Ali Navid
FROM FICTION TOWARDS AN ARCHITECTURAL CRITIQUE
Post-Petropolis is a fairy tale that tells the story of the land. The story of conflicting natural and artificial landscapes; a speculative and theoretical proposal that explores today’s immense rate of consumption, our precipitous abuse of the landscape, and the planet’s scarce resources. The context is Alberta after the Oil Boom. What will we be doing, imagining and designing after this orgy of production and immorality? What should be done with all the industrial carcasses and disfigured land left behind once the industries have exhausted the land? Post-Petropolis questions whether it is possible to heal the colossal land scars caused by Oil Sand production with an architectural strategy that envisions the post-oil future of Alberta.
Toxic Tourism:
A land that once supported potato and dairy farms transformed into super-sized industrial oil sand factories pumping and dumping synthetic crude to the United States and since the oil bust in 2050. The landscape has transformed again into a monumental tourist destination for delirious and acidic experiences.
New Suburbia:
Suburbia is a mobile ground on the quest to establish a new region, with the ephemeral edifice. It is a territory of roads and monster trucks escaping the urban zone of the Petropolis. Parents have made these regions new ‘monster pastoral’ countryside on wheels.
Neon City:
Neon City is a self-reflecting territory made of an intricate maze – a network of oil and gas refineries, a new land where illegal consumption is authorized. This senseless territory offers a hidden feast of drugs, sex, and fantasy, within an infinite network of pipes, storage tanks, and spiral stairs. Here, visitors experience the disconnected autonomous moment of time being at the mercy of Great White North. In this New Alberta, the economy of survival is found in prostitution. Carbon lust is also a platform for a Dionysian bacchanalia of surplus.
Yellow Shrine:
Yellow Shrine relies on the strong foreign worker program to build the wonderful shrines and keep the spirit of the gods and goddesses alive through the collection of offerings and holy sacrifices. Worshippers offer Jars of dirt as indulgence. This new territory of the religious ground is a key element in providing good fortune and spiritual support for all. The Yellow Shrines establish a new religious journey that brings hope and faith to New Alberta.
The Little Duck Holocaust:
Necropolis is a dark and wet territory made up of a complex accumulation and compression of various types of carcasses. Body parts collide in an entropically generated landscape, creating a territory that can be ravished from multiple points of view. Abandoned skeletons built up over years resemble the prehistoric leftovers of an ignorant civilization. Yet this new territory is the most visited in Alberta, mostly due to the lavish art of taxidermy. Necropolis can be best described as a mass burial territory exhibited in vitrines.
In Search of Sad Oil:
The most fascinating aspect of sad oil in New Alberta, this voluntary isolation, is that it transforms an idyllic toxic land into an extraordinary theater of ephemeral anxiety. This new ground becomes an unfertile terrain a landscape of extreme experimentations, thus proposing a new ecology of hope and life in a heavily polluted gluten-free carcinogenic land. Here, only time offers stability, an escape from the anxiety of uncertainty.
Homogeneous Territory:
Built out of expandable space frame structures that keep the region intact from any sudden economic shift, the scale and pace of the Homogeneous Territory and the refreshed economical guidelines challenge the notion of permanence as a basic state of any province. These ephemeral landscapes of pop-up industries persistently increase and provoke the notion of “The City” as a permanent entity. The Homogenous Territory offers a new theory of social and economic principles with tentative expiration dates and a return to pre-planned obsolescence.
Transient Westland Territories:
Transient Wetland Territories are infused with carbon to feed microbes in the tailing ponds, which in turn break down hydrocarbons and boost the fine sand settlement process. This is a madly innovative solution to enhance the removal of fine particulates from the tailing ponds. TWTs are the only hope to reclaim what was once called land. Once the TWTs set sail, the shallow vegetation on the surface of the floating basin provides enough area and nutrition to support various species of birds and mammals. This Archilocus is the new Alberta tourist destination to rival the Rocky Mountain range.
New alliance Territory:
By 2055, the New Alliance territory had been effectively transformed into a state of disuse. The oil industries CAT walks is now populated with facades that represent various political parties that have cleansed the contaminated landscape of the oil and gas industries from 2016. The lucrative political campaign process of remediation is exhibited by the department of factual certainty as a symphony of facades that has re-mediated and transformed the landscape into a performance of truth, reality and personality contest. The parties’ banners and flags move in unison to broadcast their presence in the field and reach out to their constituency for support.
Pedagogic Territory:
This territory is a unique educational region, rich in diversity, collaboration, and scholarship through design. Here, students explore today’s most creative design approaches, with an international faculty prominent across the field. The architecture faculty de-schools each and every student and provides them with a range of design investigations, expands their knowledge, and confronts them with challenges of the contemporary built environment. Upon graduation, they will be exported overseas to international markets. Alberta’s only means of survival were the Chicago Boys and their new economic theory of tutelage.
Bureau of Reclamation:
Here in Fort McVegan, all that is left over is converted to feed cows in various stations across the region. Cows are employed for casual strolls in hä-häs. Fresh manure produced by cows is sent to nearby digestion chambers to produce biogas that fuels the city and connects every BBQ restaurant with a biogas piping system. This new territory can coexist with living spaces, promoting a return to the Deutscher Werkbund model of 19th century Germany, henceforth promoting the Homo Faber movement with the agricultural city’ as the result, a genuinely mixed-use fruitful place with an identity.
Post-script
To conclude this phantasmagoria (Petropolis) - though fictional - is appropriate and relevant. It promotes a powerful and frightening spirit in Alberta. Post Petropolis is an Imaginarium for Alberta’s landscape and oil economy where the fictional narrative is used to explore, discover and invent unique realities within which new ecologies of hope are sited.
This thesis is not arguing for or against sustainable living; rather what this research has uncovered is how difficult it is to take any responsibility. Taking responsibility is not easy, no doubt. The research here aims to reach a different constituency, not just the general public. Returning to Newton’s Third Law, we can now experience first-hand some serious reaction to some very poor planning actions that designers, planners, and governments have been making for centuries.
Again, this research does not intend to provide an architectural solution per se, but rather proposes a sincere discussion and aims to inform and invite the authorities at all levels to take responsibility. Not just the authorities, all of us, designers, citizens, politicians, professors. If we want to change we must act, otherwise, all Eco-green awareness is pointless. What do we want to save in Alberta and why?
POST-PETROPOLIS RECOGNIZES THAT ANY POSSIBLE FUTURE PROPOSAL, IMAGINARY OR REAL WILL BE ON SACRED INDIGENOUS LAND, SPECIFICALLY THE TERRITORY OF THE MÉTIS PEOPLE. POST-PETROPOLIS ACKNOWLEDGES THE CONTINUAL DISPLACEMENT OF NATIVE PEOPLE BY THE CONSTITUTION ACT AND IS COMMITTED TO WORKING TO UNDO THE ONGOING EFFECTS OF THIS COLONIAL HERITAGE.