Le:Notre – The European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools and beyond...

Abstract

Although the profession of landscape architecture can look back to a long and illustrious history stretching back several centuries, only one hundred years ago there was no such thing as a university degree programme within the whole of Europe where the subject could be studied. Today, a century later, in almost every member country of the Council of Europe there is at least one university where the discipline can be studied. There is a total of more than 100 degree programmes at bachelor and master level, with many places where it is also possible to study of a doctorate. The main period of expansion took place in the decades following the Second World War and the associated wave of urban reconstruction, while the subsequent growth in environmental awareness was a further important contributing factor. In some of the larger countries in Europe, where there was more than one degree programme, regular national  meetings of landscape architecture schools began to take place during the 1970s, but it was not until 1989 that the first European higher education meeting of landscape architecture programmes was organised by Berlin Technical University. This marked the beginning of formal European collaboration in landscape architecture education. Berlin in late 1989 was, by chance, also an historic time and place in geopolitical terms, although that was not yet clear at the time of the September meeting. Rather, the main motor for this first attempt to move closer at the European level came from another historic process:
the development of the Common European Market amongst the, then, 12 states of the European Community. Two years later in 1991, the first conference under the name of ECLAS - European Conference of Landscape Architecture Schools, took place in Wageningen, NL. Ten years later ECLAS resolved to apply for European Union funding under the then SOCRATES Programme in order to develop a 'Thematic Network' in landscape architecture, in other words to seek an opportunity to pursue in a more structured manner what it was already attempting to achieve informally. The LE:NOTRE Thematic Network - Landscape Education: New Opportunities for Teaching and Research in Europe - which was co-funded by the European Union for 11 years and involved over 150 schools, provided both the necessary resources and the momentum to advance the goals of ECLAS, now the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools, and to take the establishment of a stable European academic infrastructure for landscape architecture to a new level. This paper will reflect on these developments in their wider context.