ABSTRACT
Two new books on landscape (architecture) teaching, provided the rationale for this paper. It aims to place these into the context of the development of the landscape architecture discipline in Europe. A description of the beginnings of European university education follows an outline of the genesis of the profession. Moves towards European integration in the 1980s supported the establishment of an institutional framework, allowing the creation of a critical mass of academics, giving new impetus to teaching and research. An EU-funded Thematic Network supported the preparation of a common education guidance document, responding indirectly to the European Landscape Convention’s call for university courses for landscape specialists. The Convention also stimulated a renewed focus on landscape in other fields of study. This has also broadened the horizons of landscape architecture teaching to encompass approaches from related disciplines. Finally, the paper discusses how landscape architecture education should respond to emerging societal challenges.
Introduction
“Teaching is a practice with its eye on both beginnings and futures: it is a work of constant introduction in an atmosphere of hope.”
(Waterman, Citation2019, p. 1)
As a comparatively recent subject of university degree programmes, teaching landscape architecture has a relatively short history. Nevertheless, it has developed rapidly during the last 100 years both in content and in the range and diversity of teaching modes. Recently, this diversity has been celebrated with the publication of two books on teaching landscape, including contributions from university teachers worldwide. These publications were the outcome of a collaboration between the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS) and its worldwide network. This paper, whose authors are also the editors of the books, aims to complement these by placing them in the wider context of the historic development of the discipline and the growth of international collaboration in landscape architecture teaching at the European level. Finally, it goes on to outline likely future challenges for the discipline in education and scholarship.
Genesis of the landscape architecture profession
Before the establishment of landscape architecture as a discipline in universities, there had been a long tradition of garden and landscape design. Gardens are as old as the first settlements of mankind and they exist in almost all cultures around the world. Gardens and garden architecture had been well developed in different parts of Europe (e.g., in Italy, France, England) but also on other continents (such as China and India). Those gardens were often built for the enjoyment of kings or other rulers, less for the enchantment of the general public.
The first scholarly mention of the design of landscape for public benefit is found in 1779—fifty years before the term ‘landscape architecture’ was inventedFootnote1—by Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld, a professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel, who published his Theorie der Gartenkunst in five volumes.Footnote2 In a chapter of the fifth volume, he described what he named the Volkesgärten or ‘public parks’. According to Hirschfeld, this type of garden or park was to be found in some of the major cities including Paris, Frankfurt, and London, where they were often referred to as public promenades. He felt that such public gardens were of great significance for civic life and should be regarded as a necessity for all cities. They were places of great natural beauty, with walkways, roads for carriages, and benches for people, where they could sit and admire the scenery. This was obviously a timely observation, for during the next few decades Volksgärten were established in almost every major city in Europe.
The emergence of public parks around 1800 signifies a beginning or at least a turning point for the profession of garden or landscape architecture: after this date, garden architects who had predominantly been working for the nobility, gradually turned their attention more towards public landscapes than private gardens. A major issue in Hirschfeld’s description of, and ‘programme’ for, the Volksgärten was the ‘democratic ideals’ that were linked to this new type of urban landscape: the parks should have general access and nobody should be excluded. The different classes, ‘by approaching each other more closely’ (Parshall, Citation2001, p. 407) were to develop understanding and tolerance towards each other. In addition, the parks were meant to promote public health and ‘increase national consciousness and cultural unity’ (p. 26) among citizens by having sculptures and monuments commemorating important national deeds.
Later advocates for public parks expressed similar ideas. John Claudius Loudon published the article ‘Hints for Breathing Places for the Metropolis, and for Country Towns and Villages, on fixed Principles’ in 1829 (Loudon, Citation1829). Loudon thought that public improvements should be undertaken by the authorities in a democratic fashion, not sporadically and depending on the benevolence of the wealthy. Frederick Law Olmsted referred to Hirschfeld and made several visits to European parks, when he worked on Central Park and Prospect Park in New York and consecutive assignments, such as those in Buffalo and Boston.
The designers of these early public parks and Volksgärten did not enjoy the benefit of a formal education: before the establishment of academic programmes in landscape architecture, there was a system of apprenticeship to master gardeners who had already developed high-quality garden art for the nobility. The examples are plentiful, the most well known perhaps being Andre Le Notre’s education as a painter and a gardener as an apprentice at the Louvre (Thompson Citation2006, p. 32) In eighteenth-century Germany, the planning of the gardens in Wörlitz, for example, was attributed to the gardeners Schoch, Neumark and Eyserbeck, not to the architect Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff or the client Fürst Franz. They were the draughtsmen of the garden plans, but were not—or only to a very limited extent—the designers of the gardens (Trauzettel, Citation1986). Starting from the dynasties of highly educated court gardeners, the ‘Royal Gardeners School in Schöneberg and at the Wildpark near Potsdam’ was established in 1824. The landscape gardener, Peter Joseph Lenné became the first director. It was the first institution of higher education for commercial gardeners and horticulturists in Germany. As early as 1849, Peter Joseph Lenné referred to his efforts to establish a horticultural university degree (Land, Citation2006).
Establishment of university programmes in landscape architecture
In 1900, Harvard University established the first master’s programme in garden and landscape architecture, while in Europe, in 1909, a garden art class for artistically talented school graduates was set up in Düsseldorf at the School of Fine Arts. The Norwegian University of Agriculture founded the first master’s degree in 1919, albeit initially without a professorship. Olav Leif Moen was the first lecturer and was subsequently appointed professor. Landscape architecture did not mainly emerge from research, but instead from practice and subsequently developed research within the universities.
While 100 years is a significant anniversary to celebrate, this is only a relatively short time in the life of an academic discipline, and in the beginning, the discipline of landscape architecture was a very small one. In fact, during the early decades, until the 1960s, there were only a handful of programmes, mostly only one in each country, where, in turn, there were very few qualified academics to cover all subject areas, and who often had to be supplemented by visiting lecturers from practice.
As a result, almost nowhere was there sufficient critical mass to allow for the development of a functioning academic community at the national level from which recognised common teaching and research traditions could arise. The logical response would have been to look to international collaboration in order to bridge this gap. This indeed began to take place at a modest level, especially between those countries between which the barriers to collaboration were lower—both in terms of geography and language—such as in Scandinavia. Here Carl TheodorSørensen, who was teaching landscape architecture in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, organised Nordic ‘summer schools’ during the 1930s—in Copenhagen in 1933, Oslo in 1935, Helsinki in 1936 and Gothenburg in 1939 (Lund, Citation2002, p. 15). However, significant practical barriers prevented meaningful Europe-wide collaboration until relatively recently, when from the mid-1980s, digital communications, easier travel and European Union-funded research and education projects began to facilitate the exchange of both people and ideas. This contrasts strongly with the situation in the USA, where the absence of national borders or language barriers together with a broadly common understanding of the discipline across a similar number of schools as in Europe has provided no impediments to academic collaboration across the discipline since the earliest days of its existence.
In line with the rich and varied nature of landscape as a subject of study, over the course of the 100 years since the establishment of the first landscape architecture degree in Europe, programmes have developed in a range of different types of higher education institutions across the continent. In Germany, following a long debate, the Department of Horticulture was finally founded in 1929 at the Berlin University of Agriculture, based on the campus of the ‘Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt’ in Berlin-Dahlem. Erwin Barth (1880–1933), the then City Garden Director of Berlin, became the first university professor of garden architecture in continental Europe (Birli, Citation2016). In Wageningen in the Netherlands, Hendrik François Hartogh Heys Van Zouteveen gave classes in garden art and garden architecture from 1918. His successor, Dr. Jan Tijs Pieter Bijhouwer (1898–1974) became the first Dutch professor of garden and landscape architecture in 1946 . Francisco Caldeira Cabral (1908–1992) started teaching a course in landscape architecture at Instituto Superior de Agronomia da Universidade Técnica in Lisbon, Portugal in 1940.
The different national academic traditions found in the tertiary education sector in different countries contributed further to the diversity. Thus, degree programmes have been established in general-purpose universities as well as agricultural and technical universities, in schools of art and architecture as well as in universities of applied science (Birli, Citation2016). This diversity in the international academic context of landscape architecture degree programmes has been reflected in the nature of, and approach to, teaching in the different schools, and to some degree in the approaches to collaboration itself. Because of the small number of specialist landscape architecture teachers and the ensuing need to provide additional teaching in related fields, the focus of this supplementary teaching also necessarily varied according to the type of university concerned.
Alongside the lack of critical mass due to the existence of very few degree programmes and the resulting small numbers of full-time academics, in its early years the discipline also lacked much of the classic academic infrastructure which more mature fields could take for granted. This was reflected in a dearth of textbooks and academic journals, a shortage of both opportunities for doctoral training and of suitable mentors, as well as an absence of academic conferences.
International meetings and conferences, such as there were, were generally held by professional organisations, and often in association with garden exhibitions. At the Garden Exhibitions in Brussels in 1935 and in Paris in 1937, initiatives were taken to establish an international organisation. In 1948, following the disruption to international collaboration resulting from the Second World War, IFLA—the International Federation of Landscape Architects—was founded, and from the very beginning, the organisation’s biennial conferences were organised also to accommodate academic exchange and meetings between educators (IFLA, Citation2000, p. 8).
The Scandinavian meetings, referred to above, and national meetings of members of the landscape architecture academic community in large European countries continued. These included those of the ‘Hochschulkonferenz Landschaft’ in Germany, the Landscape Education Group in the UK, and PEMAT in Turkey. However, a Europe-wide meeting between schools of landscape architecture was only held for the first time in (the then West) Berlin in 1989, which is when academic collaboration in landscape teaching at the European level can be said to have started in earnest.
European integration
The European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools—ECLAS—was established in the early 1990s at a time of increased European collaboration in the area of higher education—leading up to the Bologna Declaration in 1999. Landscape education is one of the core activities of ECLAS. The stated goals of the organisation include the aim to:
“Foster and develop the highest standards of landscape architecture education in Europe by, amongst other things, providing advice and acting as a forum for sharing experience on course and curriculum development, and supporting collaborative developments in teaching”Footnote3
Recently, one of those ‘collaborative developments in teaching’ has been the preparation and publication of two books on teaching landscape referred to at the start.
Teaching landscape architecture at tertiary level is currently undertaken in around 100 higher education institutions across most European countries, most of which are ECLAS members, as well as in many more worldwide.
This has expanded considerably in the decades since the discipline was founded, slowly at first when only a few degree programmes were established, predominantly in the countries of northern and western Europe, and subsequently more rapidly due to the wider drive towards European integration from the late 1980s. In addition, the geo-political re-unification of Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union brought with it a whole new range of Eastern-European schools that, until then, had hardly been involved in the wider European discourse.
The formation of ECLAS has to be seen in the context of the wider process of European integration being pursued by the European Union during the late 1980s with the purpose of creating the Single European Market. This led, amongst other things, to the establishment of both professional (EFLA—now the European chapter of IFLA) and academic (ECLAS) landscape architecture organisations. In the academic sphere in particular, it can be argued that this, and the growing critical mass which it enabled, provided an important boost to the maturation of the discipline, in particular in the fields of research and publication.
ECLAS initially stood for the ‘European Conference for Landscape Architecture Schools’—and the idea was to establish an annual platform for academic exchange in landscape architecture in Europe. Information about the meetings circulated amongst the schools that were interested in taking part. At the time it was not known how many schools of landscape architecture there were in Europe. The conferences proved to be an effective networking arena. The first meetings were held at Wageningen Agricultural University (1991), Ljubljana University (1992), the Swedish Agricultural University (1993), Edinburgh College of Art—Heriot Watt University (1994), Polytechnical University Barcelona (1995), Technion Haifa (1997), Vienna University of Technology (1998), Berlin Technical University (1999) and University of Zagreb (2000). Conferences generally lasted 3–4 days including excursions, and overall the number of schools participating grew steadily. Some collaborative activities also took place between the conferences, but only based on individual initiatives. The hosting schools generally had to organise each conference from scratch, although later the first draft of a ‘Conference Handbook’ was made in order to codify and simplify procedures. Apart from the conference fees, set by the organising school, there was no membership fee. The organisation was led by an elected president and an executive committee.
In the field of teaching, exchanges—between both teachers and students—began to occur more frequently, thanks to the establishment of various landscape architecture networks under the auspices of the European Union’s ERASMUS Programme. This initiated a process of what might be called ‘convergent evolution’. During the early stages of the ERASMUS Programme, bilateral exchanges of students tended to be preceded by mutual academic visits between staff in order to ascertain the degree of compatibility between the programmes in question, and the point in their studies at which student exchanges could most fruitfully take place. The resulting process of mutual adoption of ‘best practice’ was in some cases further enhanced as a by-product of holding joint international student design workshops, organised by teachers from several schools in the context of ERASMUS supported ‘Intensive Programmes’. The pioneers in this process were those organised by ‘ELEE’—European Landscape Education Exchanges—a network established in 1985 at the then Thames Polytechnic in London. These necessitated common teaching approaches and will have resulted in the transfer of ideas from school to school.
Consequently, the convergence that was an indirect outcome of this process meant that whether, for example, a degree programme was located in an agricultural or a technical university became less important, as their approaches to teaching became more similar than might otherwise have been expected.
The LE:NOTRE Project
In 2000, ECLAS entered into a new phase of intensified collaboration. This was symbolised by the organisation’s change of name from European Conference to European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools and was subsequently substantiated by the successful application to the European Union for funding to establish a so-called ‘Thematic Network’ in landscape architecture. The network became known as the LE:NOTRE Project (an acronym for ‘Landscape Education: New Opportunities for Teaching and Research in Europe’). One of the many outcomes of this project, which, over a period of 11 years, brought together more than 100 landscape architecture schools from Europe as well as many other from further afield, was the ECLAS Guidance on Landscape Architecture Education (Bruns et al., Citation2010).
One consequence of this development was the affirmation of the central role that the studio teaching of landscape planning and design should play in all programmes. The recommendation in the ECLAS Guidance document, that not less than 50% of landscape architecture degree programmes should comprise studio-based project teaching, was an important culmination of the natural process of ‘bottom-up’ convergence referred to above.
This guidance document (Bruns et al., Citation2010) was one of the results of the LE:NOTRE Network’s participation on the European Union’s ‘Tuning Project’. This had the goal of harmonising degree programmes across European Union countries and academic disciplines as a complement to the so-called Bologna Process, and thereby facilitating student mobility, as supported by, amongst other things, the ERASMUS Programme.
One of the main ideas behind the Tuning Project, however, was that this harmonisation process should be driven from the bottom-up, by the academics directly involved in the teaching process and not be a ‘homogenisation process imposed—top-down—by administrators. The strategy adopted to achieve this goal was to focus on defining the agreed outcomes of degree programmes in terms of subject specific and generic competences, at undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels. This was undertaken in the form of a collaborative process within the wider European context involving Thematic Networks from across a range of disciplines, while leaving the methods and approaches required to achieve these outcomes open, to be decided on at national, university or individual level by the teachers concerned, in the spirit of maximising academic freedom.
Looking at the diverse range of approaches to studio teaching presented in the second of the two ‘Teaching Landscape’ publications, it can be argued that the Tuning Project’s aim of promoting common competences while maintaining maximum educational diversity has, so far, been largely successful.
The European landscape convention and landscape teaching
During the period within which landscape architecture, as represented by the LE:NOTRE Project, participated in the Tuning Project, the Council of Europe’s ‘European Landscape Convention’ came into force. This was the first international treaty that focused explicitly on European cooperation to promote landscape protection, management and planning. The Convention states that, as a reflection of European identity and diversity, the landscape is our living natural and cultural heritage, be it ordinary or outstanding, urban or rural, on land or in water. A central point of the Convention is that landscape policies should also take everyday landscapes into consideration. Landscape architects have a strong platform in this common professional heritage, as well as in the garden art tradition.
By the time the LE:NOTRE Project had been completed, the Convention had been signed and ratified in 38 European countries. This is important because Article 6 of the Convention explicitly commits signatory states to promoting training for specialists and the provision of school and university courses in the relevant subject areas.
This of course did not mean the landscape architecture discipline alone, and the Convention had the effect of focussing the attention of many other fields, which also had either an academic or a professional interest in landscape. Landscape is a topic and an approach that has been adopted in many disciplines over recent years from ecology and archaeology to urbanism, not to mention geography, where the study of the subject could be said to have its roots.
Nevertheless, as Shelly Egoz (Citation2019, p.84) points out:
it is only the discipline of landscape architecture that explicitly bears the word landscape in its name, and in which landscape is not a choice of scholarly approach to be adopted, but the essence of the discipline and profession.
Furthermore, it might be argued that the goals of the Convention including the promotion of landscape conservation, landscape management and landscape planning, are each defined as involving ‘action’ in the landscape and are thus closely in line with the purpose of landscape architecture, in that they do not merely involve studying and analysing the landscape, or using it as a framework to help conceptualise other issues—as is the case with the majority of other landscape-related disciplines—but rather focus on intervention through action.
Nevertheless, the European Landscape Convention has presented both a challenge and an opportunity as far as landscape teaching and landscape architecture education is concerned. The awakening of renewed interest in the landscape on the part of many disciplines has made it clear that landscape architecture teaching cannot sensibly ignore its wider academic context. Clearly, the quality of landscape architecture teaching is not going to benefit if landscape architecture somehow seeks to close itself off from the neighbouring disciplines on the basis of being the ‘one true faith’. The wider benefits of the European Landscape Convention for landscape architecture can also be seen in its ‘adoption’ as the basis for professional understanding and organisation in countries outside Europe, such as Argentina and Columbia, Egypt and India, where the profession is small and under-developed.
Documenting the expansion of landscape teaching
The potential that related disciplines represent for landscape architecture teaching is important for the discipline to embrace actively. It is an issue which was taken up directly, early in the LE:NOTRE Project, when academics from a range of related disciplines and different countries were requested to reflect on their ways of working and the relationship of their disciplines to landscape architecture. The immediate output of this was a book, ‘Exploring the Boundaries of Landscape Architecture’, (Bell et al., Citation2011), the wider outcome will, it is to be hoped, be a broadening of the scope of landscape approaches that landscape architecture embraces in both its teaching and research as well as its practice.
What is perhaps particularly notable in this context is the way in which fields from the humanities and social sciences were involved. Previously the relationships with neighbouring disciplines had perhaps been skewed towards the natural sciences, but the majority of disciplines featured in ‘Exploring the Boundaries of Landscape Architecture’ were indeed from the humanities. ‘The Routledge Handbook of Teaching Landscape’ (Jørgensen et al., Citation2019a) even goes a step further in that a significant number of the chapters focus on teaching approaches from the arts including film, dance, creative writing and freehand drawing.
However, it is not sensible to continue to discuss the ‘What?’ of teaching landscape without also addressing the question ’Why?’. At one level, at least, the answer is relatively simple: like architecture or any other professional discipline, landscape architecture is ultimately about its practice, in this case the practice of intervening in the landscape. In turn, the central precondition for being professionally qualified involves having received the appropriate education, which brings us back to the question of what this should entail.
Given this remarkable breadth of subject matter, the real challenge for landscape teaching is to be able to combine and integrate this varied knowledge in a meaningful and relevant way. Here we move on from the question of ‘What?’ to that of ‘How?’—to which the answer lies in the role of problem-orientated, project-based studio teaching. This, of course, is the subject of the second of the two books on landscape teaching—‘Teaching Landscape—The Studio Experience’ (Jørgensen et al., Citation2019b).
The books originated in the cooperation between the editors within ECLAS and LE:NOTRE, each of whom is from a different European country, but the call for papers for these publications was distributed world-wide. Nevertheless, the aim was not to provide comprehensive geographic coverage of the contemporary situation. Instead, the books seek to provide a sample of the diversity of current teaching approaches, which is in turn a reflection of the responses to the open call for chapters. These were subsequently reviewed, edited and developed with the authors and structured to form the two resulting books.
The first, ‘The Routledge Handbook of Teaching Landscape’ is about teaching landscape subjects in a broad sense, from geology and ecology to landscape design, reflecting the differences in landscape curricula. Teaching traditions and principles still vary in many ways across schools teaching landscape, whether they belong to faculties of art, architecture, geography, forestry or agriculture, and they vary and develop over time. The main purpose of the book is to present and discuss this variety of teaching modes.
The book focuses on didactics of landscape education, reflections on pedagogy, teaching traditions, experimental teaching methods, and new teaching principles, etc. Starting with an introduction considering landscape didactics and the links between teaching and hope, the book explores the teaching of landscape understanding from three points of view: reading the landscape, representing the landscape and transforming the landscape. The teaching modes related to understanding and analysing landscapes are the focus in the first section, which includes history and theory of landscape. The teaching of representation modes from the written word to design visualisation, creativity and art in landscape teaching is treated in the second section. In the third section, the focus is on the didactics of landscape transformation, including design and planning studios, the use of excursions, field trips and site engineering.
The second book, ‘Teaching Landscape—The Studio Experience’ is a collection of examples of course units taught in landscape architecture schools from different parts of the world. The book has four sections presenting different types of classes: design studios, landscape construction classes, landscape planning studios, and classes in landscape history and theory. In the different chapters, teachers report on the creation of learning environments close to real-world situations, where students learn to synthesise case-specific information.
In the European context, the freedom of movement of professionals raises the issue of the mutual recognition of qualifications, and thus calls for a common agreement on the nature of ‘What?’ should be taught. Unlike architecture, landscape architecture does not currently fall under the European Union’s Professions Directive (DIRECTIVE 2005/36/EC), which applies to only eight professions. Nevertheless, in preparation for a possible extension of the scope of the Professions Directive, ECLAS prepared a concise one-page specification for landscape architecture education at the European level (see Box 1). This was designed to be analogous in scope to the corresponding description of the subjects of architecture education that comprises Article 46 of the Directive. Although, due to the EU’s decision to postpone the question of expanding the scope of the Professions Directive this document did not acquire official status, it is reproduced here to illustrate what it was felt that the main fields of landscape architecture education in Europe should comprise. The list of subjects it spans is clearly very broad and ranges across the natural sciences, the humanities, the social sciences, the arts and technology. While being concise, the list also aims to be comprehensive and thus, to some extent, complements the necessarily eclectic nature of the subject areas covered by the teaching books.
The two books nevertheless respond to the goal of ECLAS as well as supporting the ideals of the European Landscape Convention, bringing an expanded understanding of landscape into a teaching context. Together with the efforts made to attain European recognition as a profession, addressing this wider understanding would be the next step for developing landscape architecture further. The open question is what the future will bring to this discipline. Topical issues include the impacts of new technologies and automation, as well as challenges related to landscape democracy and the way in which society perceives and values landscape. We are already experiencing the first consequences of climate change, this and other challenges for nature and humankind will have an important impact for landscape architecture teaching and practice. We have also recently experienced how a new virus can shut down a large part of global social and economic life, and as a consequence how highly valued and important to society urban open spaces and the landscape have become, something to which landscape architecture teaching needs to respond. But also that it will have to come to terms with new forms of online teaching that the virus has called forth.
Outlook: landscape architecture education in a changing world
The world into which the profession of landscape architecture emerged, and the one in which, 100 years ago, landscape architecture education subsequently began to develop was not a static one, and over recent decades change has continued at an accelerating rate.
Despite the process of convergence and consolidation in European landscape architecture education outlined above, today the discipline cannot afford to sit back and relax. In the future, it will have to respond to a very different context to that in which it developed, if it is to continue to remain relevant.
The challenges to which landscape architecture education has to respond are, of course, much the same as those facing society as a whole. These include the irresistible and recently accelerated, spread of digitalisation, the growing ubiquity of the internet and rise of artificial intelligence, the acceleration of climate change and the worldwide expansion of the urban population resulting in the increasing global dominance of cities. Each of these presents both threats and opportunities to which landscape architecture will need to respond, and what affects the profession will necessarily also have an impact on education.
Representing landscapes digitally and their virtual manipulation at different scales with CAD and GIS is no longer anything new, and the required skills have long been part of teaching and practice. Digital workflow now reaches from regional studies to surveying and other forms of landscape information capture, through analysis to design, visualisation, tendering and construction. Indeed, the development of BIM—Building Information Management—also for outdoor spaces, will mean that the digital world will reach not just into the planning and construction of green and open spaces, but also their management, and the consideration of life cycles and recycling.
The ubiquity of the internet and mobile computing means that all this data can become both easily accessible and connected. Putting the vast amount of data now generated into context produces information, and connecting information generates knowledge. The ‘internet of things’ is already on the horizon, and for landscape architecture this means, amongst other things, the ‘Smart City’.
But all is not as straightforward as it may seem, the ‘sentient city’ does not just know all about its trees and green spaces, but also everything about its inhabitants and their movements. Thus, the question of privacy is a further issue that has been gaining importance over recent years, both in terms of the users of landscape in particular, and of society in general (Zuboff, Citation2019).
Certainly, the existence of a community of connected citizens can help to further other important new concepts for both the profession and education, such as those of environmental justice and landscape democracy. Landscape democracy is both a philosophical and ethical concept, but also a very practical hands-on one when it comes to organising and managing participation processes and looking at user groups of, for example, parks. Here too landscape teaching needs to focus more on matters of methods and processes rather than on facts and information. These questions are treated in the first teaching Landscape book, in Ruggeri and Richard Stiles (Citation2019), as well as in Egoz et al. (Citation2018).
With or without the spread of the sentient city, however, the relative importance of the urban landscape as the ‘habitat of choice’ for Homo sapiens will continue to grow, both for landscape practice and education. The European Landscape Convention already draws our attention to the importance of both urban and peri-urban landscapes, but so far neither the profession nor academia has satisfactorily come to terms with understanding the city as landscape in an operational manner. This is an important task for the future, as is the serious engagement with the concepts of green and blue infrastructure, especially in an urban context. At present these terms are used liberally, but their meaning remains vague at best, but providing them with the necessary substance and significance has the potential to raise the profile of landscape architecture considerably among the environmental professions, especially in the context of the developing climate crisis. The future need for greater resilience against both environmental and social shocks presents another important coming challenge. Here too the role of landscape architecture in climate change amelioration and adaption will become increasingly important.
With the ubiquity of information from the internet, the ease of representing physical landscapes digitally, and the reported rise in artificial intelligence, the question of the automation—not just of repetitive manual tasks but also of ‘white collar’ jobs and even professional activities—is thus increasingly being raised (Susskind & Susskind, Citation2017). However, while large parts of the expertise of some professions such as law may be tied up with the acquisition of near encyclopaedic knowledge of statutes and case law and thus may be vulnerable to the easy availability of digital information, landscape architecture is characterised by site specificity and a strong creative component. The problem-orientated integration of varied spatial information from across many fields of knowledge characterises landscape architecture and this would appear to present much more of a challenge for automation.
From this perspective, landscape architecture teaching is thus perhaps relatively safe, for the moment, from the challenges posed by the internet; indeed, it might perhaps benefit from the opportunities it provides. For example, the competences approach to teaching and learning, propagated within the context of the European Union’s Tuning Project, distinguishes between three types of competence: knowledge, skills and understanding. Whereas it is conceivable that teaching/learning of the first and to some extent the second of these can be supported if not taken over by digital means, given the central nature of project-based studio teaching, it is hard to see how this central part of the landscape architects’ education can satisfactorily be undertaken without an intensive input from experienced teachers, something which has been further highlighted by the coronavirus crisis. On the contrary, another scenario might suggest that, as the role of conventional lectures and other forms of ‘knowledge teaching’ declines, this should free up resources for an increased focus on the role of the studio teaching approach, as this can simply draw in the necessary knowledge from digital sources, on site if necessary.
Facts alone, as they can be pulled from the internet, are necessary, but far from sufficient. However, just because the internet has removed the ‘gatekeepers’ from many fields of knowledge relevant to landscape architecture does not mean that students will no longer need teachers, on the contrary—how should students navigate through this growing tsunami of information? What is important is the understanding of what, when and in which context information is needed, as well as how to evaluate and apply it. Providing this essential contextual ‘metadata’ and navigational assistance is the vital role which teachers must continue to perform. In the same way that there is a world of difference between a collection of raw ingredients and a satisfying gourmet meal, a collection of relevant facts, however large, is a world away from creating a meaningful landscape project.
Finally, also in the field of landscape architecture teaching, the internet opens up opportunities for collaborative teaching and learning forms across universities, which have so far not really been exploited. The approaches adopted to digitalisation by most universities have been to think of providing access to digital study material within their own institutional boundaries, yet the true potential of the internet is to ‘interlink’ universities and encourage collaborative cross-institutional teaching, and this has been almost completely ignored. In a still relatively small discipline, such as landscape architecture, such approaches would also provide excellent opportunities to benefit from a new-found level of critical mass, allowing individual teachers currently operating alone in their subject areas within each university to collaborate to enrich and improve the teaching and learning experience through ‘team teaching’, and thereby to release new resources for research and scholarship within the discipline.
Box 1. Proposal for a new article for a possible extension to EU Directive 2005/36/EC on professional education describing the ‘Training of landscape architects’ (designed to be analogous to Section 8; Article 46 of the current Directive dealing with the training of architects).
A. To be recognised as a component of professional recognition, landscape architecture programmes delivered by university level institutions must teach competence in the core area of the discipline, which is landscape planning, design and management. This is carried out through the conception, development, communication and implementation of landscape projects, programmes and policies, involving intervention in the landscape at different scales of time and space through.
B. To ensure that these projects, programmes and policies grow out of and fit into their social, environmental, political and cultural context, with the participation of all relevant actors and are both feasible and sustainable, landscape architecture programmes must teach knowledge, skills in and understanding of:
1. The structure of the physical landscape as well as the natural systems and processes operating to shape it
2. The historical development and the land use and management systems that have led to today’s typical patterns of vernacular cultural landscapes
3. The development, morphology and function of urban settlements, including their characteristic built form and building types and in particular their related open space structures
4. The ways in which individuals, social groups and society as a whole, both past and present, have perceived, and continue to perceive, value and interact with their landscapes
5. The legal, political, institutional and policy frameworks which influence the conservation and development of the landscape, and how they come into being, as well as the contemporary discourse relating to environmental planning and design
6. Approaches, methods and techniques for representing and analysing the landscape and for understanding the needs and expectations of its actual and potential users and other relevant actors
7. The canon of historic and contemporary parks, gardens, planned and designed landscapes, landscape designs and plans together with the ideas and individuals behind them
8. Practical planning, management and design principles and skills for landscapes, as well as the underlying theories and concepts on which they are based.
9. The materials, both living and inert, and techniques relevant for landscape projects, together with related design and construction standards involved in project implementation and aftercare
10. The professional practice of landscape architecture, including the development and role of the professions, professional ethics, the stages of the planning and design process and the practices of project management and interdisciplinary collaboration
C. To meet the academic requirement for national or state recognition, the minimum duration of studies should normally be 4 years full-time, and total 240 credits ECTS awarded, or recognised as equivalent, by an academic university programme in landscape architecture. In the case of a conversion master*, which should be a minimum of two years full time study, an award is based on 120 ECTS, together with a further 120 ECTS which must be recognised as prior learning arising from preceding undergraduate study or in-practice training.
* A conversion master programme is one where students enter a two year programme with a first degree in a different subject, ideally related to landscape architecture (from one of the ‘neighbouring disciplines’) and from which many core, generic and subject specific competences relevant to landscape architecture (as presented in the ‘ECLAS Guidance on landscape Architecture Education’) have been gained and which can be recognised as contributing to the total number of credits needed to graduate.
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Karsten Jørgensen
Karsten Jørgensen is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway, and holds a Dr.-Scient. Degree from NMBU, 1989, in landscape architecture. He was Founding Editor of JoLA – the Journal of Landscape Architecture – between 2006 and 2015. Karsten Jørgensen has published regularly in national and international journals and books.
Richard Stiles
Nilgül Karadeniz is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at Ankara University, Turkey. Her teaching and research interest focuses on participatory landscape planning and recently on landscape biography. She has been an editorial board member of SCI-expanded journals. She was Secretary General (2006–2009) and Vice President (2009–2012) of ECLAS. She is a founding member of LE:NOTRE Institute and, since January 2016, she has been the chair of the Institute.
Elke Mertens
Elke Mertens is Professor of Garden Architecture and Landscape Maintenance at the Hochschule Neubrandenburg – University of Applied Sciences, Germany. She holds a Dr.-Ing. Degree from the Technical University in Berlin (1997). She is Co-Chair of the German Hochschulkonferenz Landschaft (HKL), member of the board of LE:NOTRE Institute and has been active in the LE:NOTRE Thematic Network as well as in ECLAS as a member of the executive boards.
Nilgül Karadeniz
Richard Stiles is a Professor of Landscape Architecture in the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Vienna University of Technology, Austria, having studied biology and landscape design at the Universities of Oxford and Newcastle upon Tyne and having previously taught at Manchester University in the UK. His teaching and research interests focus on strategic landscape planning and design in urban areas. He is a past President of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools and was Coordinator of the European Union co-funded LE:NOTRE Thematic Network in Landscape Architecture for 11 years, during which time he was closely involved in preparing recommendations for landscape architecture education.
Notes
1. William Andrews Nesfield, who designed garden areas for Buckingham Palace in London and Castle Howard in Yorkshire, was the first person to use ‘landscape architect’ as a professional title in 1849. The first person to use the term for the art of designing public open space, which is it modern usage, was Frederick Law Olmsted in 1863.
2. Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld, Theorie der Gartenkunst, 5 vols., first published in 1779 by M. G. Weidmanns Erben und Reich, Leipzig.
3. ECLAS wepage: http://www.eclas.org/index.php/about/goals-and-origins-of-eclas
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