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Short abstract:

Drawing on Soviet extractivism studies (Brown 2013, Collier 2011, Kochetkova 2024), the paper reconstructs how late Soviet mobile architecture was imagined and used as a method of 'acclimatisation' during the 'resourcification' (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014) of oil and gas in Western Siberia.

Long abstract:

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