Ideas
The Alberta government has announced that it needs a new town, 100 km north of Fort MacMurray, closer to the oil sands. We expect that this will be the occasion for a giant, limited competition some time in the future, however, we would like to set an ideas competition for what it means to live near an enormous, toxic, industrial site that is so controversial that not only can it be seen from space, but it can be seen from both Europe and Washington.
Existing conditions
In Canada, primary resource extraction tends to be remote, and accommodation is in camps. Memorably, on one of the camp websites it says that few amenities are provided because it means less absenteeism. If there is nothing to do at 'home' you might as well go into work.
Meanwhile, there are grave ecosystem problems: migrating ducks in the tailings ponds, an over-representation of obscure cancers in Fort Chipeweyan downstream from the tar sands.
Adjacent First Nations are in control of land that could be developed as oil extraction sites, so their interest in their own health has to be put beside their interest in revenue. Given that many northern First Nation reserves might be called Canada's extremely impoverished third world, this is an issue.
On one hand the US government finds the oil sands environmentally abhorrent, on the other, it is a source of safe energy without the complications of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or the complicated energy politics of OPEC.
We can foresee many solutions that drop a little new urbanism new town into the spruce tree blanket of northern Alberta, but remember, the fellows who will be living in it left their hearts and their families in Newfoundland, or in Venezuela, or in Churchill. Fort MacMurray has a small permanent population, mostly engaged in administration or the service industry, and which boosts Fort Mac as a great place to live, raise a family, etc, etc. however the hostels and the camps are little different in theory than the hostels and camps of South African or Chinese mines. Drug trafficking and all that attends it is a major problem. Mining is a desperate venture, whether surface or underground.
What kind of town do we need to support such industrial ventures?
This will be a three stage project:
1. outline the urban, social, architectural and environmental issues that will act as the framework for the project. There is a $25 entry fee for this stage.
TO REGISTER, CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE REGISTRATION FORM
All entries will be published on this website.
2. propose a town project. This consists of 2 boards that list the issues, and show the material and architectural responses to these issues.
Each one of these projects will be published on this website and will be part of an exhibition.
3. these proposals will be further developed. $2000 to cover expenses will be available for each strategy which will consist of a built model and a very convincing explanation — could be a video, a photo gallery, an installation, a performance.
These strategies will be published in as many venues as possible.
Why?
We want to flood Alberta with ideas: new ideas, challenging ideas, intelligent ideas. This isn't about a winner, and the fully developed schemes will not be built – well, they could be, but it won't be up to us to do this.
However, we do sense that there is a paucity of urban thinking about topics which are socially, economically, infrastructurally and environmentally problematic. Whatever one thinks about the oil sands, they are not going to go away. We want to turn our intelligence, as designers, to this vastly complex project. And, to disseminate our ideas so widely that they become part of the working vocabulary of oil sands urban development.
Three immediate solutions propose themselves
1 Dubai will be built in northern Alberta, we should sign up Zaha now.
2 the status quo will be maintained: work camps and a transient workforce.
3 some kind of 21st century ecology will develop. What will this be?
Deadlines
stage 1: submissions posted here
stage 2: September 1 2011
stage 3: January 1 2012
for additional commentary, see comments to this post.
project outline
Reader Comments (5)
from Brad LaFoy, Architects Without Borders, Winnipeg:
As to setting parameters such as site, population etc, my gut reaction is that it is important that at least some of these be stated clearly in the design brief. Otherwise, the competition could run the risk of comparing apples to oranges with little clear criteria for how to determine what is "best".
On Site: How we see this project working is that everyone works through the project themselves, thinking what would be the absolutely best solution to the injection of 200,000 more people into the Athabasca region. Maybe you might find that the area and the industry, after a bit of research, can only sustain 100,000, or 5,000. Maybe the solution is so technologically driven that this town could exist on a tailings pond, or perhaps it is a chance to reconnect to aboriginal principles which require a certain distance from any sources of air-born toxins, and so on. This is an ideas competition; we won't be looking for a 'best' solution, but the widest possible range of solutions.
Every entry will be on display, none rejected unless they suggest we build on the moon or something. How I see it is that we are building a compendium of ideas, in 2011, for how people might live and work in a fairly dangerous resource-extraction district. It might be specific to Fort McKay, or general enough to take to the oil sands in the Congo.
So, no limitations, no criteria other than what I've already said in the opening call for entries. In my experience, when projects come in, they fall into camps. We shall put together a review panel at that point to discuss the potential for development of each strategy.
from John Sadar, Monash University, Melbourne
Do you have a sense of the programme for this? for instance, how many dwellings? you mentioned the issue of amenities, but ought there be provision for schools/policing/health+disease? I also imagine some sort of general store for food and basics?
How does sewage/water supply/electricity get handled?
Do you have a clear sense of soil conditions - frost depth primarily?
Finally, what sort of transport provisions would you be thinking of? Only autos, or also helicopters/aircraft?
On SIte:
We haven't put any programmatic information out as we are striving for ideas and possible innovative approaches to the project. If it helped, are there mining towns in the centre of Australia: fierce climate, dangerous roads, isolation?
There is so much information on the web, we don't want to start to select some of it and so perhaps limit or contain other possibilities. However, Fort McMurray was a new town, originally. It is little less than 100,000 and growing at 8.5%/year.
Fort McKay (http://www.fortmckay.com/) is a reserve town of about 900 people. It is next to the Horizon oil and gas plant which had an huge explosion a couple of weeks ago.
Work camps float out in the bush: all amenities are within the camp.
Conklin is a Metis settlement: gas station, grocery store and bar beside the highway: it is expected to grow by 200,000 over the next ten years. Right now it has a couple of hundred people.
Ft McMurray is little less than 100,000. The gist is that the oil sands are expanding, so the towns are too.
Representative maps and research units on the webpage lead to particular websites that talk about water resources, settlements, roads. You might try typing into google phrases such as Athabasca Region geology, or soil conditions, or climate. And then try it again with Oil Sands geology, soil conditions etc. Then run it all again for the dark view as Tar Sands geology, soil, etc.
For transport, that the Alberta government wants to build a new town indicates that it will be linked to Alberta Highways Dept: no doubt there are studies, but they aren't available right now.
At the level of an ideas project, the decision whether this new town is essentially a large work camp or is an actual settlement with families and schools is part of the solution. Newfoundlanders who are 6 weeks on, 2 weeks off, fly home to St John's, something like 4000km away. The closest major city is Edmonton, 440km away. There is a lot of money made in the oil sands, so another decision to be made is whether those salaries are spent elsewhere, or in a big mall in this new town. For example, Nanaimo BC is less than 100,000 people and has 5 gigantic malls plus a refurbished downtown core.
As to on site transport, yes, people and provisions are trucked, flown, helicoptered and bussed in. The distance from the tailings ponds, for all living things, starts to indicate degrees of separation. However, is there any option, anywhere in the mining world of the early 21st century, of walking to work? The road that everyone travels to work on from Ft McMurray is lethal and there have been many accidents.
There is a history of company towns and new towns that squeeze into the landscape and colonise it. For this vast area, there are lakes, rivers and highways, there are cross road gas stations, and of course google satellite maps. Should there be one town of 200,000 or five towns of 40,00: so that one would be doing a template that could fold into various landscapes?
There is a vast amount of information on the web, one just needs the critical keywords. which are: oil sands, tar sands, athabasca region, wood buffalo regional district.
Q: Can you articulate what you are looking for for stage 1? I understand that it is an identification and weighting of issues. Is it boards, or more of a report? Is is graphical or textual? Is there a format - e.g. A3 landscape document of between 4 and 16 pages?
Also, for stage 2, is there a size and number of boards that may be submitted?
Are the deadlines for receipt, or for mailing? Are entries to be hard-copies, or will digital submissions also work?
Finally, do names go on everything, or nothing?
A: For the entry itself, this is going to be an on-line exhibition first, and then perhaps a mounted exhibition later. It could be a 16-page report, but I think the graphic images of what a new town would look like, how it worked, what its structure is would be necessary. There is no format other than it has to be legible on a web screen. So, if someone is doing a giant poster, say, it would have to be at a resolution than a viewer could travel around it reading the fine print. Or, someone might do an animation or a video. or a series of drawings. Think of the product as web-viewable in the widest sense. Remember too that web-viewers are fairly passive and like just to watch stuff without too much work.
for an eventual printed publication, the resolution becomes an issue, so save for the web, but retain a 300dpi res back-up for print. We need to raise a bit of money for the publication, that is why it is tentative right now.
stage 2: more conventional presentations. 2-3 A2 panels
names: names can be on anything. If you did an entry and its only site for viewing was on the web and you wanted anyone interested to contact you about it, you would want to be identified in some way. Identification could all go through us, but we are hoping that entries also have a life of their own for their authors.
deadlines: send everything electronically, we have an ftp site for which, closer to the time, we will post the password info.
Q: is there no registration deadline? or is that the same as the stage one deadline?
Thanks!
yes, send your registration along with your entry.