Oil Spaces: Extended Urbanization from Sea to Land

Flows of petroleum have shaped buildings, cities and landscape around the world on sea and land. This paper shows how industrially drilled petroleum and its refined products have played a major role in transforming the built environment over the last century and a half, in ways that are often not visible or recognized. Understanding the multiple...

Changing Minds: Towards Water-Based Architecture and Public Space for the Future Urban Archipelago

This blog contribution supports the Urban Archipelago expo at Nieuwe Instituut (NI) in Rotterdam, designed to consist of four elements: a map, a view, a model, and a series of films that depicted a future of living with water, as well as a booklet that documented student work. The expo has been part of the Water Cities Rotterdam, which opened...

Between Tradition and Modernity: Western urban planning and street improvement projects in Hankou (1889-1937)

This article examines street improvement projects in Hankou's case for unearthing the contribution of Chinese political elites and planers in exchanging planning concepts and technologies from the West to China. Aiming to realize the Modern Metropolis, which Sun Yat-sen proposed in the fundamentals of national reconstruction, Chinese political...

(Re)-positioning Spatial Planning History and Historiography

Since its emergence in the 19th century, modern spatial planning has served as a tool to address public health issues, to organise infrastructure, or to structure cities and landscapes. Throughout this period, planning has been both praised and challenged by the different actors involved. Governments and corporations have historically used...

What Does Building Green Mean in Port Cities?

This article explores the concept of ‘green’ in architecture and urban design through the lens of port cities. Due to global pressures such as climate change, energy transition and soil consumption the planning of port cities requires new scenarios for achieving equilibrium between nature and water systems. Despite the fact that the concept of...

North Sea Crossings: Historical geo-spatial mapping as a tool to understand the local development of port cities in a global context

The global petroleumscape of the Rotterdam/The Hague area: As a model for further research

Flows of petroleum have shaped the built environment of industrial, retail, administrative, and ancillary spaces, of infrastructures and buildings, as well as their representation. Carola Hein analyses the spatial impact of petroleum on the sea-land continuum through the lens of the port city region of Rotterdam/The Hague.

Viscosity: Historical geo-spatial mapping as a tool to understand the local development of port cities in a global context

Nancy Couling and Carola Hein explore the physical and metaphorical viscosity of two North Sea liquids – oil and seawater. Thickness and resistance to flow cause friction in planning and in the petroleum industry but installations erected to enforce the flow of petroleum, create unexpected viscous conditions in the North Sea as a whole.

Blankness: The Architectural Void of North Sea Energy Logistics

Energy logistics have contributed to the gradual transformation of the North Sea into an industrial void. Referring to the concept of blankness articulated by Roberto Mangabiera Unger and Jeffrey Kipnis, Nancy Couling and Carola Hein call for imaginative architectural interventions that respond to the potential of logistic spaces lodged within...

Teaching history for design at TU Delft: exploring types of student learning and perceived relevance of history for the architecture profession

Historical investigation anchors architectural and urban practice. Analyzing two sets of questionnaires distributed in different class settings, this paper explores two questions: how do design students currently learn about architectural history, and how do they translate this knowledge into their design practice? First, tentative conclusions...

What’s in a cover image?: How to depict planning history

A book’s cover is frequently the first visual element of a book that a reader encounters in a library, bookshop, or—most likely now—on the Internet. Combining the publisher’s usually predetermined logo, typography and layout with an image provided by the volume editor or author, the cover aims to convey multiple meanings. These meanings are...

Visual Content Analysis and Linked Data for Automatic Enrichment of Architecture-Related Images

Built form dominates the urban space where most people live and work and provides a visual reflection of the local, regional and global esthetical, social, cultural, technological and economic factors and values. Street-view images and historical photo archives are therefore an invaluable source for sociological or historical study; however,...

Searching for Meiji-Tokyo: Heterogeneous Visual Media and the Turn to Global Urban History, Digitalization, and Deep Learning

Oil Spaces: The Global Petroleumscape in the Rotterdam/The Hague Area

Corporate and public actors have built the physical and financial flows of petroleum into the very landscape. This article identifies different layers of those flows— physical, represented, and everyday practices—that combine into a palimpsestic global petroleumscape. It posits that these layers historically became essential parts of modern...