Landscape Architecture
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 multifaceted nature of the landscape and mankind’s interaction with it, means that the subject area is one of unusual breadth, drawing on and integrating concepts and approaches, not just 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 have developed throughout Europe. In some countries, for example, landscape architecture can trace its roots back to horticulture, while in others it has grown out of architecture, planning or environmental science, and elsewhere out of agriculture, or ecology and nature conservation. This diversity of intellectual provenance is also clearly illustrated by the range of different types of higher education institutions across the continent in which landscape architecture teaching and research 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.In addition to the inherent complexity of content, 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 within 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). 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. As a result of the relative youthfulness of the discipline, landscape architecture courses tend often to be relatively poorly resourced in comparison with other, more traditional, disciplines. One consequence of this is 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, a fact which is by itself a strong argument for closer trans-national cooperation.