Pacific Petrodise: Brownfield Redevelopment in LA County

Advanced Urban Design Studio

Temple University Tyler School of Art and Architecture

Professor Fauzia Sadiq Garcia

2024

The violent infrastructures of fossil capitalism have created two worlds - a seemingly perfect urban fantasy, and a wasteland nightmare. Los Angeles county is home to both realities. Pacific Petrodise speculates on the redevelopment of the Carson-Wilmington refinery sites to propose an architectural urbanism which reimagines infrastructures of logistics, energy, and transportation as equitable and resilient post-oil futures which favor civic, social, and ecological welfare.

Home to more than two million Angelenos living within 2,500 feet of an active oil or gas well, Los Angeles County produces more than 1,000,000 barrels of oil a day. The infrastructural legacy of this production is incredibly destructive, with the majority of refineries existing in non-wealthy, non-white neighborhoods. The environmental and biological impact of this operation is innumerable- with a noticeable decrease in quality of life, water, and soil in addition to spikes in cancer, respiratory illness, and reported mental health disorders. Petroleum infrastructures sit at the vanguard of some of the most catastrophic injustices of environmental racism in the world today.

To acknowledge and unmake these historic injustices, the proposal engages a two-part speculative reworlding of the Carson-Wilmington refinery site. The project begins at the urban scale with a multi-site framework for post-oil urban futures. Implementing this framework in the latter half, the project proposes a single architectural object - a transportation hub. Both the urban framework and architecture examine the complex integration of industrial, social, and ecological systems organized by abatement logics in the development of a new type of post-oil urban fantasy - a Pacific Petrodise.