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Abstract This article focuses on informal road networks in remote Siberian communities: their connectivity and the relations between road owners and road users. These informal roads serve both as conduits and hindrances for local connectivities. Data was collected in the villages Vershina Khandy and Tokma of the Irkutsk region, and the study describes the variety of informal roads in the region: subsistence trails and tracks, inter-settlement roads, forest roads, and oil and gas service roads. Different actors participate in the expansion of the informal road network; our research demonstrates that communities accommodate new infrastructures and negotiate their mobility and connectivity informally according to their needs and desires under uneven power hierarchies. In conclusion, we discuss the possibilities and constraints that different groups of roads users experience because of the informal character of roads.
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Tokma and Vershina Khandy Villages’ Informal Road Networks, Irkutsk Oblast, Russia, 2019-2023
Hydrocarbon and timber industries are rapidly developing informal road networks in Siberian boreal forests, or taiga. Informal roads are undocumented, often unpaved roads, not maintained by governments, inclusive of local trails to wide industrial easements. Remote communities use informal roads for subsistence hunting, foraging, inter-community and market access. These two shapefiles delineate the modern extent of informal roads surrounding Indigenous Evenki villages of Tokma and Vershina Khandy in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. These informal road networks were mapped based on interviews and mobile ethnographies that informed a student-run crowdsourced mapping event, or “mapathon,” to digitize the roads from high-resolution 2010s Worldview satellite imagery.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1748092
- PAR ID:
- 10512930
- Publisher / Repository:
- NSF Arctic Data Center
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- informal roads transportation cultural features
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Other: text/xml
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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