Facing urgent sustainable development issues, the centre of any contemporary political, cultural and social debate, a Masters course has been organised whose purpose is to manage and to propose possible best uses for Mediterranean landscapes and territories through the training of skilled professionals in specific design and planning.
The Masters aims to focus on different important themes:
The peculiar transcultural character of the Mediterranean
geo-region
A specific approach is to be defined for Sustainable Development strategies
and techniques to better fit the specific characteristics of each region.
The Mediterranean is the heart of globally important cultures, with unique climate
and spatial features and a strategic position between three continents,
but also a fragile ecology and a territory which has already been irreversibly
changed. Immediate special action must be taken to apply specific Sustainable
Development to reprocessing territories and ways of life.
Going
beyond the disciplinary boundaries
Experts in Sustainable Design for the specific issues shown in the Mediterranean
Region are currently still missing, although there is great interest within
the related disciplines of architecture, urbanism, planning, engineering,
agronomy, forestry and different ecological and biological disciplines.
A Landscape Architect is an expert professional that can well fit the task
of facing contemporary Mediterranean region and landscape needs with his
multidisciplinary (“holistic”) knowledge and skills in order to conceive,
design, and manage the transformation process.
A program that fits the challenge for the Mediterranean landscapes
This II level Masters in Landscape Architecture has the general aim of training experts to face Mediterranean urban, peri-urban, agricultural and natural territories keeping in mind the complex texture of a unique historical and cultural heritage together with a very special particular natural environment. The students will be trained to manage designs and interventions through different scales of Mediterranean territorial sustainable design, taking into account the specific cultural and environmental issues while studying and comparing relevant different international examples of “best practice”. Moreover an interdisciplinary training and research network focused on the different fields related to planning and design intervention is meant to address not just the Mediterranean basin itself, but also the larger Mediterranean climate regions such as California, South Africa and Australia.
Course program
The Master is organised in four parts over a period of 16 months. Its activities are: frontal/ classroom teaching, assisted workshop activity, assisted study activity, distance individual and collective teaching/ learning activity (45 cfu/ECTS), apprenticeship (10 cfu/ECTS) and a final project (5 cfu/ECTS).
The first, second and third parts concern compulsory activities (master classes and design workshops) and optional activities (classes and seminars) according to the students interests and skill.
The fourth part is dedicated to professional landscape project activity and practice, to be concluded with a final dissertation related to the apprenticeship program; apprenticeship is also possible in the participants workplace provided on a specific program to be arranged with the Master Teachers.