LED2LEAP - Landscape Education for Democracy towards Learning, Empowerment, Agency and Partnership

A pledge for transformative competence
The LED2LEAP project aims to bring a new way of thinking and acting into relevant university curricula in order to prepare the future generation of landscape architects, planners, architects and designers for their role as democratic leaders for sustainability. There is an urgent need for transformative competence at all levels of society since the challenges for our communities are growing across Europe. Powerful driving forces such as the globalization of work, climate change, digitalization, demographic ageing, migration, individualization, biodiversity loss and unequal resource distribution are not resolvable within the framework of election periods and sector-specific policies.

Living Labs and Participatory Action Reserach
The proposal aims to develop the discussion within academia and the landscape and planning professions around the need for landscape democracy-building policies and processes related to landscape change. Linking expert and local knowledge is not only helpful to inform better decisions but also ensure policies which are both grounded in state of the art knowledge and communities’ perceptions. The partnership between academia and civil society is also embedded in the Participatory Action Research (PAR) nature of the project, and its predecessor LED seminar. This framework allows knowledge to be co-created rather than simply transferred to communities top down.