Oil Spaces traces petroleum’s impact through a range of territories from across the world, showing how industrially drilled petroleum and its refined products have played a major role in transforming the built environment in ways that are often not visible or recognized. Over the past century and a half, industrially drilled petroleum has powered factories, built cities, and sustained nation-states. It has fueled ways of life and visions of progress, modernity, and disaster.
In detailed international case studies, the contributors consider petroleum’s role in the built environment and the imagination. They study how petroleum and its infrastructure have served as a source of military conflict and political and economic power, inspiring efforts to create territories and reshape geographies and national boundaries. The authors trace ruptures and continuities between colonial and postcolonial frameworks, in locations as diverse as Sumatra, northeast China, Brazil, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kuwait as well as heritage sites including former power stations in Italy and the port of Dunkirk, once a prime gateway through which petroleum entered Europe.
By revealing petroleum’s role in organizing and imagining space globally, this book takes up a key task in imagining the possibilities of a post-oil future. It will be invaluable reading to scholars and students of architectural and urban history, planning, and geography of sustainable urban environments.
1. Space, Time, and Oil: The Global Petroleumscape
Carola Hein
PART I: Oil, Agency, and Territoriality
2. The Original North American Petroleumscape: Oil-and-Gas Empire, Petrochemical Nation
Carola Hein and Alan Lessoff
3. Petroleumscape as Battleground: Pladjoe, Pearl in the Crown of the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij (BPM/Shell) in the Dutch East Indies
Ben de Vries
4. Mapping the Persian Gulf Petroleumscape: The Production of Territory, Territoriality, and Sovereignty
Stephen J. Ramos
5. Between Visible and Invisible: Eni and the Building of the African Petroleumscape
Giulia Scotto
6. The Offshore Petroleumscape: Grids, Gods, and Giants of the North Sea
Nancy Couling
PART II: Oil, Materiality, and Cultural Practices
7. Arab Oil Towns as Petro-Histories
Nelida Fuccaro
8. Building Brazil’s Petroleumscape on Land and Sea: Infrastructure, Expertise, and Technology
Drielli Peyerl
9. Precious Property: Water and Oil in Twentieth-Century Kuwait
Laura Hindelang
10. Dimensions of the Petroleumscape in the Port and the City of Hamburg
Christoph Strupp
11. “Production First, Livelihood Second”: The Life and Death of Worker-Peasant Model Villages in a Chinese Oil Field
Hou Li
PART III: Oil Ecologies and Imaginaries
12. Energy Humanities and the Petroleumscape
Imre Szeman and Caleb Wellum
13. Antwerp’s Petroleumscape: Imagining the Carbon Age
Pieter Uyttenhove
14. Power Stations and Petroleum Heritage in Italy: The Case of Porto Tolle
Chiara Geroldi and Gloria Pessina
15. Petroleumscape as Heritage Landscape: The Case of the Dunkirk Port City Region
Carola Hein, Christine Stroobandt, and Stephan Hauser
Biography
Carola Hein is professor of history of architecture and urban planning at Delft University of Technology. Her authored and (co-) edited books include Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage (2019), The Routledge Handbook of Planning History (2018), Port Cities (2011), Cities, Autonomy and Decentralisation in Japan (2006), The Capital of Europe (2004), and Rebuilding Urban Japan after 1945 (2003).
