Abstract
Of the 3,102,128 passengers flying in and out of Berlin-Schönefeld airport every month (Brandenburg "Traffic Statistics" 2019), how many are aware of the network of actors and infrastructure behind the scenes enabling this action? In this paper, we follow Jet A1 aviation fuel's journey from its source to its point of use and shine a light on the infrastructures, actors, and urbanities facilitating it and being affected by it. Berlin's growth as a tourist destination and as an attractive, cosmopolitan city correlates with an explosion in budget air travel across Europe over the last two decades. That is a result of the synergetic relationship between Berlin, its airports, the tourist industry, and the oil industry. Both airports are served by a refinery from the GDR-era city Schwedt/Oder, which is strategically developed on the Polish border, where the Soviet Druzhba (Friendship) pipeline meets with Europe. Once functioned as a ''hinterland and nominated as ideal 'socialist city,' today's Schwedt has been steadily shrinking. The monofunctional environment of pragmatic industrial urbanism is to blame, the proving that 'the non-city' is no longer exterior to the urban but a basic terrain of capitalist urbanization (Brenner 2016 p. 125). The word hinterland refers to places that are usually out of sight for city dwellers. In "The Hinterland Urbanised?" Neil Brenner criticizes vocabularies for describing non-city spaces, such as rural, countryside, and hinterland, as being "locked into an externalist framework that attempts to distinguish them, analytically and spatially, from the city" (2016 p. 125). Furthermore, Schmid and Brenner, define the term planetary urbanism to describe a "disintegration of hinterlands" as our urban networks and urban support systems sprawl beyond traditional city boundaries into former wildernesses and across borders (2012). This paper investigates the oil infrastructures, as intersections of trans-territorial networks systems of power and their exchange with local practices: the journey of Jet A1 aviation fuel from crude oil extraction in Russia, distillation in Schwedt, eastern Germany, to refueling off the aircraft by tanker truck sits source to its point of use. A case study focuses on urbanism dynamics of Schwedt, as an attempt to trace part of the planetary urbanism corresponding to Berlin's growing tourist industry's use of jet fuel. The first part of the research centers on the networks of oil landscapes -the industrial footprint of oil: its transformation, storage, and transportation. Further provides a depiction of 'what constitutes aviation fuel and its production network' to have a clear view of the actors involved in the process, the links between them, and the spatial implications. The second part addresses how aviation fuel has impacted Berlin and Brandenburg's hinterland: primarily, Schwedt, a shrinking city despite Berlin's recent boom, where the size of the traditional urban "city" form is diminutive in scale compared to the adjacent PCK oil refinery's "non-city" form of urbanization. The findings of the study present new ways of interpreting and mapping the metabolic vehicles of planetary urbanization in both architectural and urban scales. Harvey, David. "Globalization and the “Spatial Fix”." Geographische Revue (2001): 23-30. Print. Brenner, Neil. "The Hinterland Urbanised?" Architectural Design 86.4 (2016): 118-27. Print. Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. "Planetary Urbanisation." Urban Constellations. Ed. ed., Matthew Gandy. Vol. Berlin: Jovis, 2012. Web. Blau, Eve, and Ivan Rupnik. Baku - Oil and Urbanism. Park Books, 2019. Print.
