Los Angeles Dreams Itself a Post-Oil City

Abstract

Oil was never really new—not in Los Angeles—but its 1892 discovery in the city would fuel expansions of profit, policy, and population that would reshape the region and the world. Soon after, ecstatic boosters peddled dreams of tropical refuge while prospectors sold plots ripe with oil. The city ballooned amid the smog, between the palms, pipelines, derricks, and freeways. In 2022, a City Council vote sentenced all oil extraction within city limits to sunset by 2045. Los Angeles Dreams Itself a Post-Oil City imagines one of these thousands of extraction sites—the Murphy Drill Site (MDS)—as it finds a new life. Dreams for MDS are a place of contest: of energy transition fantasies and effaced environmental histories, of the post-industrial's picturesque remediation. It asks us to dream of a world where energy and its landscape are no longer sites for oppressive productivity, but a liberation from it.