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 society and of citizens’ everyday lives. Resulting path dependencies and an energy culture help maintain the buildings and urban forms needed for physical and financial oil flows and celebrate oil as a heroic cultural agent, in a feedback loop that leads societies to consume more oil. Following a general analysis, the article uses the Rotterdam/The Hague area, part of the North West European petroleum hub, as a case study of this feedback loop. Only in appreciating the power and extent of oil can we engage with the complex emerging challenges of sustainable design, policy making, heritage, and future built environments beyond oil.

Brief Abstract (250 words)People have redesigned coastlines -creating ports, shaping waterfronts, and building cities -to connect water and land. Specialists from many disciplines have explored the function and design of the water-land transition over many centuries. Among them, planning as a discipline engages both with the functionality of working ports and the design of the waterfront for the urban public. Exploring the development of working ports and the revitalization of abandoned inner-city waterfronts since the 1960s, this paper reviews planning and planning history literature in regard to the specific appreciation of water. It first examines the planning of ports and its focus on improving the speed, safety and logistics, assigning water an industrial role. Second, it reflects on the design of postindustrial waterfront spaces, which ascribes a more aesthetic and symbolic as well as leisure-related role to water. Third, it points to the recent reconnection of cruise shipping with inner-city waterfront redevelopment and the coastline in general. In conclusion, the paper underscores local perceptions of water in planning literature and the need to recognize how interconnected water systems connect otherwise separated areas along the same coastline. It argues for integrated planning of port, waterfront, and city in conjunction with a comprehensive study of the environmental and ecological role of water in each of those places, both as a resource they share and, with climate change, a risk to which they must collectively respond.

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Water has served and sustained societies throughout the history of humankind. People have actively shaped its course, form, and function for human settlement and the development of civilizations. Around water, they have created socioeconomic structures, policies, and cultures; a rich world of narratives, laws, and practices; and an extensive tangible network of infrastructure, buildings, and urban form. Today, the complex and diverse systems of the past are necessarily the framework for preservation and reuse as well as for new systems. Through twentyone chapters in five thematic sections, this book links the practices of the past to a present in which heritage and water are largely two separate disciplinary and professional fields. It describes an alternative emerging present in which policymaking and design work together to recognize and build on traditional knowledge and skills while imagining how such efforts will help us develop sustainable futures for cities, landscapes, and bodies of water.