Asma Mehan: Architecture in the shadow of oil.

Introducing Asma Mehran

0:00Hello. In the latest episode of the A is for Architecture podcast, I spoke to architect and scholar Asma Mahan, assistant professor at the Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University, and director of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab, about her edited volume, After Oil, a comparative analysis of oil heritage, urban transformations, and resilience paradigms, published by Springer in 2025. In our conversation, Asma speaks about the close link between modern architecture and urbanism, and the extraction, production, and consumption of oil, what Peter Droege, I think, termed fossil city. Asma, and the

0:34book, however, are concerned with the next thing. As economies look to shift away from their reliance on oil, what should and can we do with oil's infrastructure? So intrinsic to the making of the present human condition, indeed to the social and cultural making of the last 120 years, are we not obliged to consider it a repository of history, like any other significant material culture? And nothing has been more important than oil, for sure, except perhaps the wars for it. So doesn't it deserve some sort of memorialisation, too? If you want to support the A is for Architecture podcast beyond listening to and sharing it, you

1:07can do so by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me A Coffee. Links to this, to the book, and to the wonderful Asma are in the podcast description. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted to be talking today to Asma Mehran. Asma, thank you for joining me on the podcast. We're going to be talking about your 2025 book, After Oil, a comparative analysis of oil heritage, urban transformations,

1:42and resilience paradigms, which you published with Singer. And obviously, you're the editor, there's 29 papers in the book from around the world. And in fact, on page VI, or six, there's a lovely map of where all the papers have come from. So it genuinely is a global story that the book tells. And I very much enjoy talking about it and learning about it. But before we do that, Asma, tell us all about yourself.

Oil as a spatial condition

2:05Thank you so much for having me. I'm really thrilled to be part of this podcast. So thank you for this question. The book, After Oil, actually emerged from a long intellectual and personal trajectory for me, moving across different disciplines such as architecture, urbanism, heritage studies, planning, anthropology, sociology, politics of space, and definitely the question of justice. So my earlier work has often examined how cities are

2:41shaped by power, memory, infrastructure, and public. Over time, I became increasingly interested in how energy systems are not only technical or economic, but also spatial, cultural and political systems as well. So I think we all agree that oil is one of the most powerful forces that has shaped the modern urbanization. And it has produced cities, ports, landescapes, infrastructure, labor systems, artistic imaginaries, and also deep forms of ecological and social

3:18inequalities. So for me, this book, After Oil, grew from the need to think about oil not only as a resource, but also as a spatial condition and also as a cultural inheritance. Maybe we can backtrack a little and come to your story. So you're at Texas. You're an associate professor? Yes, I'm an assistant professor and director of architectural humanities and urbanism lab at the moment. Yes. Okay. What was your trajectory in terms of your academic career? But I mean, before we were recording,

3:51you spoke of yourself as Dutch Iranian. How does a Dutch Iranian end up in the middle of Texas?

A global comparative lens

3:56Yeah, that's a great question. So yes, I born and raised in Tehran. And then I moved to Europe long years ago. And I also engaged with different oil related research as part of my teaching, but also as part of my research and different position that I had at different parts of Europe and also the Middle East. I worked with large groups of scholars in South Holland. And I was part of a large

4:29consortium called Port Cities, which we focused on the idea of governing the port cities, thinking about the spatial qualities of port cities. And also we raised different questions about the idea of the oil port cities. And I think I myself also I'm coming from the different regions and geographies where oil has deeply shaped the modernization, the geopolitics, and architecture. And also now I'm

5:03teaching and researching in Texas, United States. And I think, you know, thinking about all these geographies and all these timelines that I had in related to the Middle East, to Europe, and the time that I spent in the UK, I spent in the UK and now in the US, I became more and more interested in building this comparative conversation and comparative lens across different geographies about the idea of the thinking about oil as a kind of industrial heritage, and also thinking about the

5:36overarching question of post oil future and how it might look like. And I think we also agree that it's timely and relevant topic. And so the book, after all, brings together 29 chapters across seven thematic parts. And it's included the different cases studies from Bahrain to Baghdad, from Azerbaijan and Ukraine to Morocco, and from the Gulf of Mexico to Karamai in Western China, as well as different cases

6:11studies in North America, such as LA and Cleveland in Ohio, as well as different cases studies in South America, such as Venezuela and Argentina. And I think this comparative lens about a post oil question is important because it cannot be answered from a single geography or a single discipline. So I would like to argue you here that this book is deliberately interdisciplinary, is deliberately transnational, and it's

6:46bringing together architecture, urban planning, environmental humanities, anthropology, history, political ecology, and heritage studies all together. So what I wanted to do with after oil was to ask what do we inherit from oil and what do we preserve, transform or refuse and how we can design and how can design also help us imagine futures beyond the extraction? These were just the main guiding and important questions that

7:22that I try to bring together all of these 29 chapters based on these important questions. Yeah. And I noticed whilst your book is not specifically focused on the global south, and a sort of, how might you describe it, a sort of a history or a discourse from below, quote unquote below, but there's none from Western Europe, which I found quite fascinating, because places like Scotland, for example, have moved very decidedly into a post oil future. So it's kind of interesting to me. And yet, and a lot of the case studies that come from Middle East and

7:58from the States, and it doesn't strike me as being very post oil at all. That's, that's a great comparison. And yes, I think, when we do compare the different cases, studies across the different chapters and geographies, the, the, the main understanding is that the different countries do have different policies and paradigm shifts related to the post oil future. So I can tell also previously, I worked about

8:29the case of Dunkirk in France, and also how the French government, they are thinking about the post oil future. And then I'm comparing to the cases that I had in the Middle East, such as Bahrain, Baghdad, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and definitely some the different cases in in the in the North America, I can tell you that, yes, they do have different policies and agendas about the post oil future, and energy transitions in general. So the idea was like

9:00bringing together all of these cases studies from the comparative perspectives to be able to rather than having a solution to to be able to realize that where do we stand with all of this energy transition and circular economy approaches. And I do agree that different countries there, they do have different agendas and policies and priorities in terms of the post oil future. So share that from from Texas in the

9:32States that yes, it's, it's, it's, it's a different agenda and different policies that we are experiencing, if you compare that, for example, with the, with the European or with the European context. I want to come to this point, because of course, oil has presented so many countries with fantastic affluence. It's been, you know, enormously profitable for obviously, the Middle East, it's obviously was, you know, important for north, the North Sea, it's been enormously effective in Texas, it's, you know,

10:06wherever you find it, you've found a gold mine, black gold. So the idea of a post oil future for countries that are less economically developed must seem extremely politically, socially, culturally and economically challenging, leaving aside the environmental problems associated with it. But I thought perhaps before we get there, it would be good to try and understand a little bit of what you're talking about when you talk about oil cultures, the culture that has emerged out of oil economies. And I guess

10:39that's both at the level of the nation state, how has oil inflected certain nation states, and maybe there's some cases in the book that would be good to illustrate this, but also more generally how oil has

Reading oil heritage critically

10:51inflected the global culture? That's a great question. So the terminology that you will hear in the book is the oil heritage. And I think it's never about the buildings or sites or about machines. And I think it's generally about how people who live through this infrastructure, such as workers, families, artists, immigrants, indigenous communities, coastal communities, and those also affected by pollution

11:21and displacement. So one of the central arguments of the book is that oil has shaped cultural identities and artistic expressions, as much as it has shaped economies and urban form. And there are chapters on, for example, on Iranian contemporary art, company towns, such as Khuzestan, as well as the American and photography influenced by oil slash petrochemical industry and cinematic landscapes show how oil

11:52becomes part of memory, aesthetics, but as well as trauma, nostalgia, and critic. So I think if we think about, if we consider all these discussions from the lens of architectural preservation, this means we cannot preserve oil heritage only as industrial sites, we should not simply turn oil sites into beautiful museums without addressing the histories of labor exploitation, environmental damage,

12:25colonial extraction, and also social inequality embedded in them. I think at the same time, we should not erase these sites, but erasing these sites can also erase the memory attached to these sites. So the more productive approach is critical preservation, preserving while interpreting, transforming, while acknowledging harm, and redesigning while creating more equitable and just futures. So the social narratives help us ask whose memory is being preserved, who benefits from the redesign,

13:02who was harmed by the original infrastructure, and how can the project create new forms of public value? And there are two failure modes I want practitioners also to resist. The first is demolition in the name of progress, which loses the material record of extraction, and also the second is nostalgic sanitization, turning refineries into, I don't know, selfie museums and oil towns into tourism, which is just extraction in heritage form.

13:35But I think the third part, and this is where also the book lands, is what, for example, I do have an author called Elisa Privitera, which in her chapter about the case on the southern part of Italy in Sicilia, calls mapping toxic legacies. So heritage practice as accountability, as a precondition for democratic transition, rather than a commemoration. And you can also find the terminology that across the different chapters of the book,

14:11which called Adaptive Reuse, which mediates between two failures. So keeping the fabric, changing the program, redirecting the material flows, and holding the political memory associated with these sites. And at the same time, preservation, at the same time, I want to also be a little bit direct here, also about some ambitious project. So architects are routinely commissioned to produce the rendering that,

14:46for example, it's about related to the Vision 23 or the NEON project in Saudi Arabia and similar mega projects. So I think learning to refuse those briefs or also to negotiate them is also part of this practice. So the bottom line here in this book is that the real work happens in coalition with planners, ecologists, the lawyers, and also architects and labor. And it's in coalition, and it's not happening on a single drawing board.

15:22To get it straight in my head, we're not talking just about the stuff, or even really the stuff of oil at all, but really the processes, the social processes that depend upon that. It's quite interesting to think about it as heritage. And this word, I think heritage, for me, seems more aligned to things that are old, and are no longer there. So in a strange kind of way, you're doing an archaeology or a historiography of an active present, which I think is quite an interesting idea. Where does this use of this word heritage for you come from? Is it an appropriate word for this? Or is it, in a way,

15:57an objective? Like you want it to be heritage. You want this thing to move into the past. Because as far as I know, I mean, oil production continues to rise. Am I right in that? Yes, in most parts of the world. Yes, yes. But not in some parts of the world? Yes. Okay. So the term

Defining industrial heritage

16:17heritage, okay, let's, I think it's relevant if I, if I also mention about the, so there is a branch of UNESCO, which is called, I think the acronym is called TIKI, which is part of the UNESCO, but also working with UNESCO and ECOMOS. And it's an organization which is just focused on the preservation of industrial heritage. The idea of defining oil heritage as a form of industrial

16:53heritage is aligned with that, with that UNESCO related organization that is focusing about the preserving the industrial heritage. So industrial heritage is a broad umbrella of different kinds of heritage. For example, we can define cotton heritage, wind heritage, water heritage as a form of industrial heritage. And based on the definition from the UNESCO, also oil heritage needs to be

17:23mentioned as a form of industrial heritage. And by oil sites, we, I want to also bring forward, for example, I want to mention about the historical town in the United States, which is associated with as the birthplace of oil as petrochemical industry in the United States, which is situated in Beaumont, Texas. So because of this long history of oil over the previous 100 years, so there are some

17:53sites which are considered historical, they are not active anymore, and what they are known as the birth places of the oil slash petrochemical sites. At the same time, there are so many facilities or sites which has, which are now abundant, they are, they are not, you know, active anymore. And so there are different policies. And I actually, even if you drive in in Texas, you will see lots of that sites,

18:23which are not active anymore. So because of the different reason, because, for example, the workers, you know, change the place, there are no, you know, oil remained in that specific, you know, area. So now there is a new hub. Now there is a new site that all of these extract extractions are, you know, happening. So the main question is, what's next also for these sites about the post-oil? But I do agree that we are not still, we are in the beginning of the post-oil era. So there are so many active sites,

18:58you know, in different parts of the world. And yes, there are some countries that there are more, as we discussed before, that they do have a different agenda, and they do have a different responses about the energy transitions, about the circular economy approaches, and also about the other renewable sources of the energy. And I think that this uneven response to the oil resources is also one of the main reasons that, you know, going through this book is important, because you also

19:32will understand that how the different countries do have really different agendas in response to all these important, overarching questions about the post-oil futures. Can you give some examples of differing approaches from the book? Yes. So I would say that there are some oil dependent regions, for example, in the Middle East, and I think all of this, or in the North US, North America, and I think all of these debates are

20:05important. And there are also, there are different challenges to be able to think about this post-oil future, which is not only just about diversifying the economies, but also it's about redesigning the spatial systems that were built around extraction, car dependency, water-intensive urbanism, carbon-heavy infrastructure. So I think it's part of a bigger conversation about all these topics. And also there were different examples in the book that how the architects also can contribute by

20:41designing these regenerative spaces that combine this industrial heritage preservation, low carbon construction, renewable energy, public space, and also social inclusion. But I think that it's about how we can think about this engine of extraction of oil heritage as a platform for repair, for co-design, for learning, and also for regeneration. We are not there yet, but I think starting and acknowledging all of these different perspectives and also allowing us to

21:15have a conversation, interdisciplinary conversation about all this topic, also matters. And also, I think it's critical and timely and important. It is. It's very difficult to see how the revenue from fossil fuels, from oil specifically, which have manufactured vast swathes of the world, can be adequately replicated. You know, obviously, I live in Britain, in England, and we are moving quite rapidly, as I think the point is,

21:48is that we're moving quite rapidly to this, as you describe it, post-oil future. But at some point, taxation, which is levied on this kind of thing, is going to have to be found from another source, if public resources are going to be maintained. How are countries approaching this issue around the decline in tax revenue, particularly, but also what that represents, practically speaking, in terms of the way that money moves around countries through the combustion engine? Like,

22:19work, labor is delivered by the combustion engine for a vast majority of people. So how is this being planned out? How are people dealing with that? How are governments and scholars dealing with this idea?

Uneven energy transitions

22:31Yes. So I think through the different case studies also in the book also show that this post-oil transition is never neutral. And actually, it's shaped by sanctions, geopolitics, war, uneven development, colonial legacies, national identity, and definitely global energy markets. So I want to bring here an example from Azerbaijan, which also you can find it in the book. And it's a post-Soviet

23:03example, which trying to diversify all of these resources regarding to the oil. And we do have also another example in the book related to Ukraine, which is being forced to imagine a green future under bombardment. And its renewable infrastructure is being shaped simultaneously by war, by displacements, and also the European integration. So, and also, I think I want to also mention about

23:33another case study related to Morocco, which I think it's the sharpest case in this volume on what not to do. And so the green industrialization in Morocco is being financed and oriented to serve European decarbonization and reproducing the same north-south dependency under renewable branding. And I think these are some examples of the chapters, for example, related to Azerbaijan or Morocco or Ukraine. And these chapters also show that the energy transition is not a moral

24:11progress narrative for many countries. And it's mostly about the geopolitical, you know, narration and also forces. So I think one lesson that I want to also bring here and mention is about the indigenous knowledge system and also energy transition, which needs to be connected, you know, to all of this narration, not just only as an innovation, but as part of the integration to all

24:44these different paradigms. So I think the most important lesson from the book is that the post-toil future must be plural. There isn't any single model or single example. So each context and each geography has its own histories, its own capacities and imaginaries. And the task here is not simply to move after oil, but also to move toward the culturally grounded futures, which is relevant

25:17to each context. And at the same time, I think these paradigms that we are discussing, these resilient urban paradigms are not a global template of a sort that we can copy and paste and use it in another context. I think they are really slow, but at the same time they are political and context specific. And I think the strength point of the book is that it offers all these comparative cases, not as

25:49transferable models, but as a method for critically thinking across the differences and comparatively thinking across the differences. So again, more than just any single solution here, I think I hope the readers and listeners can enjoy from these comparative perspectives and also from this critical framework that has been developed across all the chapters of the book.

26:20You've mentioned the idea of extractivism. I wanted to come back to this and how in this post-oil future, we have to reconsider extractivist models. I kind of would like a little bit more understanding of what that sort of means, because obviously it means at the level of the actual machine, it sucks oil out of the earth, so I can see extraction there. But how does this, to go back to your previous point about the cultures that emerge out of this? Well, the socialization or sociality that comes out of this, how is that extractive?

26:56So why does that need to be reimagined, even whilst we move away from fossil fuels? Yes, that's a really important point. And I think, so the architects or the urbanists and especially the the policy makers can begin by refusing to see the oil infrastructures as either absolute ruins or just purely technical assets. So the main argument here is that the oil infrastructures are spatial archives.

27:32They hold histories of labor, extractions, modernization, community life, and environmental

27:43damage at the same time. So I think the first practical step is to read this infrastructure critically before thinking about the new redesign. And at the same time, there are different topics and different important topics that has been forward across the different chapters of the book related to energy transitions, related to circular economy, which are, I think, really important. And they help us to move from this demolition toward the repair, toward the material recovery,

28:23and also long term definition and sustainability of these sites. So the main argument here is that instead of erasing the refineries or, for example, the pipelines and industrial compounds or ports or oil port cities and company towns, we can ask how these sites might be transformed into into educational, the civic, ecological, or even cultural infrastructure. And I think this could also include

28:56converting former industrial buildings into community facilities, into climate adaptation hubs, research centers, cultural spaces, as well as the renewable energy landscapes. And again, the indigenous indigenous stewardship that you can also find it in some chapters that has been mentioned adds another important layer because it challenges the extractivist assumption that land is merely a resource to be used.

29:28And it asks us also to think relationally about the land, about water, about memory, community, and future generations, and how all of these are connected. And in practical terms, I think this means that deeper community consultation, the shared governance model across different concepts, and also respect for local ecological knowledge, and also design processes that do not simply impose the external visions of

30:03development and sustainability. I think all of these conversations are important when we are rethinking about these extractivist models through circular economies. Another theme of the book, I think, is the issue around climate justice. And in particular,

Climate justice through design

30:22climate justice through or enabled through design. What do you mean by climate justice? And how does design have a role to play in this? So for me, climate justice through design mean that climate adaptation should not be treated as a purely technical problem. And it should be treated as a special social and also ethical problem. So climate change doesn't affect everyone equally. Communities that contributed least to environmental degradation often experience the greatest impacts such as flooding, pollution, displacement, heat, toxic exposure,

30:58and also infrastructure neglect. And also infrastructure neglect. So in the book, the shift in the book, my co-author and I argue about the Gulf of Mexico chapter is we mentioned about this chapter from design as extraction. We also visualize the platform, the pipelines, and also the waterway channel to design as repair. So we use this speculative interventions and reuse these decommission platforms as ecological and energy

31:36infrastructure that reconfigure the Gulf intercoastal waterway. And it also center about the coastal communities living with hurricanes and pollution. And I think the reason justice is a space for design, specifically, and not only for policy or law, is that design forces the material and temporal

32:04commitments. So when I ask, when I speak about the climate justice through design, I think I mean several things. First, design can reveal hidden injustices and mapping visual stories and spatial analysis can make visible the uneven distribution of the environmental risk. And second, design can also redistribute protection and care. So instead of investing only in wealthy or high value districts,

32:36climate infrastructure should prioritize vulnerable communities. And the third is that design can create new civic and ecological imaginaries. It can transform damaged landscape into a space of repair, education, biodiversity, and public access. And finally, design can challenge the old model of resilience. So resilience shouldn't mean simply helping communities survive harm. It should also mean

33:11changing the system that produce vulnerability in the first place. So I also will name one guard guardrail explicitly here, because also it's a trap at this moment, which we called green neoliberalism. And So there are some, we do have an example of the lithium mines in Atacama, industrial scale, solar on indigenous land, the green hydro region mega projects, for example, in Morocco, and extraction on the renewable branding is not climate justice. So I also want to mention and highlight this here. And it's also unfolding right here in West Texas,

33:57where the data centers, where the data centers, the AI data centers, the wind, the giant wind farms, and also oil fields shared this, this geographies, with, for example, Latino and black communities. So I think justice becomes a design question, because spaces where inequality becomes visible, and also where repair can begin. As an abstract thing, design has this role. As a practical thing, what can, I guess, architects do to navigate this geopolitically, and these geopolitical tensions? At the moment, it seems that architects are pretty good at protesting things, but offered enough money, they'll design it anyway. I know it sounds very cynical, but I think there's quite a lot of evidence to suggest that seems to be the direction of travel. Not for everybody, but certainly, you know, you mentioned neon, for example.

34:53It's not exactly a normal project, but it's not exactly unique. It's just the most extreme example of that. How do architects operate then better, like in a practical sense? What does the book teach us, really, about anti-extractivist models, and potential modes of engagement that are anti-extractivist? And because you've mentioned this thing around indigenous knowledge systems, it becomes really difficult, because you then end up having to do, this design job seems to have to take on a lot of different work.

35:24You know, it becomes, not only are you trying to fight climate for climate justice, but you're also having to act suitably in relation to indigenous knowledges, and issues around authenticity, and appropriation, and power dynamics, and so on and so forth. So I'd quite like to understand how one would go about doing this. So I think the role of architects is partly special, partly ethical, and partly political. So design this adaptive reuse project, heritage frameworks, community-led planning processes, and regenerative infrastructure.

35:59But I think we also need to ask who controls the transitions, who benefits from that, and also whose histories are being recognized. So the most important lesson from the book is that the post-oil future must be plural. There isn't any single model, and each context, and each geography, and each case study has its own histories, its own capacities, and also its own narratives, and definitely the different future imaginaries.

36:31So I think, again, I want to emphasize that these comparative cases are not transferable models, and also it's important to mention here that the energy transition is not a moral progress narrative. So it's a geopolitical reshuffling, and design sits inside it, sometimes reparative, sometimes complicit, but I think design is never neutral.

37:08So I think acknowledging the role that design plays in all of this energy transition, and in all of this post-oil future paradigms is really important. And I think the role of architecture is, and architects and urbanists here, is really important to acknowledging all of these actors, and power dynamics, and all of the different contexts, and different realities that coexist together.

37:44I'm going to finish with one question.

Parallels with coal history

37:46In Britain, obviously, we used to have lots and lots of coal mines, and I did a podcast quite a long time ago with Professor Gary Boyd about his book, Architecture and the Face of Coal, and he was looking at specific buildings within the coal industry in the UK, which my family's heritage is based in, and how that's disappeared. And I find it kind of surprised, but stepping back from it, everybody's lives was intimately entwined with coal. It would come into the home every day, people had to light fires with it, it covered everything in soot, even the structure of your houses was designed to accommodate coal.

38:23I have in my 1903 terraced house a coal hole, and a place where coal goes, but actually it's all disappeared, and the knowledge has disappeared. And even, you know, it's only my grandmother's generation where they were coal miners, I don't know where they live, the coal mines have been knocked down, blocked off, the building's knocked down. So what are the chances of this actually happening, that heritage, adaptive reuse, and these kinds of things, for these large infrastructural things, which are really, as I read it, a manifestation of working class life?

38:57They're very unlikely to be maintained, because the materials of the working classes so rarely are. So in your view, is this, I suppose, your book, is it a plea for recognition, or is it a description of an emerging reality in which these things will be recognised? Or is it about a kind of ideal scenario in the future? So I really like the example of the coal mines, and yes, I think that we can compare the example of the coal mines with oil slash petroleum industries.

39:32And so I think definitely we acknowledged and we agreed that there are uneven responses to all these post-oil futures and energy transitions in different parts of the world. But I think it would be definitely part of the future discussions when we are moving forward, especially now, I think as part of my example, I mentioned about the case of the AI data centres in West Texas.

40:03So, and now there are lots of ongoing discussions about, so which land, how we can come up on an agreement with municipality, for example, how we can make sure, you know, about the environmental damage, what about the specific zoning related to that AI urban data centre. So I think we are in a really important era related to the oil heritage. It's still not heritage.

40:33Yes, there are so many active different sites, but at the same time, we agreed that there are different responses to these paradigm shifts and also to think about thinking about sustainable future. So like the example, the great example that you mentioned here as the coal mines. So we don't see the coal mines anymore and as well as, you know, all the tangible and intangible memories associated with the workers, associated with the culture and associated with the economy and working class life that has been built about the coal mines.

41:15I think we also will experience, you know, the same narrative in the future about the oil slash petrochemical industry. Yes, we do still rely on oil resources in many parts of the world, but also there are some different contexts and case studies, which they already did the government and also the policymaker. But even from the bottom-up NGOs, also there are lots of efforts to think about beyond oil and what will happen and what's next.

41:46And at the same time, I think, you know, after what's happening about, for example, the, I mentioned about the new AI data centre as the new oil sites. So there are large discussions about the energy use, about the environmental damage, about the cost, about what will happen to the land, to the water, and also what's the translation of these new data centres in terms of durability and sustainability. For example, now there are lots of discussions about, you know, the lifespan of this data centre, which is, I think, if I'm not wrong, for the period of, for example, 20 years max.

42:25And the main question here is, so what's next for these buildings, what will happen then? And also they are not associated with the working, with a large, you know, group of people working within the data centres anymore. So it's about, you know, machines and giant computers and that's it. So, I think, yes, we are in the verge of, you know, all this paradigm shift about the oil slash petrochemical industry.

42:57Yes, there are the different regions in the world that are still heavily dependent on these oil resources. But I think that it will not be like this. And definitely, we start to have this conversation and also all of this conversation will happen again and again in different parts of the world because of what's happening related to climate change, you know, all the different discussions related to relying on other, you know, sources of the energy. And also because of the paradigm shift that's happening, you know, related to oil industry.

43:32So, I think these conversations are important. And at the same time, we can also relate that, for example, to the AI data centre, to wind farms, you know, and what's next, for example, for the future of all these industrial sites. And I think that in terms of geopolitical tension, we also experience and we experience what's happening in different parts of the world and how the transitions related to the oil slash petrochemical industry and how the different narration and also the different poverty struggles are happening related to the oil.

44:14So, I think, you know, so I think it's still there, but it will not be like this for a long run. And I think, you know, having, you know, these conversations are really important to be able to come up with the solutions and to be able to have a roadmap for the next step and what would be next and how we can think about some imaginative future.

44:44There's related to after oil. Great. Wonderful point to finish on. Asma, thank you so very much. Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed.

Closing literary reflections

44:54The details wilted, shrank and were forgotten, down to the very last one prompted in the memory by an act of will or a persistent ghost. Any attempt to recall the image of things and places that had been encountered an oblivion that spread like warm air and made them dreamlike. It was a special kind of tragedy, like amnesia followed by long belated remembrance, in which the chaotic confusion and curse of things were made apparent. That's from Cities of Salt by Abdul Rahman Munif, translated by Peter Theroux. As oil came, so it goes, in a culture. Thank you to Asma for the conversation and indeed for the approach those many moons ago.

45:28Please see the podcast description for links to the book and to Asma at Work, as well as to ways you might want to subscribe to the podcast. And thanks for listening.