Oil Spaces: Exploring the Global Petroleumscape

301 Pages·2021·94.991 MB·English

by  Carola Hein

OIL SPACES
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, moder-
nity, 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 sus-
tainable urban environments.
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).

OIL SPACES
Exploring the Global Petroleumscape
Edited by
Carola Hein
NEW YORK AND LONDON
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Carola Hein; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Carola Hein to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and
of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has
been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No
Derivatives 4.0 license.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hein, Carola, editor.
Title: Oil spaces : exploring the global petroleumscape / edited by Carola Hein.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021014469 (print) | LCCN 2021014470 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367417512 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367417499 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780367816049 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Petroleum industry and trade—History. | Infrastructure
(Economics)—History.
Classification: LCC HD9560.5 .O3689 2022 (print) | LCC HD9560.5 (ebook) |
DDC 338.2/7282—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014469
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014470
ISBN: 978-0-367-41751-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-41749-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-81604-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780367816049
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Carola Hein
Introduction 1
1 Space, Time, and Oil: The Global Petroleumscape 3
Carola Hein
PART I
Oil, Agency, and Territoriality 19
2 The Original North American Petroleumscape: Oil-and-Gas
Empire, Petrochemical Nation 21
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 43
Ben de Vries
4 Mapping the Persian Gulf Petroleumscape: The Production of
Territory, Territoriality, and Sovereignty 66
Stephen J. Ramos
5 Between Visible and Invisible: Eni and the Building of the African
Petroleumscape 84
Giulia Scotto
vi Contents
6 The Offshore Petroleumscape: Grids, Gods, and Giants of
the North Sea 109
Nancy Couling
PART II
Oil, Materiality, and Cultural Practices 127
7 Arab Oil Towns as Petro-Histories 129
Nelida Fuccaro
8 Building Brazil’s Petroleumscape on Land and Sea:
Infrastructure, Expertise, and Technology 145
Drielli Peyerl
9 Precious Property: Water and Oil in Twentieth-Century Kuwait 159
Laura Hindelang
10 Dimensions of the Petroleumscape in the Port and the City of Hamburg 176
Christoph Strupp
11 “Production First, Livelihood Second”: The Life and Death of
Worker-Peasant Model Villages in a Chinese Oil Field 194
Hou Li
PART III
Oil Ecologies and Imaginaries 209
12 Energy Humanities and the Petroleumscape 211
Imre Szeman and Caleb Wellum
13 Antwerp’s Petroleumscape: Imagining the Carbon Age 226
Pieter Uyttenhove
14 Power Stations and Petroleum Heritage in Italy:
The Case of Porto Tolle 243
Chiara Geroldi and Gloria Pessina
15 Petroleumscape as Heritage Landscape: The Case of the Dunkirk
Port City Region 263
Carola Hein, Christine Stroobandt, and Stephan Hauser
Biographies 281
Index 285
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Carola Hein
Lecturing on the impact of petroleum flows on the built environment, I often tell my audi-
ence “Drop your oil!” a command that I also used as the title of a short piece.i Once people
start investigating the composition of their clothes and accessories, they also start looking
more carefully at their surroundings, from furniture to building materials. Zooming out
to a larger scale, they come to realize the impact of oil as material and financial flow, on
lifestyles, and on the formation of space and its imaginary, what I call the global petroleum-
scape. These spaces of oil differ from each other according to geographic, political, eco-
nomic, social, and cultural local context, while still being intimately connected. Exploring
the particularities in their local detail is more than a single person can research.
Research on global landscapes of oil has been part of my studies since the 1990s, when I
studied the urban and architectural history of the City Nord in Hamburg, a business district
developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Whatever research topic I took on after that, whether
the architecture and urban form of capital cities, global flows of urban planning ideas,
or the development of port cities, the impact of petroleum on urban form was included.
Over the years, as I have developed the petroleumscape concept, notably in “Landscapes of
Oil” in New Geographies and “Oil Spaces” in the Journal of Urban History,ii I have been able
to share my reflections with others and benefit from their research approaches. While taking
this approach further and investigating the role of petroleum in urban and rural spaces in a
forthcoming monograph, I have been able to refine my own work and connect with col-
leagues and students through conference sessions and workshops, relating their research to
the petroleumscape concept. I have worked with master’s and PhD students who have taken
on the concept for their own research.
The current book is the outcome of long-standing efforts, collaborations, and grants and
would not have been possible without the contributions of many people. A Guggenheim
i Carola Hein, “Editorial: Drop Your Oil!,” The Beam 7 (2018).
ii “Global Landscapes of Oil,” New Geographies 2 (2010); “Oil Spaces: The Global Petroleumscape in
the Rotterdam/the Hague Area,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 5 (2018).
viii Carola Hein
Fellowship in 2007–2008 was the springboard to seriously start the research on the global
petroleumscape. An NWO Creative Industries KIEM grant in 2016–2017 for the proj-
ect Petroleumscapes along the Maas: Visualizing Oil’s Impact and Promoting Citizen Sci-
ence at Museum Rotterdam allowed me to refine the concept and the spatial mapping.
The opening event occurred during the 2016 International Planning History Society (IPHS)
meeting in Delft. During the exhibition and the conference, we organized several subse-
quent events and meetings on the topic. A grant by the KNAW provided additional funding
for a workshop on the global petroleumscape held in 2017 that brought together many of
the contributors to this volume. Additional opportunities for presentations of the evolving
concept included the SACRPH conference in Cleveland 2017 and the IPHS meeting in Yo-
kohama 2018. Each of these meetings provided new inspirations. An NWO grant made this
open access publication possible. Many of the authors in this volume presented their work at
the 2017 workshop in Delft. I am grateful to everyone who participated in these meetings
as a speaker or an attendee. While I cannot list all the participants in the diverse events,
I would like to thank all of them for inspiring discussions. Several of the book authors
have since become involved in the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus PortCityFutures initiative, which
I lead. Because ships transport oil around the world, port city regions function as key petro-
leum hubs. They present particular challenges for sustainable post-oil future development,
and they have become a focus of attention for policy makers.
Special thanks go to Molly Mullin for her excellent editorial support and to Rosemary
Wakeman for her careful review of the final text.
As always, the project would not have been possible without the patience and support of
my family. With love to Patrick, Caya, Aliya, Jolan, Joris, and my parents Wuppi and late
Walter.
Introduction