BAKU, AZERBAIJAN Baku: Oil and Urbanism

Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan and formerly part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, is the original oil city, with oil and urbanism thoroughly intertwined — economically, politically, and physically — in the city’s fabric. Baku saw its first oil boom in the late nineteenth century, driven by the Russian branch of the Nobel family modernizing the oil fields around Baku as local oil barons poured their new wealth into building a cosmopolitan city that became known as the “Paris of the Caspian.” During the Soviet period, Baku became the site of an urban experiment: the shaping of an “oil city of socialist man.” That project included Neft Dashlari, a city built on trestles in the Caspian Sea and designed to house thousands of workers, schools, shops, gardens, clinics, and cinemas as well as 2,000 oil rigs, pipelines, and collecting stations. Today, Baku is a major oil and gas producer on the global energy market and one of the most rapidly changing urban territories in the world. The exhibition is drawn from the book Baku: Oil and Urbanism, by Eve Blau, with Ivan Rupnik (Park Books, 2018), the first comprehensive study of the close interplay of the oil industry and urbanism in Baku over a period of more than 150 years and reveals the critical significance of that history for our understanding of the global urbanization processes that are reshaping the contemporary world. It also includes a photo essay by Iwan Baan.