Village One

Eighteen miles south of Salt Lake City, Utah, in the suburb of South Jordan, Kennecott Land is building Daybreak, a twenty-thousand-home development. When it’s completed, Daybreak will be the largest planned community in Utah, and one of the largest in the nation. It will extend twenty miles from South Jordan to the Great Salt Lake, stretching over forty-two hundred acres of “surplus mining land”—formerly mining tailings and settling ponds—bought throughout the 1900s by Kennecott Land’s much older sister company, Kennecott Copper. The seven thousand homes of Village One, the first phase of Daybreak’s seventy-year master plan, were completed in 2005; a second “village” of equal size is currently under construction.

Bingham Canyon Mine, owned by Kennecott Copper, is known as “the richest hole on earth.” It is also one of the biggest holes on earth, visible—along with the Great Wall of China—from the moon. Open-pit mining was invented at Bingham more than a hundred years ago, and the mine has been in operation ever since, producing more copper than any other in history. Today, Bingham is the nation’s second-largest copper producer, running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, about six miles from what is now Daybreak.

In mining, they say something valuable is a head; a tail is waste. Bingham’s tailings impoundment, having been moved several times to accommodate its ever-widening girth, stretches for several miles along the Great Salt Lake and is about 99 percent as large in mass as the volume of the empty pit. Since copper ore was first recovered at Bingham in 1903, Kennecott has methodically purchased sizable tracts of land surrounding the mine as environmental liability: the deeper the pit, the more space needed for the removal, isolation, and neutralization of the millions of tons of overburden and toxic waste produced each year. Today, Kennecott owns more than ninety-three thousand acres of land in the Salt Lake Valley.

When the British-Australian mining megacorporation Rio Tinto bought Kennecott in 1989 during a depression in metal prices, surveying teams taking stock of the company’s new real estate saw an alternate vision for its use. In 2001, Rio Tinto launched Kennecott Land, which immediately began planning Daybreak—a suburb that would be subsidized by the heads of the mine and built atop its tails.

Make Yourself at Home

In the center of Daybreak stands a glass-walled Information Pavilion, where Kennecott Land representative Myranda Baxter welcomes prospective homeowners and tells them about the development. Despite the mine’s constant operation, the Information Pavilion is focused exclusively on Kennecott Copper’s postmining legacy. The term adorns a poster marking an out-of-the-way vitrine stocked with rusted artifacts of old-time mining—the only place in the pavilion where the mine itself is mentioned.

If the display of pickaxes and century-old headlamps harks back to an earlier time, the designs of Daybreak’s model homes embody many earlier times at once. Kennecott boasts ten different “Guest Builders,” each working under separate contracts with individual home buyers. The result is a mélange of styles that transport residents from one age to the next as they walk down the block. Facades jump from Arts and Crafts to Colonial Revival, from Victorian to Tudor shingle.

On the next page, Myranda goes into detail about a few of these homes.

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Welcome to the Neighborhood

One of Daybreak’s signatures is the absence of street-level power and gas lines. The town’s system of wires and pipes, made from copper bought on the global market from a variety of international suppliers and distributors, is buried beneath neighborhoods funded by the extraction of ore just down the street. Elsewhere, too, the armature of construction, maintenance, and control is barely visible: The lawns of occupied and empty houses alike are all manicured to an exacting standard; public facilities are neatly maintained regardless of how often they’re utilized; security cars circulate soundlessly, patrolling day and night. The porch of every completed home is decorated with a wreath and some form of seating for two. The blinds are almost always drawn.

On a recent visit, many of Daybreak’s homes seemed as vacant as the unbuilt lots surrounding them. The more elaborate the “vintage” architecture, the more each structure resembled a headstone, with each facade a freshly inscribed epitaph for the boom-and-bust company town, signaling a new day breaking on the waste heap of our postindustrial—but not quite postmining—economy.

On the next page, some of those homes.

All images and sound by the author. Special thanks to Mike Olenick. Thank you to the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation.