University architecture professor Mark Gillem will address NATO leaders in Lisbon, Portugal this month on the U.S. military’s use of land overseas.
Gillem said he was contacted by the organization after the publishing of his new book, “America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire.”
“U.S. military bases are key symbols, not just of power, but consumption and the discrepancy in the value of land,” Gillem said.
The military has exported suburban sprawl in the form of military bases overseas, he said. A survey he conducted found that the biggest concern about 12,000 Koreans living near a military airbase had was the excessive use of land, not violence by military personnel or the level of noise. In a similar survey, military architects said they thought noise would be the biggest civilian concern, Gillem said.
“For host nations land is quite valuable,” he said. While the U.S. measures land by the acre, which is 43,560 square feet, other nations measure in much smaller units, some as low as 35 and a half square feet, he said.
The U.S. has 700,000 acres of land overseas, Gillem said, much of it in cities. “Imagine a South Korean airbase in (downtown) Eugene,” he said. “It’s something American citizens would not support.”
Gillem said he knows he will encounter opposition at the advanced research workshop he will address. Some, he said, will object to his use of the word empire. But he said the military has assets in 2/3 of all countries of the world and the U.S. is involved in the writing of many constitutions around the globe.
“If that’s not an empire, I don’t know what is,” he said.