On Viscous Grounds: Planning for Friction across the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, 1968-1981

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the planning and mediation processes of environmental protection, temporary worker accommodation, and indigenous land claims prior to, during, and after the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the mid-1970s. By studying three different evidentiary regimes, this thesis posits that the viscous grounds of these environmental, architectural, and cultural terms were modeled to be included as frictions in a predisposed system of planning. Unraveling at the height of cultural shifts around gender, indigenous identity, and conservation, the planning of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline represents a shift in the negotiation of infrastructures from a regulating process of approval to a calibrating process of expertise, coercion, and predisposition.

Revealing the pipeline as a paradigmatic infrastructure valued in terms of the viscosity of oil, the thesis argues that it provided the solid grounds to negotiate the far more fluid externalities of environment, comfort, and cultures. Its process of mediation is read as bringing different types of mobility to clash: The fixity of the pipeline, the fluctuating uncertainties of boom-and-bust cycles, the shifting grounds of environmental protection, the temporariness of workers and their accommodations, and the relationship of indigenous Alaskans to land. Situated amidst these regimes of temporality and tenure, this thesis analyzes three discourses that protruded from their clash: (1) The management of the environment and its crisis through economic models, new legal systems, and corporate publicity, (2) The urban and architectural control of culture within workers’ housing owing to the biopolitics of comfort, and (3) The trading-off of indigenous knowledge through anthropological mapping of native land use. In doing so, the thesis submits planning across the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and its aftermath as a force that valorizes the contractual relationship between states and their subjects.