Landscape Design + Planning
Design Education for a Sustainable World
Sustainable landscape is a global cultural and ecological imperative. Environmental Designers meet this complex challenge in the creation of livable communities and places as an everyday body of practices and skills.
Environmental Designers incorporate innovative and tried-and-true methods with new and diverse tools and technologies to transform and induce a new resiliency in the landscape.
Critical metrics of adaptive and transformational change
Ecosystem health
Human health
Cultural, social and economic transformation
The Landscape Design and Planning major is formed around the newest integrative processes of landscape design and planning needed to reverse the detrimental environmental effects of many past and current practices. Its two tracks, Landscape Design and Landscape Planning, give focus to the principal scales of practical landscape architectural applications.
Core courses in Landscape Architecture give students engaged experiences to learn about and practice design of regions, communities and sites to conserve ecosystems services and water and air resources, protect biodiversity, and to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Principles derived from the newest design and planning project and critical new metrics of sustainability such as LEED, LEED-ND and Sustainable Sites will be used to structure learning objectives.
The setting for your education…the unique Minnesota landscape
The food, fuel, emissions triangle
With over half of the globe urbanized and the combined effects of settlement and transport contributing to over 75% of anthropogenic green house gas emissions; and with agriculture as another of the dominant stresses on ecosystem services, Minnesota is positioned well to see the shape of new futures.
Integrative water infrastructure
Our freshwater resources, though fragile are omnipresent and connective across human and other animal populations in the Minnesota landscape.
Communities and creative discourse
The Minnesota landscape has always been a sum of creative discourse registered against the tried-and-true; this discourse is now more diverse than ever.