Pierre Bélanger Lecture: “1 : 1 billion On Landscape, Infrastructure, Power”

On Monday, April 13, 2015 Penn IUR and Penn’s Department of Landscape Architecture partnered to host Pierre Bélanger, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Co-Director of the MDes Postgraduate Design Research Program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.  Bélanger gave a lecture on landscape, infrastructure and power in which he argued for more interdisciplinary collaboration between landscape architects, urban planners, engineers and those in the sciences. Such collaboration would provide deeper insights into ecologies of scale, allowing landscape architects to think on greater orders of magnitude. Bélanger provided a host of case studies including the Parc de la Villette and Les Halles to provoke thought on the urban forces that shape much of the world’s landscape architecture.. After the presentation of these case studies Bélanger led a discussion that touched on surrounding landscape, infrastructure, urbanism and power.