Conférence
Mardi 8 mai 2012, 18h30
Espace Archizoom, EPFL
Dans le cadre de l’exposition Pièces à conviction
LANDSCAPE INFRASTRUCTURE
Urbanism beyond Engineering
In response to the public works crisis identified in the past decade by the American Society of Civil Engineers, there is an urgent need for the redesign of urban infrastructures and for the rethinking of the performance of urban economies. Putting into question the conventional capacities of any single discipline to address the magnitude of urban challenges and ecological complexities today, the contemporary convergence of landscape and infrastructure proposes a series of systems and strategies for contemporary urbanization where natural resources and biophysical processes can be deployed across the footprint of urban regions and across the lifespan of service utilities in order to bridge the economic and ecologic divide of industrial economies. The cultivation of current and historic affiliations between design, ecology, engineering, and geography provides fertile ground for the reclamation of infrastructure as design discourse and as design practice for the next generation of post-carbon public works in the 21st century.
Pierre Bélanger
Pierre Bélanger is a Landscape Urbanist and Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is the Coordinator of the Masters in Design Program (Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology concentration). His academic research and public work focus on the convergence of urbanism, landscape and ecology in the interrelated fields of planning, design and engineering. Bélanger is editor of the Landscape Infrastructures DVD(Canadian National Research Council, 2009) and his most recent publications include “Landscape Infrastructure: Urbanism beyond Engineering” (Infrastructure Sustainability & Design, 2012), “The Agronomic Landscape” (GAM, 2011), “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, a Board Member of Le Festival International des Jardins de Métis, and recipient of the Professional Prix de Rome awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts.