ‘extreme’ cold climate, facilitated the access of fly-in-fly-out workers and geologists to the oil fields of the West Siberian petroleum basin – the world’s largest physical oil deposits ‘discovered’ in 1960. Throughout the 1970s-80s, dozens of such temporary rotational settlements were erected to ensure a steady supply of workers and facilitate inflated extractive targets, making the Soviet Union one of the major global suppliers of hydrocarbons. The Soviet architectural establishment had imagined rotational urbanism and mobile architecture as a method for ‘taming’ the climatic features of the region, such as the gushing winds, permafrost, swampy soils and low temperatures. To this end, they had utilised meteorological and geological knowledge, analyses of contemporaneous American, Canadian, Finnish and Norwegian Arctic architecture, and observations of the material culture of the region’s indigenous ethnic minorities – Khanti, Mansi, Nenets and others. This paper critically reconstructs the epistemic hierarchies and materialisations of Soviet mobile architecture and rotational urbanism in Western Siberia during the years of the oil and gas extraction boom and across three scales – territory, housing, and construction technologies – as a politics of ‘acclimatisation’. It will do so by drawing from the archives of the LenZNIIEP and SibZNIIEP, the State Research and Design Institutes responsible for testing and providing spatial solutions for Western Siberia’s North.

Author