Elective IV: Landscape Architecture and planning

The course aims at introducing the discipline of Landscape Design and Planning as well as to its potentials, instruments and its role among various other urban disciplines. Core issues include water landscapes, intertwined urban and regional relations, place and identity, integration, and environmental preservation. It aims that students understand cities and their large-scale processes of production and consumption that are claiming more and more space, to understand the new reality that is emerging on the ground and how can the environmental qualities and the identity of places be preserved. The course covers the roles, capacities and main instruments of landscape architecture and design, also referred to as Landscape Urbanism, that is becoming more important in the contemporary situation of an all-encompassing valorization of space though urbanization. This course tackles the spaces of nature, green and the environment as core entities of urban development, instead of mere “left over” spaces. It also comprises the appreciation of various new forms of urban fabrics, at various scales such as new intertwined systems of housing, infrastructure, “logistics”, water, greens, and different natural landscapes. The course also informs students in the localization and adaptation of global systems and solutions to local contexts under consideration of local identities.