Planning the Post-Petroleumscape

Abstract

Petroleum flows have shaped landscapes, cities and buildings around the world in tangible and intangible ways. Industrial structures such as refineries and oil depots, as well as headquarters of oil companies, gas stations, and road infrastructures, are the tangible result of petroleum power. Their emergence has created new landscapes. Analysing them it will provide new insights to think about a post petroleumscape. Petroleumscape is an interesting concept from a design perspective, used to explain the relationship between production and management of industrial flows, and their impact on the urban settlement and the configuration of the space. Understanding the relation between production and space will allow to evaluate the state of the territory, its transformative potential, and finally, to identify strategies for the regeneration of the city, infrastructure, the environment, and landscape as a whole. At the beginning of the 20th century, the national government opted to make Naples into one of the most important industrial cities. East Naples, located at the edge of the city and on the only urban expansion axis toward a wider metropolitan area, has historically assumed the character of an industrial urban periphery.
East Naples, part of a Region in the past defined as “felix”, is nowadays a place of waste, a brownfield. It is a place in transition, sad result of an obsolete economic and land use model that needs to be changed. The coexistence of industrial spaces and one of Europe’s densest urban settlement system gives rise to a landscape in which, nowadays, the interstitial spaces become available to the definition of new hybridisms and possibilities of interconnections.