Seminar Assignments Democratic Landscape Transformation 2025
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Understanding Democratic Landscape Transformation
- April 2 – July 2, 2025
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. 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
- 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;
- 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 2, 2025
- Due: April 16, 2025
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:
- Add a link to your manifesto on our shared list until April 16, 2025, 18 pm CEST (link has been shared by email)
- During the session, we will discuss and reflect your manifestoes in parallel discussion groups. This becomes also the basis of your team composition and team work for the remaining parts of the seminar.
Readings, concepts and definitions
- Start: April 2, 2025
- Due: July 2, 2025
Working in transnational teams, 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 Please make use of our reading list.. We are always open for suggestions of how to extend this list.
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 in your team area until July 2, 2025, 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
Practicing Democratic Landscape Transformation
- Start: April 21, 2025
- Due: June 18, 2025
This set of team exercises and learning activities gives every participant the possibility to apply the critical theories, methods and approaches of democratic landscape transformation to a concrete case study area.
How to find a case study area?
We suggest the following process:
- Every participant enters the course on the basis of their individual manifesto and the underlying local landscape democracy challenges. Usually, there is a concrete spatial context related to this.
- Based on this, we will form mixed teams after April 16. On April 23, these teams will come together online and discuss their local challenges and manifestoes.
- On that basis, each team will select one specific context to continue working on collaboratively over the remaining seminar sessions.
- All teams will receive their own wiki page for documenting the process and results
Elements and Activities
The practice case will be developed step by step, as we continue the programme, with the following elements:
- Community map
- Power map (current and desired power map)
- Collaborative Vision
- Design ideas for achieving the vision and prototypes of ideas
Role play
Community and power maps will be presented and discussed within the framework of a role play exercise on May 21. During the role play, the team members will think themselves into the roles of design activists. Every team member is invited to discover role models of design activists beforehand. These can be known designers or activists from you own local context. The idea is that you discuss the community challenge and the power map during the role pay and you mimic the process of a possible transformation approach.
Vision and design ideas
The teams ideas for prototypes will be presented on June 18 during the online class. This session might be integrated into the landscape forum and the OLA workshop in Vác, Hungary.
Evaluation criteria
- Critical analysis
- Conscious transfer of theories to the practice case
- Constructive collaboration in the team
- Timely completion of activities