The Landscape Urbanism programme leads to either an MArch (16 months) or MSc (12 months) degree. It explores the role that design and designers (from architects, landscape architects, urban designers and planners) can play when confronted with large scale territories (metropolitan areas, rural environments, infrastructural and productive landscapes, etc) and planetary urbanisation. At these scales, territories are structured by sets of economic policies, legal frameworks, political decisions, social and cultural contexts, and engineering solutions; design inputs are either left out altogether or consigned to the fringes.

Landscape Urbanism explores design not only as the source of aesthetic and performative proposals that are necessary to offer alternatives to the acute urban and environmental problems of today, but also as a mechanism with which to orchestrate, choreograph and negotiate their implementation within political and economic frameworks at large scales, over time. The programme is constantly evolving, and integrates critical thinking as well as practices such as cartographic representation, scripted simulation and GIS mapping, all of which are widely available in geographical disciplines but relatively untapped within the design fields.

Design and the Green New Deal (GND) Given the climate and ecological emergency that the world is currently facing, it is of paramount importance that architects support a socially just re-structuring of the world we inhabit. This effort should be intrinsically dependent on the health of the earth systems and trigger, in turn, a radical transformation of the role that individuals can collectively play in developing design proposals, mitigation strategies, advocacy initiatives and activism. One way to achieve this is by supporting a Green New Deal (GND). To co-ordinate this effort, Landscape Urbanism will explore this brief for the second year, and will get behind a project with the capacity to unite all the best intentions, preoccupations and existing proposals of the design community. This project is a GND, which the programme and its participants will contribute to shaping in the UK.

The design expertise of Landscape Urbanism in the visualisation, mapping and spatial understanding of socio-ecological systems is crucial to this project and the particular challenges that it will face. The programme will therefore develop proposals for a GND in collaboration with the New Economics Foundation through the exploration of different policies, such as:

• The transformation of a Common Agricultural Policy in a post-Brexit scenario and the impact that it could have on local communities.
• The rewilding of urban areas and the benefits that this could have for the wellbeing of citizens in both urban and rural environments.
• A Just Transition towards a post-fossil-fuel economy, including the proposition of alternative economic models and the spatial impacts these will have on the design of urbanisation processes.
• The exploration of different land ownership schemes, beyond existing privatised and individual models, that could radically transform the UK landscape.