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 2011. rshields@ualberta.ca DRAFT: To Cite Contact Author. Copyright Rob Shields 2011 This version preented at Sanghai International Studies Univerisity, 2011. A Shortened and revised version is published as: Feral suburbs: Cultural topologies of social reproduction, Fort McMurray, Canada International Journal of Cultural Studies 15:3 (May) 2012. pp.205-215. DOI: 10.1177/1367877911433743 Abstract
Through case studies drawn from Ft. McMurray (Alberta, Canada) near the Athabasca Tar Sands, builders', residents' and public 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 sun By 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 Fort McMurray, Alberta through a series of boom and bust cycles over the last forty years despite its isolated location, a four hour drive north of the nearest city, Edmonton (see Figure 1). As in Robert Service's poem about the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, strangeness vies with normality as cultural and economic forms of shift-work and suburban life are remade in this setting. They remain recognizable but are transfigured in the process, 'pushing the envelope' of normal forms, recasting the understanding 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 of settlement have a certain recognizable sameness of peripherality, often fading over time as newer suburbs 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 and ethnographic approach. This fieldwork was supplemented by a statistical analysis of migration, political economic data, a photographic study with local youth and 'Unwrap the Research' a community-academic research symposium and dialogue. The research was conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Alberta funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the municipality, university, Keyano College and local businessesi This paper avoids the usual statistical apparatus. This, and a fuller political economy are available in supporting papers.ii Rather than merely heuristic, this paper pursues a creative strategy of intelligibility rather than demonstrations of proof, making sense of the current situation and time-space relations in Fort McMurray. In what follows, these relations will be approached as spatializations and temporalizations knotted 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 looking North West, showing nearby open-pit oil sands mines (top right) to the north, downstream along the Athabasca River (running from left to top). Less visible is a grid of cuts through the forests for pipelines to in-situ extraction wells (Source: Rob Shields). Black Gold 2 DRAFT Not for Citation

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Fort McMurray (pop. 85,000 plus or minus 15,000)iii is a regional administrative centre. The definition of the place as a city is equivocal as it dis-incorporated to join the surrounding resource rich Wood Buffalo Regional Municipality in the mid-1980s, taking the term urban service area. It is located just south of the controversial Athabasca Tar Sands (or Oil Sands depending on one's politics). These are the largest global deposits of bitumen an oil resource that contemporary 'in-situ' extraction technology, 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 Pacific coast. The cost of each of 2 stages of the controversial Keystone pipelines from the Oil Sands to United States refineries is about US$12 billion. This gives a sense of the value of theses assets and the economic size of the local and far-flung petrochemical economy that has grown up around the Oil Sands and the relatively small workforce of under 80,000 based in and around Fort McMurray with another 80,000 US jobs said to be directly dependent on the Oil Sands. Although still less that 5% of 2010 GDP, oil is transforming the Canadian economy (2010 GDP US$1.57 trillion according to the World Bank) and balance of power while sucking in tens of thousands of construction, mining and oil workers from around the world to Fort McMurray. The petrochemical economy entails global circuits of expertise: Nigerians, Venezuelans, Chilean refinery technicians, Phillipinos, Chinese, Brits and Americans work alongside the largest exclave of Newfoundlanders, not to mention Quebecois and others from across Canada. Our respondents, such as municipal planners, provincial policy-makers and private sector developers (see note 1), have struggled to accommodate expansion of a population which has fluctuated dramatically, expanding rapidly over about 5 years, then contracting during 2009, and returning to expansion at maximum velocity by late 2010. A municipal official told us 'we know we are going to grow. Weve targeted 250,000 people by 2030. Non-resident workers often commute for several weeks 'on', sometimes non-stop company Airbus flights 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 Hann 2010) that inflects the civic culture with a boomtown, gold rush flavour. Residents of Fort McMurray have aspired to develop community by expanding suburbia as a family-oriented community form. The tension 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 orientated community 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. I think 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 my daughter 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 live in 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, to fly out for weekends in Las Vegas (Dorow & Dogu, 2011). The households of single-family homes are extended with migrant workers as lodgers, whose rent helps equalize class differences in accessing the very 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 slow economic periods (2008-10),v others have settled despite the boom and bust economy. When asked what 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) and Saline Creek areas (lower right) (Source: Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo Council Report). 4 DRAFT Not for Citation

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'Better housing opportunities. Im going to be depressed here myself. Ill probably have to rent for 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, bulldozed into the pine and spruce forests and muskeg bogs of the flat, boreal plain above the downtown revier valley 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 preexisting downtown. At the time of writing, Parson's Creek and Saline Creek areas housing developments have been released (see Map, Figure 2). The Province is acting as developer, investing more than $166 and $75 million, respectively, to drain these areas and prepare basic access routes and utility trunk lines. By 2012, Phase 1 of Parson's Creek will cover over 450 acres and will house 24,600 people in 2000 new homes and 6000 apartment units, of which 20% will be rented out by the Wood Buffalo Housing Authority below market rates.vi 'A Fort McMurray of the Mind' Unlike most single-industry resource towns (for which there is a significant sociological literature not surveyed here), Fort McMurray sits astride a 100-year petroleum resource, and this time-frame has belatedly 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 mix of diasporas which seem to have arrived in the 4 years since the last Canadian Census (2006) when over 60% of respondents had lived locally for 3 years or longer . Because most are temporary residents or even just passing through en route to a nearby oil sands mine camp, diasporic communities form as mixtures 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 with the local vernaculars, such as trucks sporting safety flags on tall antenna-like 'buggy whips', or jackets and overalls with reflective tape. Both are part of work site safety requirements in strip mining environments that must operate in winter darkness when sunlit hours are limited to 6 or 7 hours per day. These clothes have become a habit, an unselfconscious but streetwise marker of belonging on this frontier. Pants or overalls in particular, piped with reflective tape constitute authenticity, belonging and investment in the labour of the resource extraction economy as a source of pride and household accumulation, 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 and flickr.com Copyright 2009). Indeed there are residents who can count themselves as amongst the first employees of the enormous corporations 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 whom one 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 switching point where financial capital is exchanged for labour that is housed, harnessed and reproduced. It is as strategic as any board room or trading floor; one might read the presence of Canada's largest and most active military base near Cold Lake on the south eastern sections of the oil sands as an indicator of its geopolitical destiny. In the context of suburban living, despite the typical inadequacies of explicit markers and institutions of community, there is nonetheless a coordinated labour of place making, constant upkeep, exchange of favours, 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 migrant labourers complicate the stereotype of the single-family dwelling. This accentuates the observed urban problem that private property militates against consideration of long-term implications and effects on neighbours unless countered by planning restrictions or encouraged by notions of 'neighbrouhood property value' (cf. Oestereich, 2000; see below re. land release) that in turn make development of public areas complex and often beyond the reach of local residents (cf. Heller, 1998). Nonetheless, there is a broader oikos of suburban dwelling that is continually referenced and almost conjured from the hypostatized objects of property. The domestic is 'virtually' part of this symbolic circulation of encounters and avoidances, gestures, glances and small talk. According to one respondent, the size of Fort McMurray seems to foster rapid integration and community events: We asked, 'You mentioned Santa 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 skate You 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 to stand, 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 landed and financial capital and community (2002). Although familiar narrativesvii about suburbia describe houses, roadways and so on, any suburb is less manifest in representative but static objects and housing types 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 forms circulate, the case of suburbia will be argued to illustrate how space and time themselves circulate, are localized into spatializations and temporalizations of otherwise purely abstract, academic conceptions that theoretically reify systems and structures such as the economic and environmental, production and consumption. 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 and folded to establish new proximities between geographically distant points. It also implies distinct temporalities, such as the contrast between the face-paced development locals refer to 'Fort McMurray time', the lagging pace of regulatory due-process, or the routine of everyday family life. One might imagine topology as a knotting that articulates a rescaling or even 'trans-scaling' not only of spaces of governance 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 built environments topologically. That is, it turns on assumptions and stereotypes that are as much about the materiality of the place as they are about the virtual, ineffable aspects of the place as a social world.ix One the one hand this topological approach may seem like merely a comment on the tendency to stereotype the form and content of suburban life. However, the point is that the scholarship that discerns 'suburbia' within the suburban or peri-urban is already engaged in a cultural topology. This has been one piecemeal on a case by case basis without reflecting on the fact that suburbia is more than 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 and construction, but a set of public spheres, collective engagements and mythic imaginaries that unfold their own temporalities and spatialities at a socially meaningful level of action whether this be schooling, auto-mobility or fund-raising for disaster relief in Haiti. They are time-space structures or cultural landscapes of circulation and flow. Most significantly, topologies may be complex, multidimensional time-space manifolds that can only be understood virtually. That is, they can't be abstracted 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 are represented through scenes that appear concrete environments at first glance but are quickly understood to be improbably, warped spaces and worlds. They allow us to conceive of extra dimensions weighing on the course of events that are inadequately modelled in three spatial and one temporal dimension. In effect, by breaking the representational limits of the Cartesian and Euclidean universe, the differential geometries and time-spaces of topology allow cultural studies the opportunity to conceive and analyse the intersection of distinct but compossible spatializations in a single event and place such as Fort McMurray (see Shields 2012).

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To suggest that the literature on suburbia is topologizing is to point to suburbia as a theoretical object of research, something that includes but transcends the materiality of a suburb to construct a parametric space (a phase space) in which time, consumption, the economic and demographic facts are included as extra dimensions along with the x-y-z of a three dimensional location to create a complex graph. The resulting n-dimensional shape is a topological manifold that one might compare to Walter Benjamin's over-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 popular consumption as a future economic driver (Benjamin 1955; Shields 1993). Identifying the scholarship on the suburban often a political economy or cultural study together, albeit as a proto- or presystematic cultural topology allows theoretical comparison and methodological development, more adequate and nimble knowledge strategies. Cultural topology considers the circuits of cultural forms as they 'touch down' and are actualized in Fort McMurray's expanding suburbs. Rather than juxtaposing a limited local scale (suburban life) against the flows of the global petro-economy, this paper envisions these scales as integral to circuits that can be 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 the middle to make two bulbous manifolds, the local and the global are more intimately part of one complex 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, that bifurcates space and time into potentially multiple, simultaneous 'bubbles'. These spatializations and temporalizations nonetheless communicate, like pulmonary chambers. As in the experience of arriving in a foreign country and sensing that life is more fast-paced or that one needs to slow down to fit in with the local pace, such a lived encounter of contrasting tempos resembles the Fort McMurray experience of having distinct but communicating space-times, allowing both equilibrium and dynamic exchange that set up circuits that must be described temporally and in their mobility. In any one of time-space, explanation can only be a partial truth. Although many of these spaces and temporalities may be ignored as inconsequential to the time frames of political and economic cycles, they are nonetheless never epiphenomenal. Understood as time-space circuits, these are not only circulations of actual goods and bodies including workers and their families flying in and out or massive pieces of equipment towed up Alberta's Highway 63 to the mine sites. They also include more ideal representations and intangible goods that must be actualized in place or evoked in absentia through stylistic 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, and even the stereotyped conception of North American suburbia as always newer, always a fresh start separate 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) or the perspectival space of the streetscape (see Figure 4) does not do them justice. One is always left with a sense of oddness or surreality. In such a site, one needs a way of capturing the global and the local, the familiar and the foreign as if in a single glance. Given that its suburbs are extremely heterogeneous in population and that they offer mixed tenure (rental and owner-occupied), a mixture of households (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 the clashing 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 in such 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 global ethnography of Fort McMurray (see Dorow 2011). Feral suburbanism Fort 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 is compounded by a sense of geographical distance and isolation. Hence, I forward the term 'feral'. This can be understood in a number of ways. Suburbia escapes from a taken-for-granted tameness or ceases to be domesticated. Although they resemble suburbs of many North American cities, the juxtapositions visible in Fort McMurray, on the half-built-up streets of Eagle Ridge or Parson's Creek, such as the many trucks of tenants of basement suites or the raw edge of the forest, trouble the conventional staging of suburban environments that inform a taken-for-granted 'settlement' of the built environment and the wider landscape of ecosystem and climatic context. Feral also suggests 'savage' suburbs. This synonym of feral hints at the ferocity of the forces of petroleum resource exploitation that so dwarf other forms of engagement with the region's resources as to push other industries such as forestry aside, not to mention trapping or subsistence activities.x A third 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- and RV-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 the surveyors cuts through the forest. For example, suburban life in Fort McMurray means to be melancholically governed most of the time by the isolation imposed by the expanse of wilderness, to be fatally forced to respect its climatic extremes, to grimly wrest oil wealth from the strata of the area, or to joyfully respond to its beauties. What then is one to make of Fort McMurray's mode of land and community development that is so patently North American 'suburban' (see photographs http://www.flickr.com/groups/whereisfortmcmurray/) yet still Other? It conforms to images and forms of the North American middle class rather than in any local, working class or the village rubric of the surrounding 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 discussing Fort 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 absent and what is far away. There is a sense that the city is suburban in that it lacks not only formal urban status since it disincorporated in the mid 1980s, but that it also stands as an ex-urban addition, a displaced adjunct and outpost of more southerly metropolises. For example, the absent is very strongly indicated by those lines of escape off the page to fun, relaxation and even home that Dorow's respondents drew as sketch maps during interviews (see Dorow and Dogu 2011). Understood as a form, suburbia dissolves into only an intensive ordinate of broader forces and flows. Forms may be instanciated 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 normalizing context 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 simply domestic 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-urban locations, one of the key qualities of suburbs is the stereotype of limited consumption diversity and often, 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 comments about 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 is what 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 be within 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) where a pure spectacle of consumption reigns, or to the hometowns of the many temporary migrants where family life carries on in their absence, or where society awaits their reintegration as community members. These relationships manifest themselves in multi-layered flows of messages, hopes, dreams and mobile bodies in the many flights 'out' and 'south' that are the vectors of escape. In turn, these circulations 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 Space Despite repeated comments on the benefits of having the forest so close at hand as a natural area, part of the spatialization of Fort McMurray is to rigorously separate the spaces of social reproduction from spaces of production the forested rural region that is the site of resource extraction. This is a challenge given the cross-sectoral interests including the oil companies, governments and private developers that are involved in producing the spaces of social reproduction. New housing in Fort McMurray 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 Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB) which also controls the 'urban service area' of Fort McMurray since its dissolution. The RMWB has tended to operate partly as a surrogate city council, and partly as a regional industrial development authority, with many complaints from the actual residents of the vast rural area surrounding Fort McMurray (Lagendijk, 2007). Even if it is gridded by surveyor's lines and has been minutely assayed by mobile seismic units looking for the characteristic echo of subterranean oil deposits, land release is a process of bringing space like boreal forest into the property system where it becomes real estate. Before this it is merely 'land', the unterritorialized space of bare nature. It has to be understood as not only a legal and governmental process; the careful pace and unclear bureaucratic process hints that this is a ritual in which the legal is merely a technical aspect. Divided into lots, the newly constituted property will be interchangeable with suburban lots in Minnesota or anywhere else in the property system through the medium of money. The process surpasses the creative as it is almost alchemical: the sovereign sets in play a ritual of legislative fiat by which earth itself is transfigured, pulled out of one semiotic system of nature to be reborn as capital in the form of land. Gridded neighbourhoods abuts but are intrinsically different from the 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 in this process, which entails cross-jurisdictional collaborations with which few have extensive experience. This legal ritual is troubled by the erosion of the pure difference between nature and culture at the representational level. It may contribute to this through rushed distribution and inadequate due-process to recognize this categorical difference. It is also fraught with the material resistance of, for example, boggy wetlands as unstable, inappropriate building sites. These instabilities make 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, such as 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 through financial ties and other bonuses which go beyond remuneration. They are also extended through the formation of family life via the structure of time and the production of suburban housing and neighbourhoods, where diversity is limited by the sheer fact that all residents share in the same economic fate and fortunes of the oil sands. Despite the rushed urbanization of Fort McMurray, the government prides itself on the parsimonious amounts of land allocated for development, its diligent review of public interest and the careful extinguishment of any native claim in the process of land release. However, the process is anything but clear and transparent. An earlier organization of the forest through the trap lines of clans and individual trappers that formed a sovereign traditional land use before industrial scale forestry or oil development is erased in the land release process and only vaguely recalled in the network of wooded trails through and around the new suburbs. Historical and pre-historical aboriginal peoples understood spatializations of the land in which they were positioned as an integral element of the forest, or as hamanic stewards of natural cycles. Such a spatialization is part of a body of traditional knowledge that 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 of new public-private partnerships and co-governance by collaborating levels of government. This is much 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 the project of the locality (a very condensed form of new regionalism (Paasi, 2009)).xi Much of the frustration of local builders is in the meddling of the Province or the arrival of national scaled development 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 recent cases, the provincial government has become more involved as not only a facilitator, but also a developer by taking the role of guarantor and partner to land developers who ready the area for development. In turn, subdivisions are zoned, planned and roads and services established. Further down the development feeding chain, builders buy specific tracts to construct homes, apartments and retail strip malls. The resulting landscape in completed developments such as 'Eagle Ridge' or in new land parcels such as 'Parson's Creek' is not only suburban but a branded space with particular design mannerisms (e.g. fake tudor posts and beams, plasterboard simulations of more massive elements of historical styles), colour schemes and so on, which become a shorthand for the normative zoning of particular 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 of surrounding 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 by Crown 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 need probably 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 downtown where administrative services are still mostly centred (see Figures 1 and 2) . While some apartment buildings were built in the first boom of the late 1970s, single family homes 'in suburbia' are the preferred model, with densification happening through the private development of basement suites for let to individual temporary workers provided with a 'living out allowance', rather than work-camp accommodation. This is often a grey market of private rental arrangements, contributing to the difficult-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 conflicting spatializations. 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 of hydrocarbons, could be called 'bare nature'. Reduced to its energy capacity the supplementarity of values in the landscape nature as beauty, for example, or as a complex ecosystem, including other forms 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 consumed by being dug up and strip mined in resource extraction a disruption for decades of flora, fauna and any habitation before meaningful remediation and renewal of the local biosphere is possible. In this manner, denial of any relation to the non-human is spatialized onto the re-organization of land as property. This is true despite the increasing human and social dependency on resources extracted in the most 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 without meaning or semiotic form is technically monstrous. In stark contrast with this suburban mindset is the detailed knowledge of geological strata, of flora and fauna, the sense of natural cycles and long-term geological time that laid down the bitumen resources which characterizes interviews with elderly longterm 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 shadow population. Whether employed or not, these sites are characterized as a type of hobo jungle, a 'shadow suburbia' of drug addicts and others who have failed as labour and as citizens. The reality is that these encampments represent both the newly-arrived, the destitute and those who cannot afford the exorbitant rents. Along with small trucks abandoned in community centre parking lots by laid-off workers who have been shipped home with as little as two hours notice during recent economic downturns, but hope to 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 McMurray Housing Needs Count Committee, 2006). Unique to Fort McMurray is the sense of boundless wilderness mixed with the constrained development space due to the parsimonious land release process and compressed sense of development time. Our respondents, especially planners and those in the development industry, refer to 'Fort McMurray Years' with a 1:4 ratio compared to a metropolitan North American extent and pace of development. Because more is built in a short time, this is a place where a lifetime of experience can be gained in short order. This leads to fewer planning stages and the risk of less consultation. The local paper reported the General Manager of Planning and Development's presentation on Parson's Creek to the Municipal Council: One of the most critical things from our perspective, and by that I mean the planning department, is that time is really essential to the process, [...]. We feel by directly going into an outline plan process, we can save six to eight months in terms of the whole regulatory process.... I think theres always a concern when we look to stray outside the box, but I think one of my concerns is that weve broken pretty much every box weve got because we pretty much have to, (Cilliers, 2010). Fort McMurray's hurried time-space is thus doubly compressed and constrained even if its rhythms are cyclical ordered by times of premium demand for oil at the peaks of economic cycles when synthetic crude 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. Everything will be different and its unique (Municipal planner). On a diurnal basis, the cycle of work shifts dominates both family life as much as traffic jams circulation, 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 permeates family time resulting in patterns of shift parenting with attendant sociopathologies reported in interviews, such as unsupervised teens left with money to fend for themselves. Respondents reported a sense of meaninglessness attached to non-work time. Adolescents, in particular, criticized the community for warehousing youth until they were of legal working age at which time many would quit school for apprenticeships and quick money. As one respondent put it in reaction to international political 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 some people 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 Fort McMurray. The city is shot through with flows of people, capital, technology and the logic of commodity consumption as well as the demand for oil driven from China and the United States. Fort McMurray is not an icon of some ideal or typical suburb elsewhere. To say that its suburbs deviate from a norm or from expectations implies a rule where there is no standard suburban form. Instead suburbia's meaning is indexical of a circulating form that is actualized differently in each case (see Straw, 2010). Community life is founded on denials of absence; it constitutes a circle of people who are 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 the resource in the future. Residents come together defensively against outside critics of what they see as local success. The oil sands industry anticipates economic viability in the future and the technology remains a promissory note on consistent profitability. What is to come? This is the question on our minds leaving many of the interviews. The future is always a promise, but one that is in doubt. This future is mastered through extending rational planning and calculation to all spheres and levels. In Fort 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 often and the postponement of satisfaction is upheld as a social virtue. Despite eruptions of overspending on trucks and recreational vehicles, saving and hoping repress the present in the service of the future. This results in differential attachments to place that transfigure suburbia and its single-family developments into tracts of rooming houses (see Dorow & Dogu, 2011). However, given the long term scale of the oil sands, the development of the suburban infrastructure and scaffolding of community is a material intervention into the usual circuits that characterize unstable relationships between resource peripheries and metropolitan centres. This paper only scratches the surface of the implications of the rush to build housing. Rushed urbanization leads to awkward juxtapositions, incomplete retail infrastructure and a lag in the provision of amenities these are feral, not quite comfortable, undomesticated suburbs where the pace of life and the fractured, multiplying household formations seems at odds with expectations of domesticity and social reproduction.
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In part, tensions are managed in this spatialization through a concerted effort to separate domestic space from the production environment of the oil sands without integrating or conceding to the surrounding boreal forest. This is done by 'creating' land and constructing suburban tracts that are as typical as possible to other North American cities, including blandness. This results in neighbourhoods that 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 are works-in-progress. Satisfaction is located off the map in distant places beyond everyday life. In the ravines 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 and Other. They are switching points that embody the full richness of contemporary neoliberal petroeconomies and render the urban developments of this economy 'habitable' (Roderick, 1998). They are hinges where uncomfortable forces held at arms length under the rubric of 'the global' crash into the local 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 local time 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 petrochemical resource extraction, contemporary urbanism and the boreal forest. Topologically speaking, suburbia could then be described as a diagram of the tensions that are set up in everyday life. Residents draw on resources from radically different contexts and scales to weave for themselves a novel synthesis that in turn impacts on the actualization of cultural forms including 'community', public spheres and the modes by which they are represented and critiqued or consolidated. Fort McMurray and the Oil Sands proclaim their uniqueness, promise and superlative size. However, if they are something to wonder at, they are nonetheless only the latest instalments in a mode of frontier boom and bust development which stretches back over 100 years in Canada to the Klondike Gold Rush which drew migrants hoping to 'strike it rich' through hard toil and return home to live well. Dawson City, 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. References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (D. Hellen-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, W. (1955). Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century (E. Jephcott, Trans.). In P. Demetz (Ed.), Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 146-162. Brenner, N. (2003). Metropolitan institutional reform and the rescaling of state space in contemporary western Europe. European Urban And Regional Studies, 10(4), 297-324. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. (2006). Saline Creek plateau sustainable community design charrette. Ottawa: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Canetti, M. (1992). The Crowd Crowds and Power (pp. 15-105). London: Penguin. Chambers, I. (1994). Migrancy, culture, identity. London: Routledge. Cilliers, R. (2010). Parsons Creek fast-tracked for 2012. Fort McMurray Today, p. online.
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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). Mille Plateaux: A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dorow, S., & Dogu, G. (2011). The Spatial Distribution of Hope In and Beyond Fort McMurray Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire and Hope. Waterloo Ont.: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Dorow, forthcoming. Canadian Journal of Sociology Fort McMurray Housing Needs Count Committee. (2006). Report on Housing Needs in Fort McMurray. Fort McMurray, Alberta: Homelessness initiative Steering Committee, Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. Gaonkar, D., & Povinelli, E. (2003). Technologies of public forms: Circulation, transfiguration, recognition. Public Culture, 15(3), 385-397. Gaonkar, D. P. (2002). Toward New imaginaries: Introduction. Public Culture, 14(1), 1-9. Gieryn, T. (2006). City as Truth Spot: Laboratories and Field-Sites in Urban Studies. Social Studies of Science, 36(1), 5-38. Gilbert, R. (2010). Expandable wastewater treatment plant finished in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Journal of Commerce, online. Gregson, N., & Lowe, M. (1995). Home-Making - on the Spatiality of Daily Social Reproduction in Contemporary Middle-Class Britain. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 20(2), 224. Gualini, E. (2006). The rescaling of governance in Europe: New spatial and institutional rationales. European Planning Studies, 14(7), 881-904. Gumbrecht, H. U., & Pfeiffer, K. L. (1994). Materialities of communication. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Hann, M. (2010). The Politics of Constructing an Urban Population Profile: Impacts on Community Development and Financial Resourcing Paper presented at the Urban Affairs Association Conference. Honolulu, Hawaii. Heller, M. A. (1998). The tragedy of the anti-commons: Property in the transition from Marx to markets. Harvard Law Review(111), 621688. Jones, J. P., Woodward, K., & Martson, S. A. (2007). Reply: Situating Flatness. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32, 264-276. Lagendijk, A. (2007). The accident of the region: A strategic relational perspective on the construction of the region's significance. Regional Studies, 41(9), 1193-1207. Lee, B., & LiPuma, E. (2002). Cultures of circulation: The imaginations of modernity. Public Culture, 14(1), 191213. Lee, Y. S., Tee, Y. C., & Kim, D. W. (2009). Endogenous versus exogenous development: a comparative study of biotechnology industry cluster policies in South Korea and Singapore. Environment and Planning C-Government and Policy, 27(4), 612-631. Lefebvre, H. (1974). La production de l'espace. L'Homme et la socit, 31_32. 15_31. LiPuma, E., & Koelbe, T. (2005). Cultures of Circulation and the Urban Imaginary: Miami as Example and Exemplar. Public Culture, 17(1), 153-179. Lower Athabasca Regional Advisory Council. (2010). Advice to the Government of Alberta Regarding a Vision for the Lower Athabasca Region. Edmonton, Alberta: Government of Alberta. Lozowy, A. (2009). Where is My Fort McMurray? University of Alberta. Available through: http://www.flickr.com/groups/whereisfortmcmurray/ Marston, S. A. (2000). The social construction of scale. Progress in Human Geography, 24(2), 219242. Marston, S. A., Jones, J. P., & Woodward, K. (2005). Human geography without scale. Transactions of
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York: Oxford University Press. Notes i Fort McMurray has not yet found a voice to equal the Klondike's Robert Service whose poem, The Creation of Sam McGee, opens this paper (Service, 1956). However, the University of Alberta team, led by Prof. Sara Dorow, has been part of an ongoing conversation. This paper reports only one aspect of the overall project. The project has benefited from the extensive participation of youth, residents, public servants, business and community leaders. I have benefited from the support, suggestions, contributions and expertise brought to the project by doctoral researchers Ondine Park, Goze Dogu and Andriko Lozowy, as well as the complementary efforts of Dr. Michael Haan (University of New Brunswick) and other team members as well as anonymous referees. Now in the 4th year 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 through University of Alberta. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Urban Affairs Association Conference, Honolulu March 2010 in a session organized by Prof. Dorow. Some of the material in this paper has been presented at the Creative Suburbia Conference, Queensland University of Technology, September 2010 (http://www.creativesuburbia.com). Elements have been 'workshopped' with planners and community representatives at 'Unwrap the Research', a community-research symposium convened by Prof. Dorow and organized by the University of Alberta City-Region Studies Centre (CRSC), Keyano College and the Regional Municaiplity of Wood Buffalo in Fort McMurray, which was funded by the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, the University of Alberta, H.M. Tory Chair, the Faculty of Extension, CRSC, and Suncor in October 2010. Further information: http://www.crsc.ualberta.ca I acknowledge also the useful conversations of the Space and Culture Research Group hosted by CRSC, the editorial acumen of Stephanie Bailey and invaluable comments of Ondine Park at CRSC. ii Notably Dorow and Dogu (2011) on the conceptual mapping that positions Fort McMurray as a frontier (Shields 1991); Haan (2010) on migration and statistical debates over the 'shadow population' of migrant workers. Dogu (forthcoming) on foreign temporary workers; Dorow (2011) on the political economy of community ; Shields and Lozowy (forthcoming and online 2010) on youth 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 Wood Buffalo in northeastern Alberta (the largest by area in Canada at 63,343sq km between the size of Ukraine and Afghanistan). Fort McMurray dwarfs all other settlements (mere hamlets) in the region and lies 4 hours drive north of the provincial capital, Edmonton. It is a 'bedroom community' to the Athabaska Tar Sands, a deposit of bitumen from which oil can be extracted. Technically, it is not a city but an 'urban service area' that dissolved itself into its surrounding municipality in 1985 to access the tax revenues generated by the oil sands developments that have made Fort McMurray and its 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 are widely accessible via internet search. Fort McMurray, its isolation and the scale of the operations to extract oil from the Athabasca 'oil sands' is a case of superlatives. The 140,200 square kilometer deposits are in the region of 174 billion barrels. The city has recently repeated a boom-bust cycle of the early 1980s. These cycles are in response to the expansion and slow down of oil sands development, 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 their initial construction. Capital, labour and prefabricated sections of refineries travel the highways north, a mixture of solvents and bitumen (the first stage of synthesizing oil from the tar sands) flows south to refineries in Ohio through multiple pipelines. These cycles are governed by the price of oil which 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 of Syncrude by Suncor). It has now returned to levels which have allowed development to recommence. Oil prices over US$40-$50 per barrel make the extraction of oil from sand and shales in the Athabasca Basin economical, but prices over US$75 are required to cover the inflated labour costs of rapid development. New 'in situ' drilling technologies inject steam into underground strata to liquify tarry bitumen deposits which is then forced up another well bored nearby. The resulting water-bitumen mixture must then be sent by pipeline to refineries in the United States in order to be extensively upgraded and remixed to be useful as any form of fuel. Locally the contaminated water and wastes have not been reclaimed. The result is a set of 'tailing ponds' that are some of the largest man-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 key documents include: Government of Alberta Land Use Frameworks such as Lower Athabasca Regional Advisory Council, 2010; Regional Plans for the expansion of Fort McMurray, Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, 2008; Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, 2006 for an example of the urban design process; Tekla Structures, 2007 for an example of construction methods and apartment building types (see same building pictured in Figure 4). vii I am intentionally referring tostereotypes alternately promoted and lampooned in the media of the newly-built mostly single-family developments on the periphery of North American cities lacking most amenities and services. See Park (2011) for a fuller discussion. viii In a speculative ethnography of these circulating forms, Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli argue that cultural forms carry out the important 'ideological labour of constituting subjects who can be 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 a place or of groups, circulate (cf B. Lee & LiPuma, 2002:192), and through which they recognize themselves and develop a spatialization and social imaginary of their relation to other cultural forms in other places and times. ix There is a significant literature on the definition of suburbia and suburb that explores the stereotypical notions of twentieth century peri-urban developments in terms of architectural typologies and urban morphologies and in terms of its relation to consumption particularly in the context 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% of Canadian GDP, 30.8% of provincial GDP with no other sector in the Province contributing over 10%. xi The integration of levels of government with private sector actors and even government-appointed community advisory boards accomplish governance actions (Vigar, 2009), but in so doing, they tend to 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 research has 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 in global 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). Here circulation models can bring some clarity.

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