Landscape architecture is the discipline concerned with mankind's conscious shaping of his external environment. It involves planning, design and management of the landscape to create, maintain, protect and enhance places so as to be both functional, beautiful and sustainable (in every sense of the word), and appropriate to diverse human and ecological needs.
The modern history of the subject has a particular European dimension. This can be traced from mediaeval beginnings in monastery cloisters and secular pleasure gardens - with their roots in Roman, Byzantine and Moorish traditions - through the humanist gardens of the Italian Renaissance, the magnificent French Baroque gardens of André Le Nôtre, to the English landscape tradition of the eighteenth century. During the 20th century ideas from Germany, the Netherlands and Spain played an important role in shaping contemporary European landscape architecture. Over recent decades the discipline has expanded to encompass wider environmental concerns, by combining approaches from the natural sciences and the planning disciplines, developing strategies, methods and techniques for the assessment and amelioration of environmental impacts and also for the treatment of issues associated with sustainability and the conservation of the cultural landscape heritage.
The exceptionally wide-ranging nature of the landscape means that the subject area is one of unusual breadth, drawing on and integrating not just material from the two sides of the traditional divide between the creative arts and the natural sciences, but incorporating many aspects of the humanities and technology as well. This complexity is closely reflected by the diversity of approaches to the discipline which can be found throughout Europe, a diversity which is clearly illustrated by the range of different types of higher education institutions across Europe in which landscape architecture teaching has been established. These range from universities specialising in the fine arts to those dedicated to agriculture and forestry, and encompass technical universities as well as the more broadly-based 'general' universities.

Development of the discipline
In addition to this inherent complexity of content, the historic roots of the subject include a wide spectrum within Europe. In some countries, for example, the discipline can trace its development from horticulture, in others it has grown out of architecture, planning or environmental science, elsewhere out of agriculture, or ecology and nature conservation. There is also considerable variation in the state of development, i.e. the 'maturity' of the discipline from country to country, although in comparison with the majority of traditional subject areas in higher education, landscape architecture must be generally classed as a 'young' discipline. Indeed landscape architecture is perhaps one of the few academic disciplines which was established in the New World (Harvard 1900) before it became the subject of university education in Europe (Oslo 1919, followed by Berlin 1929). While there are now landscape courses in most European countries, in several landscape architecture education is relatively new, having only been established over the last decade. This applies not just to many of the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe but also to a number of countries in western Europe.
This brief overview shows that, while there is much to be done to move towards the convergence that is one of the central goals of the Bologna Process, there is also much richness and variety within European landscape architecture education. Such a richness, which reflects both the diversity of the landscape itself and European cultural approaches to it, should not lightly be discarded in order to achieve conformity for its own sake, but rather be seen as an important potential for the co-ordinated development of new specialisations. Convergence towards a common paradigm and the resulting agreement on common research and development goals is, however, a natural development process in all disciplines, and it can be argued that landscape architecture in Europe has reached a stage where it is ready to take an important step in the direction of such common principles.
Landscape architecture education and scholarship seek to equip students to play a creative and informed role in conserving the existing and shaping the future landscape, and to enhance society's appreciation for and understanding of landscape resources and values as an important living facet of Europe’s cultural and natural heritage.
The fact that, despite its long history, the discipline of landscape architecture is a relatively recent addition to the list of subject areas studied at Europe’s universities, has a number of important implications for European co-operation. Clearly there is a need to provide advice and support to the emerging courses, but the importance of collaboration is arguably just as great for the established courses. As a result of the relative newness of the discipline, landscape architecture courses tend to be relatively poorly resourced in comparison with other, more traditional, disciplines. One consequence of this are the relatively modest staffing levels, both in absolute terms and as measured against the unusually wide-ranging nature of the subject area. This in turn has had an impact on the research potential of the discipline: the necessary 'critical mass' for the development of functioning academic communities within the various sub-disciplines of landscape architecture simply does not exist in the majority of European countries.
It is against this background, that the Council of Europe’s recently adopted ‘European Landscape Convention’ has drawn attention to the central importance of landscape as a key issue of European concern. The Convention recognises that: „the landscape contributes to the formation of local cultures and that it is a basic component of the European natural and cultural heritage, contributing to human well-being and consolidation of the European identity”, and that it „...is an important part of the quality of life for people everywhere: in urban areas and in the countryside, in degraded areas as well as in areas of high quality, in areas recognised as being of outstanding beauty as well as every day areas“; Only through closer co-operation between universities at the European level can the identified resource deficiencies be compensated for, and the challenges posed by the European Landscape Convention effectively be met. Such co-operation can also help significantly to create the necessary preconditions to allow European higher education institutions to compete strongly in the growing world-wide marketplace for both graduate and postgraduate teaching and research in landscape architecture as called for in the Bologna Declaration.