Beyond Petropolis: Designing a Practical Utopia in Nueva Loja
Michael Sorkin, Ana María Durán Calisto, Matthias Altwicker (Editors)
Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, September 2017

Hardcover w/slipcase | 11-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches | 368 pages | 990 illustrations | English/Spanish | ISBN: 978-9881619426 | $50.00

Publisher's Description:
Each year, the Graduate Program in Urban Design at The City College of New York travels to a city somewhere in the world that is experiencing a revelatory form of stress. In January of 2006 joined by students and faculty from the Universidad Catolica in Quito and from the architecture and landscape programs at CCNY ? the destination of the group was the small town of Nueva Loja in the Amazon basin of Ecuador.
At the time, a population of around 100,000 was expanding exponentially. Nueva Loja was the fastest growing municipality in the country. There was one reason for this: the oil boom. Indeed, almost everyone calls the place ?Lago Agrio? ? Bitter Lake, after the town in Texas that houses the headquarters of Texaco, the first petroleum giant on the scene. There?s little irony in this name. As the endless lawsuit against Chevron, Texaco?s successor, has made abundantly clear, Lago?s growth has come at the cost of extremely bitter consequences. The group was inspired to visit by a more particular observation: Lago?s projected rate of growth would see the population exceed 150,000 at just the moment the oil ran out. And so, they decided to inves...