ABSTRACT
Mobile home parks (MHPs), otherwise known as “manufactured home communities” or “trailer parks” constitute a distinct, often stigmatized, neighborhood type, whose common socio-spatial conditions shape the production and texture of collective life for low- and middle-income residents. Manufactured housing and MHPs receive relatively little attention from designers, planners, researchers, and policymakers even though they are home to millions of households in the U.S. Many MHP residents prefer these neighborhoods, even with their heightened tenure insecurity and hazard risks, because of their blend of privacy and communal life. This chapter draws on semi-structured interviews, site observations, and morphological analysis of MHPs in California to address the question: What are the characteristics of manufactured home parks that enable residents to construct inclusive communities? The chapter addresses this question at three socio-spatial scales: 1) the microscale: individual households/lots; 2) the mesoscale: internal community relations; and 3) the macroscale: the interface between MHPs and their surroundings. At each of these scales, life in MHPs is shaped by dialectical relationships between residents’ self-expression and privacy on one hand and the formation of collective life on the other. At each of these three levels, the forms of inclusion enabled by MHP living are—perhaps counterintuitively—supported by and dependent on forms of differentiation and separation. The chapter closes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for both MHPs and other neighborhood types seeking to advance inclusion.
