Petropolis

Before the world runs out of oil, it’s going to try to damn hard not to run out of oil and while it tries to do that, maybe we’ll witness a far more scarred planet with features like Petropolis before a new way to provide balance and energy heals it (we hope). Archidose points to an essay by Michael Sorkin called ‘Can an indigenous culture survive in a jungle petropolis?‘ - but we wonder if the question should be more about whether we could survive with Petropolis. Anyway:

The effects of oil on the Ecuadorian landscape have been profound. On the one hand, oil has fueled a boom economy which, especially in the go-go 1970s and ’80s, generated much middle- and upper-class prosperity and government investment in public infrastructure. On the other, oil has been an environmental disaster, say people living in the area. Thousands of square miles of rain forest have disappeared. The lives of numerous indigenous peoples have been forever disrupted. And vast areas have become toxic.

…The oil concessions—covering thousands of square miles—have a very specific spatiality, a format that is, by stages, turning the forest not simply into a degraded, toxic environment but into an urbanism, a city of a new “disarticulated” character that combines webs and nodes, formality and informality, density and dispersion. Its components include grids of seismic trails (10-foot-wide pathways in which a 6.5-to-16-foot-deep hole is dug every 328 feet to hold 22-to-44 pounds of dynamite for acoustic exploration), networks of wells and toxic dumps, pumping stations, refineries, tank farms, pipelines, helicopter landing zones, airports, roadways, security check-points, military installations, and a proliferation of camps, depots, towns, and villages. In an environmental lawsuit filed against Atlantic Richfield in 1993, the plaintiffs inventoried—in this one concession—339 wells, 18,000 miles of seismic trails, 300 miles of roads, 600 toxic-waste pits, and 1,368 helicopter landing sites. Welcome to Petropolis.

Michael Sorkin In The Architectural Record