Eve Blau teaches in a Graduate School of Design, Ivan Rupnik is a scholar-architect, and Iwan Baan is a professional photographer. Baku: Oil and Urbanism combines these skills and sensibilities into an uncommonly beautiful, compelling book about the long-running entanglements of crude oil and urban form in one of the world's oldest and most legendary oil cities. Although the skeleton of the book is Blau's textually-presented account, nearly every page includes reprinted maps, photographs, and figures garnered from dozens of archival, library, and other sources—many of them in full color and/or with lengthy and insightful captions. Rupnik's many original maps and other graphics are especially well-presented and keyed to the surrounding text, and Baan's photo essays capture present-day Baku's layerings of human life and oil infrastructure in dimensions that the purely textual approaches of social science scholarship on oil generally fail to manage.

A brief introductory chapter situates Baku: Oil and Urbanism within a recent and growing body of scholarship on oil that dissents from the prevailing social science theories of “the resource curse”—with their focus on oil money, oil revenues, and state budgets—and turns its attention, instead, to the ways in which the materiality of oil and the oil industry can lend shape to physical infrastructures, built environments, and the organization of space at small and large scales. In Baku as elsewhere, that is, innovations in oil production and refining often inspired and contributed to innovations in urban design and planning. The text and images of Baku: Oil and Urbanism are divided into three main chapters, devoted to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Soviet period, and the post-1991 era.

The varieties of urban form shaped in conjunction with oil are well exemplified by the development of Baku as “Oil Baron City” in the second half of the nineteenth century, discussed in Chapter 2. To take but one example, “Black Town,” planned as an industrial zone in the 1880s and named for the soot and smoke of its refineries, followed a rigid and gridded urban plan with wide streets and dense industry. As the oil industry continued to grow, however, and was increasingly consolidated under the control of the Nobel Brothers, Baku's next industrial district, “White Town,” took a very different shape, no longer subordinating the oil industry to a preexisting grid form. Instead, the design of White Town was driven by the interests, materialities, and spatialities of a rapidly growing industry, with large, purpose-built factories and non-standard parcels and street organizations. If, in Black Town, urban form shaped industrial organization, the opposite came to be true in White Town—a claim beautifully illustrated by paired, juxtaposed graphics and reproduced photographs.

Many of the illustrations in Chapter 3, on the Soviet period, come from the massive and comprehensive USSR In Construction, published in 1931 and dedicated to showcasing the capital of Azerbaijan as an example of socialist urban development. Baku's new and reconstructed regions and microregions, and later blocks and “superblocks,” Blau's text demonstrates, continued to show the material and spatial influence of the oil industry. In this period, oil's material presence on the urban landscape combined with Soviet visions of urbanization, and, perhaps most interestingly, with west European and other international trends in urban design to which Baku's planners had access due, in part, to the city's location in an ever-more transnational oil industry. Chapter 4, on the post-Soviet period, contains the shortest text—focused on Soviet urban legacies, new imaginations fired by massively increased oil revenues in the 2000s, and ongoing negotiations over the city's master plan—which begins to contemplate what Baku might look like after its oil reserves have been depleted. Readers hoping for in-depth accounts of oil and everyday life in post-Soviet Baku should turn, in these pages, not to the text but to the dozens of full color photographs that nicely present the sedimented history of oil and urban form as the lived experience of contemporary residents.

Baku: Oil and Urbanism should earn wide readership and admiration among scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet cities. More than this, though, the Soviet oil/urbanism nexus it charts is at once unique and highly illustrative, and scholars attending to other entrants in the global register of oil cities, from Abu Dhabi to Lagos and beyond, would do well to consult this masterfully-assembled book.