’ Residents’ Uses and Planners’ Perceptions of Road Infrastructure on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula
Open Access Deposited‘Unpaved Arteries
This research assesses planners’ perceptions and residents’ uses of vernacular road infrastructure on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula to demonstrate how these roads support sociocultural practices and establish a sense of place. Residential uses and planning perceptions of the road network are described through participatory mapping, semi-structured interviews, mobile ethnography, and historic map analysis. Interviews and participatory maps are used to record the uses of these road networks by residents, mobile ethnography demonstrates how these roads are affective infrastructure, essential to regional placemaking and storytelling, and historic maps are used to understand how perceptions of the roads have changed over time, and that newly proposed extractive operations are rooted in a larger planning legacy. These participatory methods demonstrate that empty spaces depicted in the region’s maps are in fact essential areas for subsistence and other lived engagements with the land. Discussion of results provides a critical assessment of how these extractive road infrastructures may serve purposes beyond the abandonment of their intended use. In aesthetic terms, many roads and trails that remain in use have an appearance of abandonment simply by not corresponding to expected ideals of asphalt and pavement. This aesthetic expectation is continually imported to the Arctic by extractive industries, like the mining company Graphite One promising year-round paved roads for the Seward Peninsula (Barr Engineering Co., 2025). This research responds to expressed needs from residents and planners for a more comprehensive approach to representing road infrastructure on maps. Maps and interviews in this thesis attempt to foreground the varied non-extractive land uses facilitated by the road network, countering contemporary representations of the region as empty. Most importantly, this research aims to demonstrate that these are not roads to nowhere, but essential to the survival of Peninsula communities.
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.