Upcoming events
LANDSCAPE PLANNING FUTURE Online symposium 4th of June 2025
We are looking for peers to join us in rethinking the future of landscape approaches in planning to meet the pressing challenges of our time.
We are currently facing unprecedented and complex environmental and societal challenges of global importance, with profound and acute local impacts. As a result, landscapes are lost, and there is a risk of increased conflicts over the right to the landscape in the near future. Furthermore, rapid solutions to local issues often transform landscapes with unintended consequences, including the loss of values, heightened inequalities, and land use conflicts. This calls for new approaches within planning.
Can landscape approaches offer a solution? There are certainly ambitious landscape approaches to be found in environmental governance and planning which present promising avenues for fostering integrated, multifunctional solutions. Other approaches rethink landscape beyond its visual and anthropocentric bias to grasp its complex socio-materiality, or the more-than-human, as a base for planning. Landscape approaches are also used to bridge divisions between disciplines and sectors while addressing pressing environmental and societal challenges. However, no approach can capture everything in an equal manner, so the conceptual framework for such integrated approaches also requires a critical review. Furthermore, in practice, landscape planning struggles against marginalization within siloed administrative systems and rigid legal frameworks that often treat it as a secondary or aesthetic concern.
This symposium seeks to highlight opportunities, successes, and failures in comprehensive landscape planning (broadly defined), in order to better understand the capacity of landscape approaches in planning. We invite contributions to this interdisciplinary symposium and subsequent special issue that will advance discourse on the potential of landscape planning (broadly defined) to confront contemporary and future challenges.
Drawing on international experiences and perspectives, the symposium will explore both the potentials and pitfalls of landscape planning as a tool for addressing complex, “undisciplined” socio-environmental issues. The symposium aims to uncover how landscape planning can catalyze innovative thinking and behavior, challenging the silo mentality that has long characterized governance, research, and practice.
Submissions are welcomed from scholars, practitioners, and interdisciplinary teams offering theoretical, empirical, or critical perspectives. Contributions may explore historical analyses of how landscape planning practices and ideologies have shaped societal and environmental outcomes. Submissions may also examine conceptual frameworks addressing justice, equity, and multifunctionality in planning practices or ethnographic studies of the social, cultural, and institutional dynamics in planning. Case studies from diverse cultural, legal, and administrative contexts—both successful and unsuccessful—are encouraged, as are insights from integrative approaches that showcase interdisciplinary strategies for tackling complex issues.
By exchanging ideas and experiences, we seek to analyze past approaches to landscape planning, drawing lessons from both successes and failures, and to envision its future as a transformative force capable of addressing socio-environmental challenges in an integrated and equitable manner.
The symposium also aims to foster a network of scholars and practitioners dedicated to advancing the discipline through collaboration and critical reflection.
We invite extended abstracts of 250 words to be submitted by 28th of February 2025.
The symposium will be held online on the 4th of June 2025.
Selected contributions will form the basis for a special issue publication, integrating diverse perspectives and fostering interdisciplinary dialogue.
Please send abstracts and inquiries to andrew.butler@slu.se.
