Pierre Bélanger is Landscape Architect and Associate Professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His academic research and public work focus on the convergence of urbanism, landscape and ecology in the interrelated fields of planning, design and engineering.
Responding to the growing inertia of urban planning and the unchallenged predominance of civil engineering in public works today, Bélanger has formulated the term “landscape infrastructure” used today by governments, professionals and academics worldwide to designate how the field of landscape is redefining the morphology of urban infrastructure in research, pedagogy and practice vis-àvis the complexities of dis-urbanization and super-urbanization. Foregrounding and augmenting the biophysical landscape of living systems that has been marginalized by the historical divide between economy and ecology of industrial cities, the double-entendre of the landscape infrastructure project aims to reposition the agency of ecology as a sophisticated, instrumental system of essential services, resources, processes and agents that underpin contemporary urban economies towards the 22nd century.
Bélanger is editor of the Landscape Infrastructures DVD (Canadian National Research Council, 2009) and his most recent publications include Regionalization (JOLA, 2010), Redefining Infrastructure (Ecological Urbanism, 2010), Landscape as Infrastructure (Landscape Journal, 2009). Bélanger is a government-appointed member of the Ontario Food Terminal Board and recipient of the Professional Prix de Rome awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Venue: IAAC,C/ Pujades 102, Poble Nou, Barcelona
Date: Wednesday the 7th of March. / Time: 19.30pm- 21.00pm
