The Landscape Urbanism programme explores the role that designers (from architects and landscape architects to urban designers and planners) can play when confronted with policies and regulations that are currently shaping landscapes and territories across the globe (metropolises, cities, rural environments, infrastructural and productive landscapes, etc). Such environments are today configured by economic policies, political decision-making, social and cultural structures, and engineering solutions. Design inputs are either left out entirely or placed at the fringes. Landscape Urbanism at the AA explores design not only as the source of aesthetic and performative proposals that offer necessary alternatives to the acute urban and environmental problems of today, but also as a mechanism to orchestrate, choreograph and negotiate their implementation at large scales over time.

Landscape Urbanism is constantly evolving. It integrates critical thinking with diverse practices such as cartographic representation, scripted simulation and GIS mapping, all of which are widely utilised in geographical disciplines but relatively untapped within the field of design.

Given the climate and ecological emergency that the world is facing, it is of paramount importance that those involved in designing landscapes (whether architects, landscape architects, artists, planners or engineers) support a socially just re-structuring of the world we inhabit. This effort should be intrinsically dependant on the health of earth systems and trigger, in turn, a radical transformation of the role we can collectively play in developing design proposals, mitigation strategies, advocacy initiatives and activism.