Political economies of landscape change contributes to the Landscape Architecture Foundation's Landscape Futures Initiative, which explores driving forces of landscape change that societies and designers will face in the 21st century. It examines the complex relationships between political economy and landscape change and encompasses perspectives ranging from radical landscape interpretation to sustainable livelihoods, real estate economics, institutions, international landscape policies, and global finance. It asks what difference design can make within the broader structural contexts of landscape change.

"Places of Power: Political Economies of Landscape Change" asks how politics and economics transform the landscapes we inhabit. This volume explores the connections between political economy and landscape change through a series of conceptual essays and case studies. In so doing, it speaks to a broad readership of landscape architects, geographers, and related fields of social and environmental research. The book consists of an introductory essay with nine chapters commissioned from leading geographers, landscape architects, political scientists, and economists, and a concluding essay on implications for future landscape inquiry and design.

The book is organized in three major sections. Part one, titled Landscapes of Struggle, Possibility, and Prosperity, includes a chapter on new axioms for reading the landscape followed by two chapters that read processes of economic development and distress in mountain landscapes of the U.S. and South America. Part Two on Political and Economic Driving Forces of Landscape Change includes two chapters each on political driving forces (political constructs and institutions) and economic driving forces (environmental economics and global financial markets). Part Three, titled Integrative Landscape Change compares innovative rural landscape policies in Europe and the U.S., and draws implications for future landscape inquiry, planning, and design.