Thesis Defence: James Strong

For nearly fifty years, commercial development in the Canadian Oil Sands has been the generator of a population explosion in northern Alberta.  Oil sector workers seeking stable employment and high wages have been drawn to the region for decades; often with the intention of re-settling permanently (or semi-permanently) in local communities near industrial activities.  These population increases have long been the driver of urban (and sub-urban) development in Fort McMurray; which has grown to become a fully functioning industrial town of nearly 100 thousand permanent residents.

While many consider Fort McMurray a paragon of the contemporary ‘single industry’ (or company) town, an exclusive academic focus on ‘city-building’ has failed to acknowledge the increasing relevance of the company work camp in accommodating perpetual population increases.  Indeed, statistical and demographic data – gathered by the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo – has revealed a trend prioritizing the deployment of company camps in lieu of permanent improvements to the existing urban construct.

Overwhelmingly, the camp has been characterized as the natural consequence of industrial expansion: as resource extraction operations advance farther into the Canadian hinterland, the centripetal urban model (i.e. Fort McMurray) is rendered increasingly obsolete.  The expanding industrial footprint has necessitated an alternate extra-urban project.  This assumption - that the camp is inevitable - has severely limited the ongoing public discourse surrounding contemporary working accommodations, and has contributed to a perception of the camp as ‘benign’ or ‘passive’ when – in fact – the opposite is true.

This thesis aims to assess the current scope and scale of camp deployment through a careful accounting of individual accommodations sites while simultaneously exploring the organizational prerogatives of camp deployment.  The camp – as extra-urban paradigm – is linked to an explicit economic agenda which has successfully institutionalized a ‘nomadic,’ ‘transient,’ or otherwise ‘precarious’ working regime on what is arguably Canada’s most significant industrial project.