cartographic metaphors petropolis as archipelago
reading material | resource extraction by stephanie white
oil infrastructure geography
urbanism networks
The Petropolis of Tomorrow , a curiously nostalgic Buck Rogers sort of title, carefully presents the historic roots of archipelagic relations: a University of Toronto architecture studio went to the islands of the Aegean, the tops of a mountain range, the original archipelago. Ungers and Koolhaas’s 1977 plan for Berlin which re-defined the city as an archipelago of sub-centres with green belt in between (mentioned often throughout this book) underpins discussion of the figure-ground of island and ocean: which is the figure, which is the ground? The oceans are our future, hold most of our resources and control our weather. The islands are where we live and what we know. Although connections between islands are often clumsy, the archipelago works as a collective territory. In systematised territory, say The Interstate Highway System, a mesh of American cities connected by traffic arteries of numbing utility where highway verges block out the rural hinterland behind, everything is given an equivalency. The usefulness of the archipelago as a metaphor is to select, out of this flattened blur, islands that can be thematically connected: the petroleum archipelago: Anchorage - Edmonton - Calgary - Houston - Caracas — big islands with smaller islands nearby, such as Fort MacMurray and Corpus Christi. Conceptually, the archipelago can be very elastic. This is its strength – a fresh way to conceptualise one’s way through the cloud[s]. It is also cartographically based, which allows a default to the basic condition of islands afloat in an undifferentiated sea whenever the metaphor is stretched too far. Although our economic, resource, military, political and cultural systems can be detached from geography, they are also indisputably grounded in physical space and time. Petropolis occurs where oil is either extracted, refined, transported or used. Which is everywhere. Neeraj Bhatia references Frederick Douglas Turner in his description of the Campos Basin archipelago of oil wells and rigs off Rio de Janeiro as a frontier – the meeting point of wilderness and civilisation. He recasts Turner’s nineteenth century American frontier that stepped ever-westward away from the entrenched and corrupt old centres of the eastern seaboard (connected by the Atlantic to the even more corrupt centres of Europe) as structurally similar to the stepping away in a spirit of independence and freedom from mainland Brazil, out into the ocean in an archipelago of oil wells and rigs. Perhaps. The frontier thesis seems to fit better core-periphery relations and the system of resource exploitation in the periphery, (the frontier) by the core (the mainland, the cities, the centres of commerce). All that can be done to redress an imbalance of power is for the periphery to withhold its labour and its resources – the ultimate spirit of independence and freedom. However, the periphery needs the core to supply it with, baldly, market. The petropia archipelago, fascinating, fragmented, complex, is not and cannot be autonomous simply because its product is petroleum. Freedom and independence of spirit are useful nationalist qualities, but nation-states appear irrelevant in this book. This is its ambiguous core: is a book of maps that often coincide with cartography, representations of land mass, but without political representation. **
A tome crashed through my mailbox last month – a 2 x 9 x 6 block of book, The Petropolis of Tomorrow , edited by Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper, a triangulation of essays and projects between Toronto, Infranet lab, Harvard GSD South American Project and Rice University where Casper studies and Bhatia taught. It is published by ACTAR (Barcelona) and Rice, printed in the EU, distributed by ACTAR Din NY. I mention this array of links and dispersed institutions because their very atomisation parallels the overriding metaphor that directs The Petropolis of Tomorrow , the archipelago. Mason White tells us in his essay that the petropia archipelago is not to be taken as a metaphor, but a geologically based reality. But why this reality and not another? A successful metaphor encapsulates complex theory, backed by theoretical development and describes, in an instant, all sorts of conditions, ideas and situations. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome was such a metaphor: it provided a new way of visualising loose and indefinable connections that were moiling around unable to coalesce in a traditional, centralised metaphor of knowledge. One might say that all theory is meant to describe the world as any one culture finds it. A full generation ago when I applied literary theory to architecture, it was revelatory: Foucault and Derrida, relativism and semiotics still in play. My formulation of a postcolonial architecture along the lines of postcolonial literature, led me to world systems theory and core-periphery relations. Bingo. This made total sense: asymmetrical power relationships, travelling theory – all was clear. Everything I looked at, everything I knew, could be explained by my position on the periphery of the semi-periphery with its false consciousness of core ambitions. What both postcolonial studies and world systems theory did was to diminish the hegemony of the centre – it lost its critical and cultural dominance. The world is no longer first, second and third worlds but BRICS and MINTS; there has been a levelling of economic power, military might and control (asymmetrical warfare is now the norm) and Europe and the United States are no longer the arbiters of cultural excellence. I found this all very useful. Then came the rise of the internet which presented the world as a vast multidimensional web, then a cloud, where paths, routes, nodes and edges (the vocabulary by which we have described cities since Kevin Lynch) are completely random, provisional, seemingly arbitrary and un-replicable. Algorithms collect and sort data, but there is so much raw data it is possible that the algorithms cannot be checked. Enter archipelago as an organising metaphor; nominally, in The Petropolis of Tomorrow , a way to articulate sites of oil resource extraction. This can be the array of drilling platforms in the Campos and Santos Basin off the coast of Brazil, or the rigs of the North Sea, or the oil capitals whose executive personnel seem to be interchangeable and highly mobile – the Al Qaeda attack on the Algerian gas plant in 2012 collected hostages from ten countries. The archipelago that is the Athabasca Bitumen Sands not only has a geographic dimension, but a larger cultural field that extends to Newfoundland, yes, but also to Venezuela and Nigeria.
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