Ecologies of Power

Bélanger and Arroyo recalibrate how we understand relations of military and urban space, expertly linking disparate and often invisible logics and landscapes. A graphical masterpiece, Ecologies of Power is essential reading for anyone interested in how the world is being made.

Charlie Hailey, author of Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space

Among its remarkable achievements, Ecologies of Power offers a new way of analyzing and representing the complex apparatus commonly called 'war' through its military infrastructures, logistical territories, and the material, energetic, informational, and financial flows that make and move through them. Deftly traversing a multitude of scales and landscapes, the book mobilizes a vast body of transdisciplinary work on the complex subject of power and its modes of spatial and semiotic representation. This ambitious and long-awaited volume is an essential reference for all scholars across the arts and sciences whose work aims to rethink how we engage—and disengage from—contemporary forms of conflict.

Claude Raffestin, author of Pour une Géographie du Pouvoir

The urbanists and landscape thinkers of design culture prepare exceptional documents like Ecologies of Power to describe formations at a planetary scale—synthetic and correlative research translated into measured and accessible graphics that should have more and more authority to inform global decision making.

Keller Easterling, author of Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space

Throughout most contemporary nation-states and Western European militaries, postmodern thought on territory is an influence with theoretical and pedagogical utility. Now with this keen addition to the literature, the U.S. security community can benefit from the scholarship of Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo, who make innovative inroads into a necessary discourse on military logistics that is too often closed to spatial, philosophical evolution.

Jeffrey D. Smotherman, Executive Editor, Joint Force Quarterly

Casting astute eyes on a very different landscape, in Ecologies of Power, Pierre Bélanger... and Alexander Arroyo, assess U.S. military 'logistical landscapes' and the 'military geographies' of defense, conducted on a scale large enough to mark, and even remake, the planet.

Harvard Magazine

Bélanger and Arroyo have made an effective case for the extent and import of the landscapes in which [critical, spatial] questions operate…the questions Ecologies of Power raises figure a substantive, if largely unexplored, agenda for design.

Journal of Architectural Education

Bélanger and Arroyo's analysis focuses on the aspects of Department of Defense (DOD) operations that are constructive and visible in the process contravening the fashion in war studies of foregrounding (to the extent possible) covert operations, state secrecy, and the destructiveness of military force as emblematic of modern war.

Air & Space Power Journal

This is an extraordinary book in many ways. What started as a mapping project developed over seven years into a book that uses numerous disciplines to describe how the power of the US military—the 'single largest landowner, equipment contractorand energy consumer in the world' (16:43–44)—is expressed in space, over time and to scale.

Journal of Medicine, Conflict and Survival