Seminar Assignments Democratic Landscape Transformation 2024

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Overall Assignment

• April 3 – July 1, 2024

Rationale

This assignment consists of a sequence of individual and group activities aimed at mapping, exploring and deepening your knowledge of critical concepts and theories associated with landscape democracy and the agency of planners and designers in promoting democratic landscape change/preservation decision-making. This will become the core knowledge that you will take away from this seminar and apply in your future as a professional and individual.

Elements of this assignment

1. You will begin this assignment by drafting a landscape democracy visual manifesto representing your personal understanding of the relationship of landscape and democracy before the seminar start;
2. Integral part of this assignment consists of familiarizing yourself with a selection of seminar readings from which you will be asked to identify core concepts and definitions of those concepts which will be shared with the rest of the class on the wiki. This is a team activity.

Your ‘Landscape Democracy’ visual manifesto

• Start: April 3, 2024
• Due: April 24, 2024

MANIFESTO [man-uh-fes-toh], noun, plural manifestoes. A public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, as one issued by a government, sovereign, or organization.

In your manifesto, you will express your very personal and individual beliefs and understanding of landscape democracy. You can use any medium you like. Your manifesto should include visual evidence (photography, graphics, etc) of landscape democracy challenges in your context and/or home country. You are encouraged to refer to your everyday environment

Submission:

• Upload your collages or share your video on the wiki until April 26, 2023, 18 pm CEST
• you will receive an individual login to the wiki and indication on where to add your manifesto
• During the session, we will discuss and reflect your manifestoes in parallel discussion groups

Readings, concepts and definitions

• Start: April 3, 2024
• Due: July 2, 2024

Working in transnational trios, express your personal understanding of the relation of landscape and democracy in the form of a concept map with linking words or any other diagrammatic representation. Please make your maps very visual and not just verbal. Think critically about why one map differs from another

About concept mapping

Before starting the exercise you can read this article by Joseph D. Novak & Alberto J. Cañas about Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct and Use Them.

This paper gives a good explanation of how concept maps are conceived and developed.

You can use any tool you like for producing your concept map. However, since the result needs to be submitted digitally we recommend the following open source software for producing your maps:

• Cmap Tools >>> you can also work with your group on the Cmap cloud doing a shared map
• VUE - The Visual Understanding Environment

Submission:

• Upload your concept map on the wiki until July 2, 2024, 18 pm CEST
• you will receive an indication on where to add your concept map
• During the last session, your conceptual reflection will be the basis of the co-creation workshop for the Open Landscape Academy

Evaluation criteria

• Timely completion of activities
• conceptual depth and logical argumentation of concept definitions
• Adequate level of abstraction

Phase B Activities and Exercises

• During the second phase of the course, you will be working on landscape activism and a reflection of the role and approaches of planners and designers within the context of democratic landscape transformation
• All information on these activities is compiled in this PDF