21.11.2023

Rachel Heiman | The New School New York

This talk draws on five summers of fieldwork in an unlikely site for the production of environmental subjects and expertise: a massive master-planned community in Utah spearheaded by one the largest mining conglomerates in the world and developed with equal parts attention to sustainable suburbanism and values of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). Now almost 20 years into an anticipated 30-year build out on remediated mining lands, the suburb in which the project is located is one of the fastest growing U.S. cities and has become an object lesson in sustainable development in politically conservative areas of the American West, including for its award-wining advanced stormwater detention system that integrates landscape architecture, infrastructural design, and earthquake preparedness. My research sheds light on the generative power of diverse temporalities and modes of legitimacy in this long-term build-out, as architects, mining officials, planning non-profits, builders, municipal workers, residents, marketers, master gardeners, and politicians negotiate aspirations for—and anxieties about—the material, social, aesthetic, and environmental future of the American suburb.