LED (Landscape Education for Democracy) is an interdisciplinary, international course unit training conceptual thinking, diversity management, and intercultural communication for building leadership competence in the spatial planning professions.
To meet contemporary needs in spatial planning, we need to rethink design and planning education so that future practitioners will have the knowledge, skills, and sensitivities necessary to design and implement democratic decision-making in landscape planning. LED promotes empowerment, participation, and active citizenship among young people by directly addressing the topic of participation and active citizenship, thus enhancing relevant competences needed for facing social, cultural, and environmental challenges in Europe. It also includes training participation methods in interdisciplinary constellations as a fruitful ground for groundbreaking new ideas for local change. In this way, it clearly supports the objectives of the 2013 Communication on Opening Up Education by providing an open, online course. LED focuses on the importance of the practical, everyday application of the principles of the European Landscape Convention, the Aarhus Convention, and other key accords that address landscape decision-making along democratic principles.
The project has, after a follow-up in the LED2LEAP project from 2019 until the end of 2022, a new project: the Open Landscape Academy, where collaboration between academia and communities takes the form of Living Labs. Read more on the LED/website.