The Recombinant City Camp

“The Recombinant City” is a speculative research by design project that considers housing – in the form of camps associated with the mining industry – as a large material stock that can be moved, reconfigured, replaced, recycled and reused based on the dynamics of the evolution of the industry. Although landscape reclamation and post-mining territorial decontamination and recovery have become increasingly relevant practices, not enough attention is paid to territories of extraction as a distinct place for living with unique social dynamics. Globally, in territories of extraction one can find a plethora of decommissioned pits, camps and cities that were rendered obsolete. Kiruna in Sweden or Chuquicamata in Chile are just two notable examples of mining “cities” that have been forcefully abandoned and their inhabitants relocated because of mining operations.

In the future, increasing demand for minerals coupled with radical changes in technologies of extraction, will force the industry to face challenges that will drastically affect their relationship to labor. Current predictions by mining corporations (CODELCO-Chile, 2014) and financial institutions alike (McKinsey 2015), forecast that mineral extraction will have to intensify and grow in the next decades. Nevertheless, many existing mines are maturing, resulting in the extraction of lower ore grades and longer haul distances from the mine face; orebody-replacement rates are in decline; and new-minedevelopment times are increasing. In the short term, the industry will require an increased number of workers on new sites and new camps. In the longer term, by 2050, robotic technologies will gradually substitute human labor, reducing the number of workers on site to the bare minimum.

Using the Chilean context as a case study, “The Recombinant City” is a vision for the future of the Chilean mining field, able to adapt to the circumstances the industry will face in the next decades. The project combines innovation in building materials and manufacturing to offer a radical alternative to current design and construction practices. We design the mining camp as social space that changes according to the dynamics of extraction and ultimately, once it expires, transforms into building material for the city.