Welcome to Petropolis

June's Architectural Record features a piece by Michael Sorkin called "Can an indigenous culture survive in a jungle petropolis?," focused on the conflict of oil, urbanization, and the indigenous population of Ecuador's Amazon basin. The piece is an extension of the project our Urban Design class at City College undertook with Sorkin for Nueva Loja, the oil boom town familiarly known as Lago Agrio.

It's a typically good piece by Sorkin, with content familiar to me and my classmates but not to many people outside South America, those affiliated with NGOs focused on the Amazon, or those with an academic interest on the subject; Ecuador's dismal treatment of the rain forest and its inhabitants is overshadowed by Brazil and its larger land area considered rain forest. How oil shapes the landscape and the people living upon it is Sorkin's focus, making it extremely relevant reading as exploration potentially expands in the coming years into places not yet touched, such as the Arctic Nationl Wildlife Refuge.



Here's a sampling:

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...Welcome to Petropolis.