Pierre Bélanger’s recent book Ecologies of Power: Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes and Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense (MIT Press, 2016, with co-author Alexander Arroyo) has been awarded the prestigious 2017 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize by the Foundation for Landscape Studies.
The John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize is awarded annually by the Foundation for Landscape Studies. According to the Foundation, the award honors books and authors that expand the field of landscape studies to new areas, or increase knowledge within an existing branch of the discipline, and to support authors with an ability to write for both a general readership and a scholarly audience.
Released in October 2016, Ecologies of Power explores the contemporary spatial configurations of power within the infrastructures, environments, and scales of military operations. Bélanger (MLA ’00) and Arroyo (MLA ’13) demonstrate that, through military cycles of build up and breakdown, the U.S. Department of Defense has engineered a planetary assemblage of “operational environments” in which militarized, demilitarized, and non-militarized landscapes are increasingly inextricable.
Bélanger and Arroyo employ a series of critical cartographic essays to trace this footprint far across five different environments: the ocean, the atmosphere, the highway, the city, and the desert. book unearths the logistical infrastructures and residual landscapes that render strategy spatial, militarism material, and power operational. The authors aim to reveal unseen ecologies of power at work in the making and unmaking of environments.
Bélanger, a landscape architect and urbanist, is associate professor of landscape architecture and author of a number of publications, including Landscape as Infrastructure (Taylor & Francis, 2017). Arroyo (MLA ’13) is a doctoral student in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ecologies of Power will be celebrated during a Pacific launch event on April 22, 2017 at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa School of Architecture, with an opening keynote lecture for the Building Voices Conference. Visit the University of Hawai’i website to learn more.