Budka, P. (2024). Planes, trains, ships and rockets: Infrastructural temporalities and entanglements in Northern Manitoba, Canada. Paper at 18th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), Barcelona, Spain: University of Barcelona, 23-26 July.
Co-chairing of Panel “Infrastructural Residues: Reproduction and Destruction of Infrastructures Across Space and Time”, 26 July.

Abstract

This paper explores transport infrastructures, their temporalities and entanglements in the Subarctic town of Churchill, Canada. The community of 870 people in Northern Manitoba, which is not accessible via roads, is unique in terms of transport infrastructures. It is home to the only deep-water port on the Arctic Ocean that is directly linked to the North American railway system. Due to the former military presence the community has a big airport which is crucial for the growing tourism industry in the “Polar Bear Capital of the World”. The military also constructed a rocket range which was later used by research organizations and a commercial operator before it was finally closed in the 1990s. While the ruins of the Churchill Rocket Range have become a tourist attraction, the Hudson Bay Railway, the Port of Churchill and the town’s airport are still in use and need to be maintained under harsh Subarctic conditions. Since 2021, the railway and port are – for the first time in history – owned by a consortium of local communities. For renovating and reviving these transport infrastructures, the new owners started right away to look for much needed investments. Eventually, recent global crises prompted the governments of Manitoba and Canada to once again invest heavily in these infrastructures. By discussing results from ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and a future scenario workshop, conducted within the ERC project InfraNorth, this paper focuses on infrastructural temporalities (Velkova & Plantin, 2023) through concrete moments of change.