Starting from exploring different forms of Play, the project aims to educate and engage younger generations in climate change issues.

Laura Cipriani is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at Delft University of Technology and a founder of Superlandscape, a landscape and urban design firm. She holds a Ph.D. in Landscape Urbanism from IUAV, a master’s degree in landscape and urban issues from Harvard Design School, and a master’s in Architecture from IUAV. Her current research addresses climate change issues, starting from the materiality of water and soil, and adopting (co)design approaches. She authored and edited several books, including recently “Fluid Soils. (Co)Designing for the Wadden Sea Landscapes”. This year, “(Co)Designing Hope: Aqueous Landscapes in Transition” was published with Routledge, featuring numerous projects and research on the “body of water,” including contributions by landscape architects, geographers, academics, engineers, and artists. [...]

The relationship between soil and water is at the center of interest now more than ever. Like many other littoral areas around the globe, such as lagoons, wetlands, islands, and their inland areas, the Wadden Sea territories struggle between two opposing forces: permanence and transformation. The war between man and nature is waged on various fronts (i.e. geo-morphological, climatic, ecological environmental, architectural, and landscape) and in urban settlements.

Landscape design is the product of a plural, collective symphony that involves or originates from living systems and natural forces. From hydrologist to botanist, fisherman to farmer, swallow to fish, rain to wind, all of Earth’s systems constantly draw landscapes. The actors involved in the collaborative dance of the cosmos incessantly design landscapes within a complex and often indecipherable plan.
How can landscape design and different forms of collaboration open new doors to tackle the water and climate crises? What hopes can spring from collective design in its broader meaning?
This introductory chapter sets out a number of ‘axioms,’ observations, notions, and ideas on landscapes, the water and climate crises, and (co)design, identifying what hopeful routes
might be taken for the three states of aqueous landscapes in transition—liquid, solid, and gas.
People, animals, plants, water, ice, fog, wind, sand, and rocks—all contribute to the cosmos’ landscape symphony and designing together can become a seed of hope to listen and embrace the Earth’s climatic changes.

The second Ph.D. Landscape Community Colloquium presents the ongoing Ph.D. works from the Section of Landscape Architecture at TU Delft by discussing research methods in landscape architecture. Landscape research methods encompass diverse approaches to understanding, analyzing, and designing landscapes. They are crucial for investigating various aspects of landscapes, from their ecological functions to their social and cultural dimensions.

Research methods in landscape architecture embrace empirical inquiry, design thinking, and stakeholder engagement, ranging from site analysis to design research, from participatory methods to interviews and questionnaires, from fieldwork to case studies, etc.

By employing diverse research methods, landscape architects can gain insights into the complex interactions between people, environments, and landscapes and develop innovative practices.

The Colloquium will seek to address the following questions. What methods do landscape researchers use? Are they different from those of other disciplines? How could they be implemented?

Ph.D. candidates will present one research method used in their research, describe it, and argue how and why this method is relevant to their research.

Today’s new generations, and in particular young people, will face consistent landscape changes during their existence. Can we create consciousness in young generations of how climate change will modify landscapes and cities? Can we involve children and university students in co-designing the landscape considering climate change? Can we develop new educational methods and co-designed techniques for primary and tertiary education?

This presentation will introduce the Comenius Fellowship results for didactical and pedagogical innovation—an invitation to act collectively to save our planet Earth and to develop a positive attitude and emotional knowledge in contact with nature to tackle the climate transition.

Starting from exploring different forms of games, the project aims to educate and engage younger generations in climate change issues. The game becomes the tool through which students can acquire knowledge, observe the world from different perspectives and ultimately imagine and transform the future world. Games are ‘designed experiences’ in which players can learn through doing and being, rather than absorbing information in traditional educational formats. By assuming various roles and perspectives, the educational experience of play triggers emotions that help to acquire new awareness, develop a more complex vision of the future, and finally make decisions.

In the project, students from the landscape, architecture, and urban disciplines explored the past, present, and future of an assigned landscape, adopting the concepts of play, design, and climate change. Later, students themselves became ‘actors of change’ involving children in co-designing and co-creating a collective outdoor climate game on-site.

How do young generations and educators envision the future of the Wadden Sea territories? How will these landscapes be modified in the years to come? How do we embrace the past and the present and imagine the future? […]

Some anthropic and natural practices involve working with the atmospheric phenomena of change of state, including clouds, fog, frost, and dew. This contribution explains how human and non-human ‘cloud gardener’ (Clément, 2021) practices can allow us to explore new (co)design techniques and open our imagination to new possibilities.
The introductory paragraphs ‘Oceans of clouds. Drops of Fog,’ ‘The Rain Dance,’ and ‘Learning From Nature’ by Laura Cipriani introduce readers to this theme by addressing the scientific-technical and poetic-aesthetic dualism of climate modification and adaptation by technologies, humans, plants, insects, bacteria, and microorganisms that oscillate between the two inverse phenomena of the passage of state: condensation and vaporization.
The last paragraph ‘Clouds’ is an excerpt from Clément’s book Nuages (Clément, 2021) initially published in 2005. Clément explores clouds in the water cycle within the ‘planetary garden’ (Clément, 1999), intending to explain how cloud gardeners can ‘create’ and ‘hold’ water, frost, and fog in desert environments. From Chinese water towers to the Namib Desert, from the Atacama Desert to the everyday landscape of Clément in Limousin, France, cultivating clouds in dry regions of the planet also passes through the wisdom of gardeners who decide that their lawns should turn yellow. Letting plants organize with the new climate can provide hope in tackling the climate crisis.

Beginning in the fourteenth century, along the northeastern Italian coastline, Venetians began to create a series of hydraulic structures called “fishing valleys,” which combined aquaculture production with lagoon and seawater management. According to the current scenarios provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the coastal areas, where many historic fish farms still stand, will inevitably be affected by the rise in sea level. To be preserved, coastlines will require some sort of water defense or possibly a managed retreat. Can we redesign traditional fish-farm systems as climate, economic and environmental adaptation devices? Through a series of design scenarios, this contribution explores how traditional fish farming can help redefine the territorial scale by addressing climate change and reviving existing production systems.

The Rhenish crater is one of Europe’s largest and deepest open-cast coal mines. Humans have transformed the landscape to the point of giving life to a new geological era. The mine is the symbol of humanity’s power over territorial, environmental, and climatic transformations at impressive levels of scale and scope.
This contribution sums up five different times of the Hambach mine landscape, with its rhythms and palimpsests: deep geological time, historical time, the rapid anthropogenic time of excavation, the present time of transition towards new forms of energy, and finally, future time with the conversion of the crater into a lake.

Lagoons, wetlands, islands, and their inland areas struggle between two opposing forces, permanence, and transformation. Coastal lagoons are constantly evolving dynamic natural ecosystems, shaped over the centuries by natural phenomena and ongoing anthropic interventions. The war between man and nature is waged on various fronts: geo-morphological, climatic, ecological-environmental, architectural, and landscape, as well as in urban settlements. Despite being a UNESCO World Heritage Site of extraordinary environmental value and beauty, the Wadden Sea, its territories, and its people, are facing an uncertain future, while currently wrestling with a latent climatic, economic-productive, and social crisis. Subsidence increased by gas extraction, soil erosion, saltwater intrusion, eutrophication, and agricultural water pollution testify to a territory in the throes of long-term repossession by the sea. Unlike large coastal conurbations, these areas are marginal territories, with low levels of urbanization, and are mainly linked to agricultural, fishing, tourist development, and dying industrial activities. Starting from the past, the present, and its legacies, the presented work will present many possible futures of the Wadden Sea and its hinterland.

This article drafts a global picture of landscape program offerings worldwide through data collection, mapping, and targeted interviews. The study presents data collection on landscape architecture programs throughout the world and interviews with graduate program directors. The selection criteria for the case studies address diversity in crucial categories. The interviews elucidate current curricular trends in master’s degree tracks. This research supports the view that global landscape programs are mainly a product of Western knowledge, dealing with urban centers primarily located in one of the world’s 14 biomes. At the master’s level, programs respond to diverse missions according to context, cultural differences, and traditions. Future trends and challenges for landscape architecture programs include climate change, new technologies, social justice, and equity. In light of these findings, we call for a collective landscape education to respond to unprecedented and overwhelming climatic, economic, and social uncertainties.

The Hambach mine is one of Europe’s largest and deepest open-cast coal mines. Humans have transformed the landscape to the point of giving life to a new geological era. The mine is the symbol of humanity’s power over territorial, environmental, and climatic transformations at impressive levels of scale and scope. This contribution sums up five different times of the Hambach mine landscape,
with its rhythms and palimpsests: deep geological time, historical time, the rapid anthropogenic time of excavation, the present time of transition towards new forms of energy, and finally, future time with the conversion of the crater into a lake. Time is the driving force of this place in light of the geological, anthropic, and climatic changes. The work presents a reflection on the IDEA League summer workshop held in 2022 by TU Delft in collaboration with Aachen University and Politecnico di Milano.

REL22 was an international summer school program launched by the Institute of Landscape Architecture of RWTH Aachen University (Prof. Frank Lohrberg, Silvia Beretta) together with the Master’s Programme in „Landscape Architecture and Landscape Heritage“ of Politecnico di Milano (Prof. Antonio Longo) and
the Master’s Programme in “Landscape Architecture” of TU Delft (Prof. Laura Cipriani). The aim was to formulate visions for the landscape transformation of the Rhenish Lignite District, the largest open-cast lignite mining area in Europe, located in the German region of North Rhine Westphalia.

Today, the definition and role of the landscape architect remain uncertain. The profession encompasses multiple realms of research and practice that seem to contradict each other according to the views held by many countries’ professional and educational systems. While some see landscape architects as creative gardeners, others interpret them as rational technicians—not to mention all the intermediate work scales and definitions between the two extremes. This research aims to gain insight into the definition of the next generation of landscape architects and it is a product of a research undertook for the ‘Landscape Journal.’ The work is organized in three parts. The first part discusses the uncertainty regarding who the landscape architect is and the ever-evolving role. The second part identifies the existing educational programs in landscape architecture on the global scale producing a global database and cartographies with population centers, terrestrial ecological regions, and education levels. The third part presents the results of a series of targeted interviews at 10 international universities from all continents to facilitate the understanding of current global educational trends in the master tracks. The list includes: Cornell University & Penn University, USA; TU Delft, Netherlands; University of Pretoria, South Africa; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hanover, Germany; Politecnico di Milano, Italy; University of Technology Sydney, Australia; CEPT University, India; Federal University of Rio, Brazil; Peking University, China. Finally, the research indicates that today graduate landscape architecture education is mostly a product of Western knowledge, likely resulting in hidden cultural dominance. In a planet dominated by unprecedented climatic, economic, and social uncertainties, this research aspires to a collective landscape architecture consciousness, which goes beyond the singularity of the individual and takes responsibility in today’s world.

Today, the landscapes of Asia—and Southeast Asia in particular—are undergoing major transformations, many of which are due to urbanisation processes that impact coastal areas. These are often controversial reclamation projects, generically referred to as the ‘war of sand’—an (in)visible conflict named for the raw material used to develop artificial land for property development. In Malacca, Malaysia, coastal urbanisation engenders serious environmental damage via the elimination of mangroves, deterioration of water quality and marine ecosystems, and erosion. It also causes severe social and economic transformation that leads to specific social dynamics marked by the marginalisation of certain ethnic minorities. This invites us to rethink the right to the city and the landscape in the moment of reclaiming land. For this purpose, this article describes how coastal development and reclamation projects are heavily mining local communities and the environment. The sand war, it turns out, is not purely a resource-grabbing conflict nor a real estate process with heavy environmental implications, but an implicit war against ethnic and religious communities. Inequality is a consequence not by accident but by design.