Shields-Feral Suburbs Fort McMurray Cultural Topologies

7/29/2019 Shields-Feral Suburbs Fort McMurray Cultural Topologies

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Shields 1 DRAFT Not for Citation

Cultural Topologies of Property:

Social Reproduction and Global Oil Circuits in Fort McMurray, Alberta

Rob Shields, Henry Marshall Tory Research Chair and Professor Sociology / Art and Design,

City-Region Studies Centre, University of Alberta Canada. Copyright R. Shields [email protected]

DRAFT: To Cite Contact Author. Copyright Rob Shields 2011

This version preented at Sanghai International Studies Univerisity, 2011. A Shortened and revisedversion is published as:

Feral suburbs: Cultural topologies of social reproduction, Fort McMurray, CanadaInternational Journal of Cultural Studies 15:3 (May) 2012. pp.205-215.DOI: 10.1177/1367877911433743

AbstractThrough case studies drawn from Ft. McMurray (Alberta, Canada) near the Athabasca Tar Sands, builders', residents' andpublic officials' attempts to develop neighbourhoods in the midst of an oil boom and bust economy are considered.

Drawing on interviews with these actors, photographs and participant observation, this theoretical paper considers the

circulation of 'cultural forms' across a 'cultural topology' in the production of new suburbs through crown land release and

development. Within a highly constrained planning context, the adaptation of land development policy and practice as well

as attempts to stabilize a highly dynamic economic environment create 'works-in-progress'; built environments that attempt

to materially render the circuits and forces of a global petro-economy habitable in the name of social reproduction. The

label 'feral' is advanced to highlight how these suburbs transfigure preconceptions of North American suburbia as a cultural

form. Residents of Ft. McMurray perform novel syntheses which impact on the actualization of cultural forms, including

household and community.

Keywords: suburb, cultural form, flow, topology, community, social reproduction, planning, Fort McMurray

There are strange things done in the midnight sunBy the men who moil for gold(Robert Service The Cremation of Sam McGee (1956 [1917])

A more recent rush for 'black gold' in Canada's boreal north has driven the expansion of FortMcMurray, Alberta through a series of boom and bust cycles over the last forty years despite itsisolated location, a four hour drive north of the nearest city, Edmonton (see Figure 1). As in RobertService's poem about the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, strangeness vies with normality ascultural and economic forms of shift-work and suburban life are remade in this setting. They remainrecognizable but are transfigured in the process, 'pushing the envelope' of normal forms, recasting theunderstanding of local and global dwelling, community and labour markets in ways that reverberate

back into everyday life under capitalism elsewhere, touching all of us. While suburban patterns ofsettlement have a certain recognizable sameness of peripherality, often fading over time as newersuburbs push out even further, every instance is also different, being located in particular economies,geographies and histories.

This paper is focused theoretically but derives from four years of ethnographic, photographic,participant observation and interview research. Over 100 semi-structured and longer in-depth


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interviews were conducted in fieldwork in Fort McMurray with youth 13-16, residents, workers,entrepreneurs, municipal and provincial administrators and planners using a snowball sample andethnographic approach. This fieldwork was supplemented by a statistical analysis of migration,political economic data, a photographic study with local youth and 'Unwrap the Research' acommunity-academic research symposium and dialogue. The research was conducted by a team ofresearchers from the University of Alberta funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada, the municipality, university, Keyano College and local businesses

i

This paperavoids the usual statistical apparatus. This, and a fuller political economy are available in supportingpapers.ii Rather than merely heuristic, this paper pursues a creative strategy of intelligibility rather thandemonstrations of proof, making sense of the current situation and time-space relations in FortMcMurray. In what follows, these relations will be approached as spatializations and temporalizationsknotted together within the manifolds of a 'cultural topology' (see also Shields 2012).

Figure 1. Aerial photo of Fort McMurray area (bottom left and centre) from the South East lookingNorth West, showing nearby open-pit oil sands mines (top right) to the north, downstream along theAthabasca River (running from left to top). Less visible is a grid of cuts through the forests forpipelines to in-situ extraction wells (Source: Rob Shields).

Black Gold


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Fort McMurray (pop. 85,000 plus or minus 15,000)iii is a regional administrative centre. The definitionof the place as a city is equivocal as it dis-incorporated to join the surrounding resource rich WoodBuffalo Regional Municipality in the mid-1980s, taking the term urban service area. It is located justsouth of the controversial Athabasca Tar Sands (or Oil Sands depending on one's politics). These arethe largest global deposits of bitumen an oil resource that contemporary 'in-situ' extractiontechnology, rather than surface strip-mining, places second only to Saudi Arabiaiv. By mid 2011,

Chinese investment was over US$ 11.2 billion in anticipation of a pipeline to be built to the Pacificcoast. The cost of each of 2 stages of the controversial Keystone pipelines from the Oil Sands toUnited States refineries is about US$12 billion. This gives a sense of the value of theses assets and theeconomic size of the local and far-flung petrochemical economy that has grown up around the OilSands and the relatively small workforce of under 80,000 based in and around Fort McMurray withanother 80,000 US jobs said to be directly dependent on the Oil Sands. Although still less that 5% of2010 GDP, oil is transforming the Canadian economy (2010 GDP US$1.57 trillion according to theWorld Bank) and balance of power while sucking in tens of thousands of construction, mining and oilworkers from around the world to Fort McMurray. The petrochemical economy entails global circuitsof expertise: Nigerians, Venezuelans, Chilean refinery technicians, Phillipinos, Chinese, Brits andAmericans work alongside the largest exclave of Newfoundlanders, not to mention Quebecois andothers from across Canada. Our respondents, such as municipal planners, provincial policy-makers andprivate sector developers (see note 1), have struggled to accommodate expansionof a population whichhas fluctuated dramatically, expanding rapidly over about 5 years, then contracting during 2009, andreturning to expansion at maximum velocity by late 2010. A municipal official told us 'we know weare going to grow. Weve targeted 250,000 people by 2030.

Non-resident workers often commute for several weeks 'on', sometimes non-stop company Airbusflights to private oil sands airports, from across the continent and either rent rooms (often so-called'basement suites' in private homes) in town or live in large hotel-like workcamps built from'construction trailer'-like modules. These workers form a mostly male 'shadow population' (see Hann2010) that inflects the civic culture with a boomtown, gold rush flavour. Residents of Fort McMurrayhave aspired to develop community by expanding suburbia as a family-oriented community form. Thetension is suggested by the following quotation from a resident:

If these people brought their families in, all of a sudden youre in more of a family orientatedcommunity again like it was when I first moved up. And you see that where people are renting

out rooms and basements and that kind of thing because of accommodation issues that we had. Ithink that part of that loneliness, that distance apart, gives you some dysfunctional families as

well which doesnt make a lot of sense. We had that discussion with my son-in-law and mydaughter as well because they wanted to move he said I can sell my house for so much, move

somewhere else for less money and just commute. I said, how long are you going to do that for?Youre going to be gone, your shift is six on, six off you knowyoure three days, three nights,

six off you know first of all you need a place to stay up here. Ill live in camp. Okay, so you livein camp. I said, youre driving up all the time or taking the bus. Now youre on the highway

constantly and my daughters down there, in a house, by herself(Long term resident).

People are highly mobile, travelling hundreds of kilometres to Edmonton to shop or if wages permit, tofly out for weekends in Las Vegas (Dorow & Dogu, 2011). The households of single-family homes areextended with migrant workers as lodgers, whose rent helps equalize class differences in accessing thevery expensive housing. Almost no one escapes the temporariness of the Tar Sands as a place to work,


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but not an ideal place to grow old in. However, while over 20,000 live in work camps even in sloweconomic periods (2008-10),v others have settled despite the boom and bust economy. When askedwhat they would like to see happen for the place, one of our respondents puts it this way:

Figure 2: Land Release Options Map for Fort McMurray including Parsons Creek (upper left) andSaline Creek areas (lower right) (Source: Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo Council Report).


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'Better housing opportunities. Im going to be depressed here myself. Ill probably have to rentfor a few years'(Newly-arrived public servant)

'Your $1400 a month [salary] isnt doing it for you there?'

'It gets me a room in a trailer. A 6x6 room. Ill be lucky if I get a window...'(Worker)

Many rent basement suites and rooms in the new suburbs laid out on freshly cleared land, bulldozedinto the pine and spruce forests and muskeg bogs of the flat, boreal plain above the downtown reviervalley of Fort McMurray, which is situated at the confluence of the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers(see Figure 1). Set up above the river valley, suburbia in Fort McMurray is independent of the pre-existing downtown.

At the time of writing, Parson's Creek and Saline Creek areas housing developments have beenreleased (see Map, Figure 2). The Province is acting as developer, investing more than $166 and $75million, respectively, to drain these areas and prepare basic access routes and utility trunk lines. By2012, Phase 1 of Parson's Creek will cover over 450 acres and will house 24,600 people in 2000 newhomes and 6000 apartment units, of which 20% will be rented out by the Wood Buffalo HousingAuthority below market rates.vi

'A Fort McMurray of the Mind'

Unlike most single-industry resource towns (for which there is a significant sociological literature notsurveyed here), Fort McMurray sits astride a 100-year petroleum resource, and this time-frame hasbelatedly forced governments to focus on the social issues raised by such fluctuating migrations.Workers circulate between distant hometowns, importing regional and foreign cultures into a local mixof diasporas which seem to have arrived in the 4 years since the last Canadian Census (2006) whenover 60% of respondents had lived locally for 3 years or longer . Because most are temporary residentsor even just passing through en route to a nearby oil sands mine camp, diasporic communities form asmixtures of class, religious, ethnic and gender positions (Filipina nannys and their groups and churches;East coast skilled tradesmen and their bars and clubs). Instead, cultures are 'sampled' and remixed withthe local vernaculars, such as trucks sporting safety flags on tall antenna-like 'buggy whips', or jacketsand overalls with reflective tape. Both are part of work site safety requirements in strip miningenvironments that must operate in winter darkness when sunlit hours are limited to 6 or 7 hours perday. These clothes have become a habit, an unselfconscious but streetwise marker of belonging on thisfrontier. Pants or overalls in particular, piped with reflective tape constitute authenticity, belonging andinvestment in the labour of the resource extraction economy as a source of pride and householdaccumulation, binding lifecycles and life chances to the extraction economy.


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Figure 3: Constructing suburbs (Source: Where is Fort McMurray? Youth Photo Project, A. Lozowy(University of Alberta) More information: Where is Fort McMurray group on facebook.com andflickr.com Copyright 2009).

Indeed there are residents who can count themselves as amongst the first employees of the enormouscorporations that pioneered the development of the oil sands 'I was Syncrude employee number six'cracks an elderly man and a respectful hush falls over the coffee shop. This is a claim to more than

history: it situates this person as one of the founders of a community 'ur-labour' a veteran to whomone owes a generational debt, a prime mover of the subsequent and future flows and wealth, locally,nationally and throughout the global petro-economy. Fort McMurray's suburbs are part of a switchingpoint where financial capital is exchanged for labour that is housed, harnessed and reproduced. It is asstrategic as any board room or trading floor; one might read the presence of Canada's largest and mostactive military base near Cold Lake on the south eastern sections of the oil sands as an indicator of itsgeopolitical destiny.

In the context of suburban living, despite the typical inadequacies of explicit markers and institutions ofcommunity, there is nonetheless a coordinated labour of place making, constant upkeep, exchange offavours, and the constitution of a sense of home that is not only a household matter, but takes place in

a social context is troubled 'from below' in Fort McMurray. The basement suites rented-out to migrantlabourers complicate the stereotype of the single-family dwelling. This accentuates the observed urbanproblem that private property militates against consideration of long-term implications and effects onneighbours unless countered by planning restrictions or encouraged by notions of 'neighbrouhoodproperty value' (cf. Oestereich, 2000; see below re. land release) that in turn make development ofpublic areas complex and often beyond the reach of local residents (cf. Heller, 1998). Nonetheless,there is a broaderoikos of suburban dwelling that is continually referenced and almost conjured fromthe hypostatized objects of property. The domestic is 'virtually' part of this symbolic circulation ofencounters and avoidances, gestures, glances and small talk. According to one respondent, the size ofFort McMurray seems to foster rapid integration and community events: We asked, 'You mentionedSanta Claus parades. Are there other kinds of public events or public places...?'

Its ongoing. At any given point and time. Like I heard on the radio this morning and I must

admit I didnt hear about it before but theres some sort of family skateYou heard about it? ...Theres always that kind of stuff going on. And theres some

pretty big take up on it... there was just blocked you couldntit was hard to find a place tostand, let alone sit(Resident)


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Cultural Topology

Building on and going beyond Lee and LiPuma, forms such as 'the suburb', or 'the domestic' or 'home'within suburbs, are 'fetishized figurations' of the underlying performativity of particular types of landedand financial capital and community (2002). Although familiar narrativesvii about suburbia describehouses, roadways and so on, any suburb is less manifest in representative but static objects and housingtypes than as space-time structures or actualized topologies of circulations (Shields, 2012).viii The

literature on the circulation of cultural forms (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003) such as suburbia(s),modernities and lifestyles has little to say about the space that is the stage or manifold in which formscirculate, the case of suburbia will be argued to illustrate how space and time themselves circulate, arelocalized into spatializations and temporalizations of otherwise purely abstract, academic conceptionsthat theoretically reify systems and structures such as the economic and environmental, production andconsumption. These circuits 'arrive' in this scene or site as parts of a temporal and spatial 'topology'.Topology designates a nexus of contrasting but converged spatializations or one that is warped andfolded to establish new proximities between geographically distant points. It also implies distincttemporalities, such as the contrast between the face-paced development locals refer to 'Fort McMurraytime', the lagging pace of regulatory due-process, or the routine of everyday family life. One mightimagine topology as a knotting that articulates a rescaling or even 'trans-scaling' not only of spaces ofgovernance and economic action (cf. Brenner, 2003; Rouhani, 2003; Warner & Gerbasi, 2004;Gualini,2006), but also of social reproduction (Gregson & Lowe, 1995; Marston, 2000; Marston, Jones, &Woodward, 2005).

'Suburbia' is not a homogeneous form, but a manner of characterizing certain social and builtenvironments topologically. That is, it turns on assumptions and stereotypes that are as much about themateriality of the place as they are about the virtual, ineffable aspects of the place as a social world.ixOne the one hand this topological approach may seem like merely a comment on the tendency tostereotype the form and content of suburban life. However, the point is that the scholarship thatdiscerns 'suburbia' within the suburban or peri-urban is already engaged in a cultural topology. Thishas been one piecemeal on a case by case basis without reflecting on the fact that suburbia is morethan a discussion of a Weberian ideal type abstracted from cases and identified by key characteristics(anoter example would be 'bureaucracy', realized in a given organization see Weber 1946).

Cultural topologies are spatially characterized frames of reference that include not only land andconstruction, but a set of public spheres, collective engagements and mythic imaginaries that unfoldtheir own temporalities and spatialities at a socially meaningful level of action whether this beschooling, auto-mobility or fund-raising for disaster relief in Haiti. They are time-space structures orcultural landscapes of circulation and flow. Most significantly, topologies may be complex, multi-dimensional time-space manifolds that can only be understood virtually. That is, they can't beabstracted into a literal representation; instead they must be understood through representations that are'as if' they were the topology, virtually the topology much like Escher's warped spaces arerepresented through scenes that appear concrete environments at first glance but are quickly understoodto be improbably, warped spaces and worlds. They allow us to conceive of extra dimensions weighingon the course of events that are inadequately modelled in three spatial and one temporal dimension. Ineffect, by breaking the representational limits of the Cartesian and Euclidean universe, the differentialgeometries and time-spaces of topology allow cultural studies the opportunity to conceive and analysethe intersection of distinct but compossible spatializations in a single event and place such as FortMcMurray (see Shields 2012).


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To suggest that the literature on suburbia is topologizing is to point to suburbia as a theoretical objectof research, something that includes but transcends the materiality of a suburb to construct a parametricspace (a phase space) in which time, consumption, the economic and demographic facts are included asextra dimensions along with the x-y-z of a three dimensional location to create a complex graph. Theresulting n-dimensional shape is a topological manifold that one might compare to Walter Benjamin'sover-dimensioned gaze on the Paris Arcades that saw so much more that sheltered bourgeois

conveniences short-cutting through city blocks; that saw the empire become emporium for popularconsumption as a future economic driver (Benjamin 1955; Shields 1993). Identifying the scholarshipon the suburban often a political economy or cultural study together, albeit as a proto- or pre-systematic cultural topology allows theoretical comparison and methodological development, moreadequate and nimble knowledge strategies.

Cultural topology considers the circuits of cultural forms as they 'touch down' and are actualized in FortMcMurray's expanding suburbs. Rather than juxtaposing a limited local scale (suburban life) againstthe flows of the global petro-economy, this paper envisions these scales as integral to circuits that canbe usefully seen from below in an embedded manner, as well as from an unreflexive 'Archimedian'point of view from above (Jones, Woodward, & Martson, 2007:265). Like a balloon twisted in themiddle to make two bulbous manifolds, the local and the global are more intimately part of onecomplex topology than oppositions such as local versus global and their variations could ever capture.In such a topology, multiple spatializations are knotted or articulated around one site, a singularity, thatbifurcates space and time into potentially multiple, simultaneous 'bubbles'. These spatializations andtemporalizations nonetheless communicate, like pulmonary chambers. As in the experience of arrivingin a foreign country and sensing that life is more fast-paced or that one needs to slow down to fit inwith the local pace, such a lived encounter of contrasting tempos resembles the Fort McMurrayexperience of having distinct but communicating space-times, allowing both equilibrium and dynamicexchange that set up circuits that must be described temporally and in their mobility. In any one oftime-space, explanation can only be a partial truth. Although many of these spaces and temporalitiesmay be ignored as inconsequential to the time frames of political and economic cycles, they arenonetheless never epiphenomenal. Understood as time-space circuits, these are not only circulationsof actual goods and bodies including workers and their families flying in and out or massive pieces ofequipment towed up Alberta's Highway 63 to the mine sites. They also include more idealrepresentations and intangible goods that must be actualized in place or evoked in absentia throughstylistic and cultural references. These include both the sensation of living in two places at once,locally and in one's place of origin, as well as digital transfers of money and technical information, andeven the stereotyped conception of North American suburbia as always newer, always a fresh startseparate from the urban agglomerations that quite evidently envelope them (see Figures 2, 3 and 4).

Describing Fort McMurray's suburbs in terms of Euclidean three-dimensional space (see Figure 2) orthe perspectival space of the streetscape (see Figure 4) does not do them justice. One is always leftwith a sense of oddness or surreality. In such a site, one needs a way of capturing the global and thelocal, the familiar and the foreign as if in a single glance. Given that its suburbs are extremelyheterogeneous in population and that they offer mixed tenure (rental and owner-occupied), a mixture ofhouseholds (single, shared apartments and houses, couples, families and so on) and housing forms(low-rise apartment buildings, row housing, detached houses), qualities such as neighbourliness and theclashing space-times of different oil migrants, inflect the distances and intimacies of this lived space.Fort McMurray's suburbs as topological sites manifest the intersection of different spatializations insuch qualities as strikingly different attachments to place, investments in neighbourliness, and in the


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'coinage' of community as a rhetoric of political actors and neoliberal corporate policy (Creed 2006).These are explored in companion publications resulting from this team effort at a multi-year globalethnography of Fort McMurray (see Dorow 2011).

Feral suburbanismFort McMurray's suburbs are arguably well-planned housing developments yet inadequate,

unsatisfying, places to live in the sense that lack of services and consumption opportunities iscompounded by a sense of geographical distance and isolation. Hence, I forward the term 'feral'. Thiscan be understood in a number of ways. Suburbia escapes from a taken-for-granted tameness or ceasesto be domesticated. Although they resemble suburbs of many North American cities, the juxtapositionsvisible in Fort McMurray, on the half-built-up streets of Eagle Ridge or Parson's Creek, such as themany trucks of tenants of basement suites or the raw edge of the forest, trouble the conventionalstaging of suburban environments that inform a taken-for-granted 'settlement' of the built environmentand the wider landscape of ecosystem and climatic context.

Feral also suggests 'savage' suburbs. This synonym of feral hints at the ferocity of the forces ofpetroleum resource exploitation that so dwarf other forms of engagement with the region's resources asto push other industries such as forestry aside, not to mention trapping or subsistence activities.x Athird synonym, 'wild', reminds us of the almost impenetrably boggy forest at the end of the street,which exists in striking contrast to the vinyl-clad exteriors of suburban houses and their vehicle- andRV-filled driveways which could be almost anywhere. There are no agricultural fields to expand over:residential suburbia collides with a vast ecological totality that retains its complex otherness despite thesurveyors cuts through the forest. For example, suburban life in Fort McMurray means to bemelancholically governed most of the time by the isolation imposed by the expanse of wilderness, to befatally forced to respect its climatic extremes, to grimly wrest oil wealth from the strata of the area, orto joyfully respond to its beauties.

What then is one to make of Fort McMurray's mode of land and community development that is sopatently North American 'suburban' (see photographshttp://www.flickr.com/groups/whereisfortmcmurray/) yet still Other? It conforms to images and formsof the North American middle class rather than in any local, working class or the village rubric of thesurrounding Mtis, Cree and Dene settlements? Indeed, this is a paradise of the lumpen proletariat,wealthy on overtime and double shifts. Our respondents often referred to distant cities when discussingFort McMurray, such as referring to boxy houses as 'Calgary houses' or using arrows to indicate that'home', 'fun', or 'out' exist off the pages of sketch maps (discussed in Dorow & Dogu, 2011).

Fort McMurray, like any suburb, is not only constituted by what is present, but also by what is absentand what is far away. There is a sense that the city is suburban in that it lacks not only formal urbanstatus since it disincorporated in the mid 1980s, but that it also stands as an ex-urban addition, adisplaced adjunct and outpost of more southerly metropolises. For example, the absent is very stronglyindicated by those lines of escape off the page to fun, relaxation and even home that Dorow'srespondents drew as sketch maps during interviews (see Dorow and Dogu 2011). Understood as aform, suburbia dissolves into only an intensive ordinate of broader forces and flows. Forms may beinstanciated merely by performative quotation. For example, when a neighbourhood is not literally but'as if' a suburb. Rather than fulfilling all the defining elements one would expect, a material context(e.g. houses) is set in relation to a conceptual typology (e.g. suburb) that constitutes a normalizingcontext for certain actions but not others, thereby spatializing a locale as, for example, primarily


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domestic or (perhaps appropriately) lacking the full complement of urban services. Neither simplydomestic nor properly wild but the 'domestic' turned toward an Otherness and elsewhereness.

While acknowledging that many major retail developments are located in suburban or peri-urbanlocations, one of the key qualities of suburbs is the stereotype of limited consumption diversity andoften, opportunity, especially if one includes collective consumption of common goods such as street

life and social centrality of those frequenting public spaces. Responding to team-member's commentsabout the lack of commercial space in one area of Fort McMurray, a respondent says:

'Oh yeah, when they laid out this area, they really underestimated what they shouldthis iswhat you callthis is suburban. And a real suburb is you drive out of it to get your commercial,

whereas what we were pushing is we want a more urban feel to it, which means you should bewithin your five minute walk/hike/drive/bike whatever. You could do your weekly things. And

here you cant even do your daily things. You have to get out of it.'

Some needs and aspirations are displaced elsewhere to places such as Las Vegas (Shields, 2011) wherea pure spectacle of consumption reigns, or to the hometowns of the many temporary migrants wherefamily life carries on in their absence, or where society awaits their reintegration as communitymembers. These relationships manifest themselves in multi-layered flows of messages, hopes, dreamsand mobile bodies in the many flights 'out' and 'south' that are the vectors of escape. In turn, thesecirculations mark Fort McMurray's suburbs like the tire tracks of the heavy duty pickups, atvs and'quads' favoured by the oil workers.

Figure 4: Apartments at Eagle Ridge, Timberlea area, Fort McMurray (Source: Rob Shields).

Land Release: Creating Real Estate from Natural SpaceDespite repeated comments on the benefits of having the forest so close at hand as a natural area, partof the spatialization of Fort McMurray is to rigorously separate the spaces of social reproduction fromspaces of production the forested rural region that is the site of resource extraction. This is achallenge given the cross-sectoral interests including the oil companies, governments and privatedevelopers that are involved in producing the spaces of social reproduction. New housing in FortMcMurray has developed through a slow process of the incremental release of parcels of land to private


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development from the surrounding Crown Land controlled by the Provincial Government (see map,Figure 2). This takes place on the basis of requests from the local government, the RegionalMunicipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB) which also controls the 'urban service area' of Fort McMurraysince its dissolution. The RMWB has tended to operate partly as a surrogate city council, and partly asa regional industrial development authority, with many complaints from the actual residents of the vastrural area surrounding Fort McMurray (Lagendijk, 2007).

Even if it is gridded by surveyor's lines and has been minutely assayed by mobile seismic units lookingfor the characteristic echo of subterranean oil deposits, land release is a process of bringing space likeboreal forest into the property system where it becomes real estate. Before this it is merely 'land', theunterritorialized space of bare nature. It has to be understood as not only a legal and governmentalprocess; the careful pace and unclear bureaucratic process hints that this is a ritual in which the legal ismerely a technical aspect. Divided into lots, the newly constituted property will be interchangeablewith suburban lots in Minnesota or anywhere else in the property system through the medium ofmoney. The process surpasses the creative as it is almost alchemical: the sovereign sets in play a ritualof legislative fiat by which earth itself is transfigured, pulled out of one semiotic system of nature to bereborn as capital in the form of land. Gridded neighbourhoods abuts but are intrinsically different fromthe bare nature that so stridently bifurcates any overall topology we may wish to locate them both in.Many respondents have expressed anxiety about the involvement of multiple levels of government inthis process, which entails cross-jurisdictional collaborations with which few have extensiveexperience. This legal ritual is troubled by the erosion of the pure difference between nature andculture at the representational level. It may contribute to this through rushed distribution andinadequate due-process to recognize this categorical difference. It is also fraught with the materialresistance of, for example, boggy wetlands as unstable, inappropriate building sites. These instabilitiesmake for feral built environments, feral suburbs.

The production of these suburbs is through a mixture of public-private oversight committees,outsourcing to private developers and a syndicalization of risk to large private sector employers, suchas CNRL who wish to encourage skilled workers to remain with the firm. As a form of company town,public-private partnerships in infrastructure and recreational facilities are extended into families'everyday lives not only through awareness of the importance of the oil sands industry, but throughfinancial ties and other bonuses which go beyond remuneration. They are also extended through theformation of family life via the structure of time and the production of suburban housing andneighbourhoods, where diversity is limited by the sheer fact that all residents share in the sameeconomic fate and fortunes of the oil sands.

Despite the rushed urbanization of Fort McMurray, the government prides itself on the parsimoniousamounts of land allocated for development, its diligent review of public interest and the carefulextinguishment of any native claim in the process of land release. However, the process is anythingbut clear and transparent. An earlier organization of the forest through the trap lines of clans andindividual trappers that formed a sovereign traditional land use before industrial scale forestry or oildevelopment is erased in the land release process and only vaguely recalled in the network of woodedtrails through and around the new suburbs. Historical and pre-historical aboriginal peoples understoodspatializations of the land in which they were positioned as an integral element of the forest, or ashamanic stewards of natural cycles. Such a spatialization is part of a body of traditional knowledgethat is almost impossible to recode into the alienated language of property and objects (see Thornton,2010; Taylor, Friedel, & Edge, 2009; Nadasdy, 2002). This web of relations and circuits of harvesting


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and offering is forcibly interrupted by a transnational regime of flows: global-scaled capital,continental oil production-refining and consumption networks.

Land development is a case in point where old models of the company town are reprised in the form ofnew public-private partnerships and co-governance by collaborating levels of government. This ismuch more complex than 'from company town to corporate town' (Dorow & Dogu 2011). Different

jurisdictions and scales of government, as well as private sector partners, are yoked together around theproject of the locality (a very condensed form of new regionalism (Paasi, 2009)).xi

Much of thefrustration of local builders is in the meddling of the Province or the arrival of national scaleddevelopment firms as the first movers of development in the form of development zones and plans.Main developers service large tracts of land, sometimes on behalf of the Municipality (RWMB),installing sewers, electrical service, main roadways and new interchanges with arterial roads. In recentcases, the provincial government has become more involved as not only a facilitator, but also adeveloper by taking the role of guarantor and partner to land developers who ready the area fordevelopment. In turn, subdivisions are zoned, planned and roads and services established. Furtherdown the development feeding chain, builders buy specific tracts to construct homes, apartments andretail strip malls. The resulting landscape in completed developments such as 'Eagle Ridge' or in newland parcels such as 'Parson's Creek' is not only suburban but a branded space with particular designmannerisms (e.g. fake tudor posts and beams, plasterboard simulations of more massive elements ofhistorical styles), colour schemes and so on, which become a shorthand for the normative zoning ofparticular types of occupancy and thus of family units.

The slow pace of land release means that land is always in short supply despite the miles ofsurrounding muskeg bog and forest. 'Look at all that land...' we naively comment in an interview:

What do you mean youre surrounded by land... the fact remains were surrounded byCrown land . . . the land the municipality controls right now is becoming very, very small...we

have something like maybe 22 hectares of available commercial land if that...when we needprobably something close to 1,000...based on projections.

Each parcel is developed independently of other areas, resulting in a series of relatively disconnected'pods' on the plain above the river valley site of the original settlement (Waterways) and the downtownwhere administrative services are still mostly centred (see Figures 1 and 2) . While some apartmentbuildings were built in the first boom of the late 1970s, single family homes 'in suburbia' are thepreferred model, with densification happening through the private development of basement suites forlet to individual temporary workers provided with a 'living out allowance', rather than work-campaccommodation. This is often a grey market of private rental arrangements, contributing to thedifficult-to-count 'shadow population' of the town.

It is incorrect to treat this as a transition from natural space to suburbia as Lefebvre suggests (Lefebvre,1974). An actually materialist approach cannot account for the complexity of alternative modernities,settler societies, postcolonial topologies or the existence of cultural and ethnic bases for conflictingspatializations. In the sites of resource extraction, nature is reduced to a form of non-human bare life(cf. Agamben, 1998). This crude resource status, emphasizing the raw caloric capacity ofhydrocarbons, could be called 'bare nature'. Reduced to its energy capacity the supplementarity ofvalues in the landscape nature as beauty, for example, or as a complex ecosystem, including otherforms of animate life is repressed. This form of natural life can be consumed without responsibility


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for the collateral damage to these repressed aspects of the ecosystem. 'Place' may literally be consumedby being dug up and strip mined in resource extraction a disruption for decades of flora, fauna andany habitation before meaningful remediation and renewal of the local biosphere is possible. In thismanner, denial of any relation to the non-human is spatialized onto the re-organization of land asproperty. This is true despite the increasing human and social dependency on resources extracted in themost crude manner. This exclusion deprives bare nature of participation in semiotic systems which

give meaning except as a point of contrast to the spaces of everyday life. The landscape withoutmeaning or semiotic form is technically monstrous. In stark contrast with this suburban mindset is thedetailed knowledge of geological strata, of flora and fauna, the sense of natural cycles and long-termgeological time that laid down the bitumen resources which characterizes interviews with elderly long-term residents.

The affective relation to the surrounding forests is a felt element of Fort McMurray. The forest and'bush' margins of the town are sites of informal camps of the most abject elements of the shadowpopulation. Whether employed or not, these sites are characterized as a type of hobo jungle, a 'shadowsuburbia' of drug addicts and others who have failed as labour and as citizens. The reality is that theseencampments represent both the newly-arrived, the destitute and those who cannot afford the exorbitantrents. Along with small trucks abandoned in community centre parking lots by laid-off workers whohave been shipped home with as little as two hours notice during recent economic downturns, but hopeto return one day, the bush camps bring the transient population to the edges of everyday perception(on the hidden margins of foreign temporary migrants see Dorow & Dogu, 2011; see Fort McMurrayHousing Needs Count Committee, 2006).

Unique to Fort McMurray is the sense of boundless wilderness mixed with the constraineddevelopment space due to the parsimonious land release process and compressed sense of developmenttime. Our respondents, especially planners and those in the development industry, refer to 'FortMcMurray Years' with a 1:4 ratio compared to a metropolitan North American extent and pace ofdevelopment. Because more is built in a short time, this is a place where a lifetime of experience canbe gained in short order. This leads to fewer planning stages and the risk of less consultation. Thelocal paper reported the General Manager of Planning and Development's presentation on Parson'sCreek to the Municipal Council:

One of the most critical things from our perspective, and by that I mean the planningdepartment, is that time is really essential to the process, [...]. We feel by directly going intoan outline plan process, we can save six to eight months in terms of the whole regulatoryprocess....

I think theres always a concern when we look to stray outside the box, but I think oneof my concerns is that weve broken pretty much every box weve got because we pretty muchhave to, (Cilliers, 2010).

Fort McMurray's hurried time-space is thus doubly compressed and constrained even if its rhythms arecyclical ordered by times of premium demand for oil at the peaks of economic cycles when syntheticcrude of the type extracted from the shale deposits of the Athabaska basin is most economically viable.Respondents commented to the effect that,

youre gonna get to do anything you can imagine in planning. I mean youre gonna be involved

in quick like I would estimate that three years experience in Fort McMurray would be the


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equivalent ofmaybe even 15 years in a place like Toronto...youd have a file that youd baby

along for four years... Here its gonna happen fast and you juggle piles of things. Everythingwill be different and its unique (Municipal planner).

On a diurnal basis, the cycle of work shifts dominates both family life as much as traffic jamscirculation, with corporations building their own overpasses costing hundreds of millions of dollars to

ease congestion at entrances to their mine sites north of town. Shift work for both parents permeatesfamily time resulting in patterns ofshift parentingwith attendant sociopathologies reported ininterviews, such as unsupervised teens left with money to fend for themselves. Respondents reported asense of meaninglessness attached to non-work time. Adolescents, in particular, criticized thecommunity for warehousing youth until they were of legal working age at which time many would quitschool for apprenticeships and quick money. As one respondent put it in reaction to internationalpolitical and ecological criticism:

if I had to put my finger on it, you have an environment where . . . eyes of the world are focused

on this region good and bad. Some people think we are the economic generator and somepeople think were the nextwe are Mordor...was it? (Residential builder)

Cultural Topologies of Suburbia: Circuits of Social Reproduction

Both suburbia and what it means to 'live' somewhere, or to form a household, are transfigured in FortMcMurray. The city is shot through with flows of people, capital, technology and the logic ofcommodity consumption as well as the demand for oil driven from China and the United States. FortMcMurray is not an icon of some ideal or typical suburb elsewhere. To say that its suburbs deviatefrom a norm or from expectations implies a rule where there is no standard suburban form. Insteadsuburbia's meaning is indexical of a circulating form that is actualized differently in each case (seeStraw, 2010). Community life is founded on denials of absence; it constitutes a circle of people whoare more or less present, remembered from the past and projected forward as faith in the future.

Any resource-based city faces the challenge of newness, temporary residents and the exhaustion of theresource in the future. Residents come together defensively against outside critics of what they see aslocal success. The oil sands industry anticipates economic viability in the future and the technologyremains a promissory note on consistent profitability. What is to come? This is the question on ourminds leaving many of the interviews. The future is always a promise, but one that is in doubt. Thisfuture is mastered through extending rational planning and calculation to all spheres and levels. InFort McMurray everyone planners, global oil corporations, individuals has a plan: a financial plan,a game plan, or a development plan. Given the dominant role of work, gratification is deferred oftenand the postponement of satisfaction is upheld as a social virtue. Despite eruptions of overspending ontrucks and recreational vehicles, saving and hoping repress the present in the service of the future. Thisresults in differential attachments to place that transfigure suburbia and its single-family developmentsinto tracts of rooming houses (see Dorow & Dogu, 2011). However, given the long term scale of theoil sands, the development of the suburban infrastructure and scaffolding of community is a materialintervention into the usual circuits that characterize unstable relationships between resource peripheriesand metropolitan centres. This paper only scratches the surface of the implications of the rush to buildhousing. Rushed urbanization leads to awkward juxtapositions, incomplete retail infrastructure and alag in the provision of amenities these are feral, not quite comfortable, undomesticated suburbs wherethe pace of life and the fractured, multiplying household formations seems at odds with expectations ofdomesticity and social reproduction.


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In part, tensions are managed in this spatialization through a concerted effort to separate domesticspace from the production environment of the oil sands without integrating or conceding to thesurrounding boreal forest. This is done by 'creating' land and constructing suburban tracts that are astypical as possible to other North American cities, including blandness. This results in neighbourhoodsthat are neither ecological nor naturalized. Fort McMurray's suburbs are spatialized as a community

against the ex-centric, de-centred spatialization of the oil industry and its migrant employees. They areworks-in-progress. Satisfaction is located off the map in distant places beyond everyday life. In theravines and walking trails that form a nature-culture otherness bordering each developed suburban area(see Park 2011). Or in distant homes and families, and perhaps in Las Vegas or the beaches of Cancun.

Yet these suburbs are sites of exchange between more than the built and the Boreal, the domestic andOther. They are switching points that embody the full richness of contemporary neoliberal petro-economies and render the urban developments of this economy 'habitable' (Roderick, 1998). They arehinges where uncomfortable forces held at arms length under the rubric of 'the global' crash into thelocal and into the intimacies of family and community life. This represents a specific cultural topology(Shields forthcoming 2012), a landscape of circulations in which lives are lived on multiple scales,twisted in knots between several spaces, running at both the global speed of information and the localtime of shift-changes and the crawling pace of the doughnut store drive-through on the way to work.Feral suburbs knot together these different flows that are also an encounter between petrochemicalresource extraction, contemporary urbanism and the boreal forest. Topologically speaking, suburbiacould then be described as a diagram of the tensions that are set up in everyday life. Residents drawon resources from radically different contexts and scales to weave for themselves a novel synthesis thatin turn impacts on the actualization of cultural forms including 'community', public spheres and themodes by which they are represented and critiqued or consolidated.

Fort McMurray and the Oil Sands proclaim their uniqueness, promise and superlative size. However, ifthey are something to wonder at, they are nonetheless only the latest instalments in a mode of frontierboom and bust development which stretches back over 100 years in Canada to the Klondike Gold Rushwhich drew migrants hoping to 'strike it rich' through hard toil and return home to live well. DawsonCity, Yukon also became a boom town of 100,000. As its poet, Robert Service, wrote 'strange things'continue to be done in the land of the midnight sun.

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Notes

i Fort McMurray has not yet found a voice to equal the Klondike's Robert Service whose poem, TheCreation of Sam McGee, opens this paper (Service, 1956). However, the University of Albertateam, led by Prof. Sara Dorow, has been part of an ongoing conversation. This paper reports onlyone aspect of the overall project. The project has benefited from the extensive participation ofyouth, residents, public servants, business and community leaders. I have benefited from thesupport, suggestions, contributions and expertise brought to the project by doctoral researchersOndine Park, Goze Dogu and Andriko Lozowy, as well as the complementary efforts of Dr. MichaelHaan (University of New Brunswick) and other team members as well as anonymous referees. Nowin the 4

thyear of what was intended as a 3 year project, this research has been funded by the Social

Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada and a Killam Foundation Cornerstone grant throughUniversity of Alberta. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Urban AffairsAssociation Conference, Honolulu March 2010 in a session organized by Prof. Dorow. Some of thematerial in this paper has been presented at the Creative Suburbia Conference, QueenslandUniversity of Technology, September 2010 (http://www.creativesuburbia.com). Elements havebeen 'workshopped' with planners and community representatives at 'Unwrap the Research', acommunity-research symposium convened by Prof. Dorow and organized by the University ofAlberta City-Region Studies Centre (CRSC), Keyano College and the Regional Municaiplity ofWood Buffalo in Fort McMurray, which was funded by the Regional Municipality of WoodBuffalo, the University of Alberta, H.M. Tory Chair, the Faculty of Extension, CRSC, and Suncor inOctober 2010. Further information: http://www.crsc.ualberta.ca I acknowledge also the usefulconversations of the Space and Culture Research Group hosted by CRSC, the editorial acumen ofStephanie Bailey and invaluable comments of Ondine Park at CRSC.

ii Notably Dorow and Dogu (2011) on the conceptual mapping that positions Fort McMurray as afrontier (Shields 1991); Haan (2010) on migration and statistical debates over the 'shadowpopulation' of migrant workers. Dogu (forthcoming) on foreign temporary workers; Dorow (2011)on the political economy of community ; Shields and Lozowy (forthcoming and online 2010) onyouth imaginaries and representations (Lozowy 2009) and Shields (2011) on travel patterns.

iii 'Fort Mac' as it is known, is the administrative capital for the Regional Municipality of WoodBuffalo in northeastern Alberta (the largest by area in Canada at 63,343sq km between the size ofUkraine and Afghanistan). Fort McMurray dwarfs all other settlements (mere hamlets) in the regionand lies 4 hours drive north of the provincial capital, Edmonton. It is a 'bedroom community' to theAthabaska Tar Sands, a deposit of bitumen from which oil can be extracted. Technically, it is not acity but an 'urban service area' that dissolved itself into its surrounding municipality in 1985 toaccess the tax revenues generated by the oil sands developments that have made Fort McMurray andits surroundings the fastest growing industrial area of Canada and probably of North America.

iv The substantial journalism and environmental reports are not the focus of this short paper but arewidely accessible via internet search. Fort McMurray, its isolation and the scale of the operations toextract oil from the Athabasca 'oil sands' is a case of superlatives. The 140,200 square kilometerdeposits are in the region of 174 billion barrels. The city has recently repeated a boom-bust cycle ofthe early 1980s. These cycles are in response to the expansion and slow down of oil sandsdevelopment, in particular, the construction of upgraders (initial refining plants) and other


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infrastructure which attracts large numbers of construction and engineering tradespeople during theirinitial construction. Capital, labour and prefabricated sections of refineries travel the highwaysnorth, a mixture of solvents and bitumen (the first stage of synthesizing oil from the tar sands) flowssouth to refineries in Ohio through multiple pipelines. These cycles are governed by the price of oilwhich increased to over US$100 per barrel in 2007-8 and dropped in 2008-9, leading to a

consolidation amongst some of the energy corporations active in the area (notably the acquisition ofSyncrude by Suncor). It has now returned to levels which have allowed development torecommence.

Oil prices over US$40-$50 per barrel make the extraction of oil from sand and shales in theAthabasca Basin economical, but prices over US$75 are required to cover the inflated labour costsof rapid development. New 'in situ' drilling technologies inject steam into underground strata toliquify tarry bitumen deposits which is then forced up another well bored nearby. The resultingwater-bitumen mixture must then be sent by pipeline to refineries in the United States in order to beextensively upgraded and remixed to be useful as any form of fuel. Locally the contaminated waterand wastes have not been reclaimed. The result is a set of 'tailing ponds' that are some of the largestman-made objects and have attracted international condemnation.

v Estimated based on trucked sewage from work camps. See Gilbert, 2010.vi Our sources include Government of Alberta and Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo reports as

well as interviews and data presented in public planning and local council meetings. The keydocuments include: Government of Alberta Land Use Frameworks such as Lower AthabascaRegional Advisory Council, 2010; Regional Plans for the expansion of Fort McMurray, RegionalMunicipality of Wood Buffalo, 2008; Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, 2006 for anexample of the urban design process; Tekla Structures, 2007 for an example of construction methodsand apartment building types (see same building pictured in Figure 4).

vii I am intentionally referring tostereotypes alternately promoted and lampooned in the media of thenewly-built mostly single-family developments on the periphery of North American cities lackingmost amenities and services. See Park (2011) for a fuller discussion.

viii In a speculative ethnography of these circulating forms, Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelliargue that cultural forms carry out the important 'ideological labour of constituting subjects who canbe summoned in the name of a public or a people' (2003:386), such as a community or citizens.They do this by creating circuits in which information and abstractions, such as representations of aplace or of groups, circulate (cf B. Lee & LiPuma, 2002:192), and through which they recognizethemselves and develop a spatialization and social imaginary of their relation to other cultural formsin other places and times.

ix There is a significant literature on the definition of suburbia and suburb that explores thestereotypical notions of twentieth century peri-urban developments in terms of architecturaltypologies and urban morphologies and in terms of its relation to consumption particularly in thecontext of American culture and economics (see Park 2011)

x By 2009-10 estimates in the Government of Alberta, the local oil and gas industry contributes 7% ofCanadian GDP, 30.8% of provincial GDP with no other sector in the Province contributing over10%.

xi The integration of levels of government with private sector actors and even government-appointedcommunity advisory boards accomplish governance actions (Vigar, 2009), but in so doing, they tendto resolve disputes in the allocation of resources and entitlements to authority behind closed doors.They leave in their wake debates about democratic accountability and transparency. Some researchhas found that understandings of social processes and the power dynamics of long term development


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are over simplified, and the asymmetrical impacts across the social fabric is poorly understood(Frisvoll & Rye, 2009). Furthermore, an analytical framework which places localities and regions inglobal economic networks may be missing. This leads to a confusion over localized growth factors(endogenous) and globalized, external drivers (exogenous see Y. S. Lee, Tee, & Kim, 2009). Herecirculation models can bring some clarity.

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