Place in transition: Exploring the potentials of relocating disused oil rigs and transforming them into public places

In the last 150 years, the oil industry has created economic growth and technological advances, with inherent consequences. But by the ‘peak oil’ in 2006, the industry had started to decline. This leaves a large number of disused facilities and structures to be decommissioned: in the North Sea alone, 600 oil rigs will be decommissioned in the next thirty years, creating potentially transformable ‘drosscapes’. These structures are part of a vast network, conceptualized in this paper as the Oil World. This network is often inaccessible and unfamiliar to, yet highly entangled with, the Everyday World. This paper discusses the conception of place in the Oil World, with the relocation and transformation of oil rigs from an urban design perspective as its point of departure, using Esbjerg, Denmark, as a case study. Combining a theoretical understanding of places as relational with a design thinking approach, the paper outlines future design scenarios.