Seminar Landscape Education for Democracy 2016

image: Deni Ruggeri

This page documents the fist LED online seminar which was organised from March - June, 2016 by the LED partners

Introduction

The landscape belongs to everyone. We should all have equal access to it and a voice in how it is used valued and maintained. However, spatial planning education rarely includes considerations of democratic processes, participatory planning, community design and landscape stewardship. Furthermore, it does not fully prepare young practioners to become leaders in promoting democratic landscape change and work effectively in partnership with communities.

The idea behind the LED (Landscape Education for Democracy) project, a partnership between 5 European landscape architecture faculties and the LE:NOTRE Institute is to promote awareness and empower young design and planning professional to become more active in shaping democratic change. The project employs interdisciplinary, problem-based learning environments and curricular innovation to introduce landscape and democracy as a cross-disciplinary subject. Our goal is to fill a gap in design and planning education and give students the opportunity to confront themselves with pressing issues of landscape democracy, right to the landscape and participation.

The first LED course starts this spring featuring a 12 online course sessions available to students at any institution, as well as a two-week summer on-site intensive programme available only to students at partner universities.

• Project Presentation (PPT)

Course schedule and content for 2016

LED seminar schedule and assignments 2016

Online seminar: April-June

The online module consists of twelve 90-minute sessions of lectures, reading materials, collaborative group work, concept mapping, storyboarding and other diverse active and passive learning tools.

Themes covered in the course are:

• Landscape and democracy
• Participation theories and practices
• Community and identity
• The design process
• Communication and representation

For further details please visit the seminar schedule 2016.

Seminar lectures and recordings

• Lecture recordings and presentation materials are available open access via HfWU's ILIAS platform
• An overview of recordings can be accessed here

Assignments

• Active seminar participants completed a series of five assignments in order to translate the courses' theoretical and methodical knowledge to their local landscapes
• More information can be found on the seminar assignments page

Working Groups

• Participants worked in international teams on their assignments and all outcomes have been documented on working group pages
• See the global distribution of our participants on this interactive map
• Please visit the 2016 working group pages for further details

Intensive Programme 2016 - Zingonia

• The online seminar was followed by an intensive study programme in Zingonia, Italy
• Further details on this learning activitiy can be found in the Zingonia documentation

2016 Seminar Minutes

• If you wish to read about our process in the seminar and the working groups please visit the 2016 seminar minutes

About the partnership

Grant holder and coordinator

• NMBU, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Department of Landscape Architecture and Spatial Planning

Project partners

• Nürtingen-Geislingen University, Nürtingen, Germany
• University of Kassel School of Architecture, Urban and Landscape Planning, Kassel, Germany
• Szent István University, Faculty of Landscape Architecture, Budapest, Hungary
• University of Bologna, Department of Architecture, Italy
• LE:NOTRE Institute, an international foundation based in Wageningen, Netherlands.

ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership Programme

The LED - Landscape Education for Democracy Project has been (partially) funded by the ERASMUS+ grant program of the European Union under grant no.2015-1-NO01-KA203-013239 Neither the European Commission nor the project's national funding agency are responsible for the content or liable for any losses or damage resulting of the use of these resources.