Scenario thinking in landscape architecture education

The contribution presents the experience of the Final Master Studio in ‘Landscape Architecture and Infrastructures’ carried out in the last seven years at the Architecture Department of the University of Ferrara, Italy. The course focuses upon the development of a single project over the last academic year bringing the students to their Master dissertation. The studio is structured on five teaching modules held by academics and experts on different topics: landscape architecture, parametric landscape & infrastructure design, coastal and hydraulic engineering, geology, and energy engineering. Such diversity has been set up with the aim of providing students with as much as possible skills contributing to their work development in the direction of an interdisciplinary scenario-based approach to the issues concerning infrastructural landscapes’ evolution. One of the main pedagogic challenges is related to the fact that the majority of the students who chose the studio, during their university career, have not been able to attend any specific course on landscape architecture. Such a situation, which is not uncommon in the Italian scene, reflects a peculiar way of considering the landscape discipline as a complementary skill, among others, for future architects. This generalist and classical conception of the profession, as it is also regulated by law, has affected academic programs and implicitly prevented the establishment of strong landscape tendencies in architecture schools. Furthermore, this lack has deeply contributed to downplay the architects’ role in planning, design and management of major landscape transformations in favour of other professional profiles. As a result, landscape architects are rarely involved with the infrastructures’ design process since its beginning; only after basic strategic choices have already been taken and the infrastructure layout has been set up, they are called in order to mitigate side-effects, visual impacts and to restore some kind of ‘natural’ appearances. Such an attitude at considering the landscape just under the filter of impacts is probably grounded on two main beliefs: the first concerns a certain sense of guilt towards Nature seen as an ideal and fixed entity that is going to be violated; the second, more practical, deals with the reassuring effect of data, numbers and statistics that engineering as well as other scientific-based disciplines are able to provide the developers with describing the infrastructure as a congruent body which can range inside a predictable array of circumstances.