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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!
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. For passive participation, no registration is required. For active participation and earning the five ECTS associated with the online seminar, registration and completion of coursework are required. Registration can be done here:
About the partners
The project is jointly administered by the Department of Landscape Architecture and Spatial Planning,at NMBU (the Norwegian University of Life Sciences near Oslo); Nürtingen-Geislingen University, Nürtingen, Germany; the University of Kassel School of Architecture, Urban and Landscape Planning, Kassel, Germany; the Corvinus University Faculty of Landscape Architecture, Budapest, Hungary; the Department of Architecture at the University of Bologna, Italy; and the LE:NOTRE Institute, an international foundation based in Wageningen, Netherlands.