Newly Appointed, Associate Professor Pierre Bélanger's research on infrastructure featured on the cover of Landscape Journal
Appearing on the cover of the 25th anniversary edition of Landscape Journal, Associate Professor Pierre Bélanger's peer-review research is published in a feature article entitled "Landscape as Infrastructure".
Responding to the legacy of the 400,000 brownfields across North America and the 2$ trillion debt left in the wake of decaying post-war infrastructure, Bélanger's essay revisits a series of milestone events in the history of North America and draws a cross-section through phases of industrialization and urbanization in the 19th and 20th centuries in order to track the emergence of infrastructure by accident, failure, crisis and by design. With a focus on the Great Lakes region, a boundary watershed along the Canada-U.S. border and the largest freshwater body in the world, the essay aims to redefine the conventional understanding of modern infrastructure by amplifying the biophysical landscape that it has historically suppressed, towards reformulating the field of landscape as a sophisticated, instrumental system of essential resources, services, and agents that generate and support urban economies.
The article is published in Volume 28 of Landscape Journal from the University of Wisconsin Press, the scholarly journal dedicated to contemporary issues on design, planning and management of land.
The publication coincides with the summer release of the Landscape Infrastructures DVD edited by Prof. Bélanger, chair and organizer of a symposium recently held at the University of Toronto exploring the critical convergence of the fields of landscape and infrastructure.
From the dvd sleeve:
Signaling a departure from centralized forms of urban development and the predominance of civil engineering in the design of cities, more flexible forms of infrastructure and design practices have begun to emerge during the past decade as a response to the increasing demand for renewable and integrative forms of urban development. Strategies that combine landscape ecological principles with urban infrastructure are now rapidly becoming the dominant logic in the renewal of infrastructure systems for new industries as well as contemporary cities.
Foregrounding the reciprocity between landscape and infrastructure, this one-day symposium gathers a series of influential thinkers and practitioners from around the world to discuss emerging practices, paradigms and technologies that are reshaping the contemporary urban landscape. Re-examining the historically divisive, technocratic nature of engineered infrastructure, the symposium aims at formulating a more synthetic vision of urban infrastructure as a landscape that combines ecological and economic imperatives of big cities and urban regions. The penultimate objective of the symposium is to reposition the agency of landscape architects, urban designers and architects vis-à-vis the design of urban infrastructures for the new economy of the 21st century.
For students, educators, researchers and professionals in the interrelated fields of design, planning, engineering and public administration, the disc set includes lecture presentations by Stan Allen, George Baird, Pierre Bélanger, Julia Czerniak, Herbert Dreiseitl, Kristina Hill, Michael Jakob, Nina-Marie Lister, Kate Orff and Jane Wolff as well as plenary discussions with Rodolphe El-Khoury, David Fletcher, Ted Kesik, Robert Levit, Liat Margolis, Alissa North, Mason White and Robert Wright. The dvd also features a new afterword, and a full list of reference readings on the converging fields of landscape and infrastructure.
For librarians and archivists, the DVD comes with CIP data, ISBN and UPC code for cataloguing purposes. The DVD disc-set is available online through the University of Toronto Bookstore: www.uoftbookstore.com/online/. For further inquiries, please contact Associate Professor Pierre Bélanger: belanger@harvard.eduTop image: Carbohydrate Matter: fresh sludge delivered from a wastewater treatment plant in Niagara temporary laid down for storage prior to the de-watering and de-nitrification reprocesses. The resulting carbohydrate-, protein-rich matter is reused as organic fertilizer for farm fields and as an organic additive for composting facilities. As the single most important contributor to nutrient overloading in the waters of the Great Lakes, over 90 billion litres of combined sewer overflow is discharged from urban, suburban and rural areas into the Great Lakes every year. (Photo: Pierre Bélanger, 2008)