In the western world, societies and lifestyles have been predicated on access to cheap oil. The expanding economies of the East have heedlessly copied this fossil fuel based model. In the Middle East, gasoline is presently cheaper that water. Experts now predict that at the present rate of consumption, our reserves of politically and geographically accessible oil will be exhausted within 20 years. Some researchers maintain that we are already there; that we have already reached the moment of Peak Oil and that we have left the age of flowing oil behind us.

Must architecture, urban planning and our own lifestyles radically change as the flow of oil ebbs out? What is the correlation between energy and architectural form? Resources.07 poses the question if Form Follows Fuel? Or is it Fuel that will have to follow us? Is it simply a matter of replacing our Hummer’s gasoline engine with a hydrogen fuel cell, as the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger has already done, or should we invent a new vessel for our journey? Will Peak Oil counteract the globalization and homogenization we have just recently become accustomed to; thereby allowing local initiatives to supplant them on a global and national level? Should we be searching for new utopian visions, or is it a plethora of small solutions that will create a serviceable patchwork pattern for the post-fossil city?

Documentation
Final documentation of the student proposal – Beyond Oil: Shanghai, which won first prize in the international, Swedish/ Chinese student competition Cities Beyond Oil and has been published in the Chinese magazine Urban China.

Peak oil is now