a note came in from one of the entrants. part of it is here:
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I think that there are some situations in the world that architecture alone cannot address and I think that Athabasca is one of those. I don’t think that the showing is indicative of apathy but more of helplessness. I think it is ok to regroup and consider a new approach based on Stage 1.

Perhaps Stage 2 should go in a completely different direction rather than developing further the ideas from Stage 1. A more politically and/or education directed program involving your readers would yield greater awareness. Maybe a petition, e-mail page, Facebook page, plus written comments, drawings, film, etc. sent to the appropriate political and media people would spark a public discourse on the topic. A sort of intellectual inundation and rebuttal to the company ads currently in the news and television media which currently go unchallenged.

Having written and managed competitions before, I know how much work and effort go into it and you have chosen a huge topic to tackle and the effort will be commensurate. I’m not sure that the design community, while certainly supportive of your efforts, is up to the challenge or at least, not in this format.
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I agree that the format must be redefined and perhaps that can happen through this discussion.

Some points I do want to address first:
Sure, it isn't apathy toward the idea of a new town in the oil sands, but it is apathy that allows one to consider the project and then think 'oh, it is too big, too complex, where would I possibly start'.
Why are architects so helpless? The discipline has to be radically reworked if it can't even approach such traditional projects as planning a new town.

Stage 2 could be some sort of education awareness project, but it isn't as if all the ingredients, all the articles, all the websites, all the critiques aren't already there, easily available. We could go to the public, but the public speaks about it all the time here, radio is full of it. CBC did a long series of programs and public forums last fall, Andrew Nikiforuk has spoken all over the country about the oil sands developments, everyone knows about the cancer rates, the Irish doctor who discovered the rare cancer over-represented in Fort Chipeywan, the highway of death, the ducks: none of it is news.

No amount of protest, debate or challenge is going to affect the conglomerate of oil companies, the Conservative provincial government and the Conservative federal government who will build this town. CAPP can run all its ads showing how green it is all becoming, but that is just a tiny fraction of the whole oil sands project, which will continue. However I said all this in my original outline.

Architects are not doctors, politicians, scientists, oil men, medical researchers or even environmental researchers: we plan spaces, we organise ways of living in a landscape. If the design community isn't up to the challenge, well, what sort of community are we then? Of course there are some situations in the world that architecture alone cannot address, however, there will be a town designed by architects and planners, and built by developers probably in a P3. It will be most likely done by a major engineering firm in conjunction with a smaller, cooler environmentally savvy planner.

And true, this isn't really a competition in the traditional sense where everyone works very hard, sends in the entry and it disappears -- I did enough of those in my working days. It is, however, a hope that somehow we as a discipline could strategise an approach that would lead to some sort of intelligent way to occupy a huge and compromised terrain.

Well, I'll discuss it. I spent a week in Sudbury listening to discussions of how to re-imagine a mining and ore-reduction town which, through technological changes, requires fewer miners, uses marginally cleaner processes, has added a university and, apocryphally, a large hospital/medical centre/cancer research institution. The acid bathed landscape was sprayed with lime and then with that green mulch full of grass seed, twenty years later the black rocks of Sudbury are covered in young trees.

One of the biggest problems stems from the Mike Harris provincial tenure which amalgamated all the small company towns that are dotted around the edge of the greater Sudbury region into Sudbury itself, gutting local health care, municipal structures, social services. The result is an aging population in these satellite towns who now have to travel 30 or 40 km to visit their doctor in Sudbury. So not everyone moves away when the mine closes, or when they retire: they have an investment in their house, their property, their neighbourhood, toxic and inconvenient as it may be.

In the 60s and 70s and into the 80s acid rain was Canada's industrial disaster, something which continues, but which has paled in the face of the oil sands, controversy about which started in the early 1980s. It is the use of sulphur in pulp and paper processing and sulphur as a by-product of ore reduction and smelting processes that with water forms sulphuric acid. This still goes on, despite treaties and clean air acts. Sudbury is Fort MacMurry two generations on. It too has a disproportionate incidence of cancer and one of the shortest life expectancies in Canada. But people still live there.

There is something about casting one's gaze and research capacity way into the future, taking the long view, that does not attend to the immediate problems of the work camps for the oil sands, or the cancers, or the lethal highway of death from Ft Mac to the worksites. We need both, but the immediate world, for the workers there now, and next year and 5 years from now seems to always be overlooked.