Role: Lecturer in Architecture
School: Built Environment
Department: Architecture
Theme: Environment
Expertise: Cultures of energy (petrocultures) and architecture; architecture in/as/within extractive landscapes; politics and cultures of urban space; spatial practices in formal/informal city’s public spaces.
About me: I am a Venezuelan chartered architect, urban artivist, researcher and architectural educator. My research focuses on the entanglements between petroleum, culture, politics, and urban space, with a particular interest in urban activism, creative practices and contemporary Latin American petro-politics. My monograph, Culture as renewable oil: how territory, bureaucratic power and culture coalesce in the Venezuelan petrostate, unpacks the links between state power, oil energy, urban space and culture, by looking at the Venezuelan petro-socialist state to examine how oil is a cultural resource, in addition to a natural resource, implying therefore that struggles over culture implicate oil, and struggles over oil implicate culture. The book was shortlisted for the Royal Geography Society’s Political Geography Research Group Book Award 2019-2020, awarded Special Commendation. Informed by my urban activism in Venezuela, as co-founder of the not-for-profit organization Collectivox and former member of the playful urban protest collective Ser Urbano, I am currently focused on ground-up cultural forms of critique and creative resistance to the power of the petrostate and the oil industry on the instrumentalisation of architecture and public space and the inequalities of who bears the negative social and ecological effects of extractivism at the urban micro-scale. This multidisciplinary research traverse cultural studies, urban studies, sociology and architecture.
Weblink: https://www.reading.ac.uk/architecture/staff/penelope-plaza
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