Beyond Petropolis

Beyond Petropolis: Designing a Practical Utopia in Nueva Loja
Michael Sorkin, Ana María Durán Calisto, Matthias Altwicker (Editors)
Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, September 2017



Hardcover w/slipcase | 11-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches | 368 pages | 990 illustrations | English/Spanish | ISBN: 978-9881619426 | $50.00

Publisher's Description:

Each year, the Graduate Program in Urban Design at The City College of New York travels to a city somewhere in the world that is experiencing a revelatory form of stress. In January of 2006 joined by students and faculty from the Universidad Catolica in Quito and from the architecture and landscape programs at CCNY – the destination of the group was the small town of Nueva Loja in the Amazon basin of Ecuador.

At the time, a population of around 100,000 was expanding exponentially. Nueva Loja was the fastest growing municipality in the country. There was one reason for this: the oil boom. Indeed, almost everyone calls the place “Lago Agrio” – Bitter Lake, after the town in Texas that houses the headquarters of Texaco, the first petroleum giant on the scene. There’s little irony in this name. As the endless lawsuit against Chevron, Texaco’s successor, has made abundantly clear, Lago’s growth has come at the cost of extremely bitter consequences. The group was inspired to visit by a more particular observation: Lago’s projected rate of growth would see the population exceed 150,000 at just the moment the oil ran out. And so, they decided to investigate what might happen then, how Nueva Loja could move beyond oil to an economy and urban pattern that embrace renewed harmony with the natural environment and is dedicated to creating an intensely humane and supportive place for its inhabitants.

The projects in this volume represent a series of propositions for such a place. They are utopian in that they look to a time of harmony and prosperity but intensely practical in that they stem from the specifics of people and place and utilize simple, historical, and local technologies, not any magic fix.

dDAB Commentary:

Last week Terreform hosted a live online remembrance for Michael Sorkin, who died in March after contracting the coronavirus. The nearly three-hour celebration (it can still be watched on Facebook) included comments by Terreform employees, Michael's wife, Joan Copjec, and many familiar people who knew him personally and professionally. I've written many times on this blog about Michael, whom I studied under at City College and who wrote some of my favorite books. It was great during the event to hear one person, Ana Maria Duran, speak about an experience that I shared in part: Duran recounted (starting at the exact 2-hour mark in the video) how Michael enthusiastically embraced her pitch for him to do something in South America. But he went beyond her idea of a biennale appearance and instead dedicated a one-year studio to Lago Agrio, an oil town in Ecuador. I was one of the urban design students in that studio, and Beyond Petropolis is the book that many years later came out of those two semesters.

Given my involvement in the studio, I can't really review Beyond Petropolis, which came out close to ten years after my fellow urban design students and I got our master degrees. I was also involved with some of its production, helping Michael with some last-minute pieces, such as securing rights to reprint an article written by Patrick Radden Keefe that appeared in The New Yorker in early 2012. The long article went into the story of oil exploration in Ecuador's Amazon basin and the prolonged legal battle between indigenous populations and the oil companies that were hired by the Ecuadorian government to exploit the deposits of oil in the region. It was important to reveal what had happened in the ensuing years and give context to the studio focusing on Lago Agrio. The article comes at the end of the book, whose pages are split into four parts: introductory essays by Sorkin, Duran, and others; social and environmental background on the region; analyses and proposals for infrastructure in Lago Agrio; and design proposals by the urban design and architecture students from CCNY.

With quality paper and binding, and the inclusion of a slipcase, Beyond Petropolis is an elegant summary of my year at City College, something many grad students would no doubt kill for. Unfortunately some of the text is presented light green on dark green, like the first spread below, making the most interesting texts in the book (The New Yorker piece and Sorkin essay included) hard to read. Regardless, it's a lovely book. But I have often wondered how many people outside CCNY would appreciate it; what is the audience for student projects on a topic alien to many people, to those in the US at least? Duran's comments in celebration of Michael make clear how important it was to have the studio in Ecuador, in partnership with her students in Quito, and to produce the book. The latter in particular is a symbol that progressive ideas, in this case of sustainable urban design, need to address places that are overlooked and in peril.

Spreads:


Author Bio:

Michael Sorkin is an American architectural critic and author of several hundred articles in a wide range of both professional and general publications.

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