Unpack Living: Housing the Working Nomad

The development of resource extraction sites in Canada has created a temporary, dynamic and nomadic workforce that flies back and forth between work sites and geographically distant home-base residences on a three-to-one week rotation. Worker housing takes the form of prefabricated single-storey dormitory slabs arranged on a grid. These isolated, temporary, and fixed-form housing camps have been developed to support mining developers’ ever-expanding business, and constitute an inexpensive and time-efficient alternative to working towns of old. However, their repetitive and undifferentiated morphology produces alienating environments; social problems abound therein. This thesis reexamines the architecture of temporary, industry-related dwelling with a view to creating more humane dwelling environments. Taking the full cycle of the mine’s life span into account, the thesis also addresses the question of how trucked-in housing can leave a lighter environmental footprint on the Canadian landscape.