Along the streets of Western North Carolina: Notes on mobile home parks

Since starting my PhD journey, I traveled most widely within the United States in fall 2025 when I joined a project as a field surveyor. One branch of our lab's work focuses on detecting manufactured homes from satellite imagery and validating their locations on the ground. My task was simple: travel across North Carolina, visit places identified from above, and confirm whether mobile home parks were there. I went into the field expecting to see them mainly as data points. This is a reflection on what I began to notice once those points became lived places.

More than one kind of place

The survey focused on presence, but being there made it difficult not to notice the spectrum of qualities that could only be sensed on the ground. Mobile home parks are, of course, difficult to separate from questions of poverty and inequality. Infrastructural disadvantages were visible in energy, water, sanitation, and drainage, while location itself sometimes added another layer of vulnerability. One park sat beneath large transmission lines; another climbed such a steep hillside that even driving through it required care. Some of the sites that stayed with me most uneasily were those located very close to rivers, exposed to flooding and perhaps already carrying traces of Hurricane Helene.

Yet no two places looked quite the same. Some were managed almost like small villages, with orderly roads and shared spaces. Within others, one home stood out through flowers, a children's play area, porch lights, or small decorations. These details did not erase structural disadvantages, but they showed how incomplete those disadvantages were as a description of place.

Inside, outside, and in between 

The strongest variation often appeared in the relationship between a mobile home park and its surroundings. In some rural towns, manufactured homes mixed so naturally with conventional houses, fields, and local roads that it was difficult to tell where a park began or ended. Several homes could be present without forming what I had imagined as a distinct "park." In more urbanized and industrial areas, parks were often larger and denser, with clearer entrances, internal roads, or gates.

What interested me most, however, was not the gate itself but the boundary it represented. In some counties, high and dense fences appeared repeatedly; elsewhere, even gated communities remained visually open, and the gate seemed almost decorative. Traveling through many countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe has left me with one informal observation: visible security does not always correspond to felt security. Places that feel secure may have less need to constantly mark and defend their boundaries. I would not turn that impression into a rule, but county by county and neighborhood by neighborhood, the contrast was striking. Some parks were tightly enclosed by fences, while others seemed to dissolve almost entirely into the surrounding landscape.

Patterns and particulars 

By the end of the fieldwork, I could imagine several recurring physical configurations: tightly arranged or dispersed, gridded or shaped by hills and older roads, enclosed or open, clearly separated from surrounding housing or almost seamlessly mixed into it. These configurations may intersect with how people experience residence, develop attachment to place, decide whether to stay, and prepare to search for somewhere else.

Yet the scenes that stayed with me longest were often the ones such a typology would miss: a row of flowers, a small garden, colorful lights by the door, a children's play area made from an ordinary corner. These details would not affect whether our satellite classification was correct, nor would they appear in most formal datasets or categories. Still, I came to think that they, too, are part of what makes a space a place.

Somewhere between movement and stillness

The project began with a view from the sky: clear, expansive, and patterned, like a North Carolina fall. My part of it took place on the ground, where the same landscape unfolded into streets, hills, rivers, and leaves in different colors, still the same North Carolina fall. One revealed patterns; the other, details that disappeared at scale. Somewhere between those two views of the same place, field validation became more than confirming whether a point on a map was correct.

I have often thought about the tension within the term “informal settlement”: to settle is to become fixed, yet informality implies uncertainty. “Mobile home” echoes that contrast: home suggests rootedness, yet mobility implies movement. In both, the words pull in different directions, yet together describe a condition that neither could capture alone. Perhaps that is why, for a while, somewhere between movement and stillness, I found myself along the streets.

Sep. 2026