Constructing the Politics of Landscape Change

In order to understand the political forces shaping landscape change, three constructs – or lenses – are used here to articulate key political trends and conditions. The first construct is Harold Lasswell’s garrison state notion. Lasswell coined this phrase in 1937, 12 years before Orwell’s chilling account of 1984, to warn that extensive security concerns and the constant threat of war could lead to the creation of a garrison state where “specialists on violence” and their civilian allies become the most powerful group in society.

Lasswell predicted a “crisis in democracy,” with suppression of civil liberties in the name of national security. Now, in a post-9–11 era, these narratives are resurgent, accompanied by powerful forces to control access to public space and “design out terrorism.” The construct of splintering urbanism links spatial and political trends. Graham and Marvin (2001) characterize the “unbundling” of urban infrastructures such as transportation and communications into public and private segments as “splintering urbanism.” This lens moves us beyond a focus on how privatization measures affect landscape changes. Rather, it directs attention to the ways in which contemporary processes unbundling local public authority also selectively reconnect some people and some places to political power in advantageous ways.

The third construct – democratic ecologies – is more speculative and incomplete. It pushes the familiar notion of just ecologies to encompass democratic practice as well. The familiar contrast of socially just and ecologically efficient resource patterns still tends to focus on different distributional patterns rather than the processes by which such choices are made. A perspective on democratic ecologies, however, would view environmental inequities and ecological dilemmas as matters of citizenship rather than distributional politics.