Pierre Bélanger is an independent landscape architect and urbanist whose work interrogates the systems and geographies of global resource empires. His writings delve into the complex interplay between nature, technology, and human society, often through a critical lens on infrastructure and its consequences. Bélanger analyzes how landscapes are shaped and transformed by logistical and military forces, offering profound insights into these processes. His approach emphasizes the need to reconsider our relationships with the environment and the systems that shape it.
Composed as a geopolitical treatise, this book proposes a counter-map to rebuild relations with the Cinchona plant and to challenge territorial destruction that continue to increase amidst state-sanctioned resource extraction and benevolent conservation.
Focusing on infrastructure as a multifaceted instrument, this book presents strategies for rethinking and reclaiming knowledge related to urbanization. It explores how infrastructure acts not only as a physical entity but also as an influential effect and interface in contemporary urban processes, encouraging a deeper investment in this critical field of study and practice.
Weaving together an extraordinary range of visual media and original geographic work, this critical cartographic volume countermaps the geospatial footprint of the U.S. Department of Defense beyond the battlefield, revealing a vast and shifting military-logistical landscape reshaping infrastructures and environments at every scale. Moving beyond conventional military geographies of combat zones and covert operations, Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo explore the forces and forms of this landscape from the molecular and metabolic to the political and the planetary, giving new dimension to familiar military milieux of land, air, sea, and space. In so doing, they trace out a growing assemblage of logistically linked "operational environments," where militarized, demilitarized, and non-militarized landscapes are ever more entangled. It is in this assemblage that they find emergent ecologies of power at work in the making, unmaking, and remaking of operational environments across existing, emerging, and future horizons