The graphic style of The Petropolis of Tomorrow: huge fonts and microscopically detailed drawings, tiny print and whole pages given over to background pattern, redistributes hierarchies of information. The essays and projects, precedents and photographs, titles and footnotes are all equal in their position in the archipelagic layout of the book: you can enter it anywhere. There is no linear narrative, the tracks are set to shuffle . Because of this, it is an irony that an essentially optimistic re-visioning of resource-extraction infrastructural installations as a new kind of polis is set next to the photographed reality of Baku and the Athabasca Bitumen Sands, both of which show the environment of these resource extraction sites as toxic and irredeemable – the damage is done. To build a positive petropolis one would have to equal, if not supersede, both the Soviet system that built Baku and the unfettered transnational corporate world of resource extraction that is the Athabasca region. In The Petropolis of Tomorrow the negatives of the petroleum landscape, are acknowledged with copious researched references, and then suspended in favour of dealing opportunistically with the hardware potential of the petroleum industry – whether it be a pipeline, a drilling rig or a refinery tank – as the physical foundation for a future petropolis. This aerial strategy is a fundamental modernist belief: if it can be diagrammed, it can happen. Farmers, pipeline bombers and people with strange new forms of cancer at the front line of petropia do not impinge on the design of these petropoli. Where is the long term care island in the archipelago? **
The Petropolis of Tomorrow is valuable, for its engagement with the pariah industry of the twenty-first century, its thoughtful theoretical arguments and its snapshot of how, willingly, architectural thought discards on-the-ground reality in favour of the utopian design. From the introduction to one of the projects, Park and Stone’s Cidade Recorrente : ‘In the middle of the ocean, water both isolates islands of activity and connects these objects within a broader network. The scale of mobility at sea has no dry analogue – ships can transport cargo the size of city blocks with relative ease. With such capacity, it is possible to condense the spatially dispersed population of the oil fields into a single network scheduled through time. While land-based mobility remains relatively limited, by way of the ocean, people and city can move omnidirectionally. Optimising this condition, Frequencity deploys a diverse range of programme shared through three moving networks that interface between a series of static points to offer the complexity and diversity of the city in a dispersed logistical environment.’ 1 This about sums it up: the new frontier, huge, ripe for rethinking, almost a tabula rasa for the ongoing pursuit of logistics, technology, industry and archipelagic urbanism. c
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1 Bomin Park, Peter Stone. ‘Cidade Recorrente’, The Petropolis of Tomorrow. Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper, editors. Barcelona and Houston: Actar and Architecture at Rice, 2013. p448
disclosure: a few years ago, before the hail Mary pass that is shale gas and all the pipeline controversies, On Site review asked for contributions to what a new town in the Athabasca oil sands would be: not that we thought it should be built, but that it will be built. The Petropolis of Tomorrow , developed with such resources, such intelligence and thought, is the first serious response, not to us, but to the subject.
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