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Are you a planning or design student interested in learning how to build more inclusive, open and democratic landscape planning processes?

Then register now for the LED Program – an exciting way to earn credits and strengthen important professional skills.

Registration for our April-June 2016 online seminar is happening now!

This website is being continuously updated with more details on the course

Introduction

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

This is the idea behind the LED (Landscape Education for Democracy) project, a partnership between 5 European landscape architecture faculties and the Le:Notre Institute. LED seeks to promote empowerment, participation and active citizenship among young people through interdisciplinary, problem-based learning environments and curricular innovation that introduces 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 LED project starts this spring and is structured in three year-long cycles, each featuring a 12-session online course that is available to students at any institution, as well as a two-week summer on-site intensive programme available only to students at partner universities.

Course schedule and content for 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 are organized around the following areas:

• Landscape and democracy
• Concepts of participation
• Community and identity
• The design process
• Communication and representation

Conditions for participation and credits

• Participation in the online seminar is free and open to students at any institution as well as the public.
• There are no registration fees
• Particiaption is possible in active or passive mode

• Active participation includes:
  • regular attendance in the online class (or working with the seminar recordings in due time)
  • completion of the seminar coursework and the group process
  • academic recognistion of up to 5 ECTS

• Passive participation includes:
  • regular inviation to the online seminar sessions
  • no academic recognition can be granted

Online registration

You can decide on active or passive participation as part of the online registration.

You can register via this link: Landscape and Democracy Seminar 2016 - Online registration

About the partnership

Grant holder and coordinator

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

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
• Department of Architecture at the University of Bologna, Italy
• LE:NOTRE Institute, an international foundation based in Wageningen, Netherlands.

ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership Programme

The creation of these resources 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.