Capital Petrolera

Alejandra Espinosa, Energy and sustainability, Essay, No Density, Politics and economics, Urban Paradigms

Aesthetics, Amazon, Architecture, Building, Construction, Ecuador, Emerging ecology, Environment, Essay, Geographies of extraction, Global South, Industrial context, Material extraction, Non renewable resources, Oil, Petroleum infrastructure, Unfinished, Urban landscape, Wealth

Originally published in Issue No2 of DESIRED LANDSCAPES.

Drawings by Dimitris Zampopulos.

There is always a line or, better to say, infinite lines between the spaces we aspire to inhabit and those existing within the actual realm of possibility. Sour Lake, or Lago Agrio in Spanish, is an Ecuadorian city that challenges western and modern conceptions of an ideal city. Emerging in the center of the Amazonian region, Sour Lake’s aesthetics and its architecture perspire oil: buildings, streets, stores and all the brick and mortar composing its urban dynamic are influenced by oil resources exploitation. Altogether, as the city grew, it came to be defined by an “unfinished” aesthetic that puts into discussion the relationship between urban imaginaries and their realization.