ABSTRACT
The city-state and the port of Hamburg in Northern Germany have been hubs of the global petroleumscape in Europe for more than a century. In the port, petroleum drove much of the expansion of the port area in the Empire and the interwar years. In the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, port planners accommodated the spatial demands of the oil industry through the reallocation of port land and adjacent areas. Pipelines and the “oil crises” of the 1970s ended new projects in Hamburg, but the oil industry maintained most of the established storage and production sites, underlining the path dependencies that large-scale industrial investments create. This chapter also pays close attention to the administrative dimension of the petroleumscape, which was particularly prominent in Hamburg. Company headquarters and oil-related institutions and associations had originally formed a tight cluster in the inner city. In the late 1960s, this cluster disintegrated when the four major oil companies moved their headquarters to the newly built office area of the “City Nord.” In the 1990s, the administrative layer of the petroleumscape began changing again and it is now dispersed throughout the city.
