Conference Program

This contribution explores landscape design as a tool for spatial mediation and as a form of peace infrastructure within transboundary border contexts, considering peace parks as emblematic devices of this practice. Borders are often drawn at geopolitical scales and historically conceived as mechanisms of separation, surveillance, and control, operating according to logics that interrupt spatial continuity, fragment ecological systems, and reinforce political divisions between neighboring territories.

In contrast to this paradigm, the paper proposes an alternative interpretation through the ecological concept of the ecotone, a transitional zone where different ecosystems meet and interact. Rather than understanding the boundary as a thin line of separation, the ecotone suggests a relational thickness: a dynamic spatial condition marked by high levels of interaction, overlap, and transformation. Within this perspective, borders can be reinterpreted as spaces of encounter where the interaction between systems generates complexity, adaptability, and continuous evolutionary potential.

Engaging with the non-immunitarian perspectives highlighted in the call for papers, approaches that challenge the idea of space as a protective enclosure designed to exclude difference, landscape design is framed here as a practice capable of operating in continuity with existing conditions while enabling the adaptive transformation of territories disturbed or fragmented by frontier infrastructures. Rather than reinforcing barriers, landscape interventions may act as mediating frameworks that reconnect divided environments and encourage cooperative spatial practices.

Through the analysis of selected border landscapes and parks developed in proximity to transboundary areas, the contribution investigates how public spaces and landscape projects can transform territories traditionally characterized by infrastructural transit and geopolitical control into environments of interaction and shared stewardship. These sites, often located along former military zones, demilitarized corridors, or heavily regulated borderlands, possess ecological and spatial characteristics that can be reactivated through design strategies oriented toward openness and coexistence.

By integrating ecological restoration, public accessibility, and symbolic reconciliation, such projects may support new forms of cross-border dialogue and shared territorial identities. In this sense, landscape architecture emerges as a mediating discipline operating across environmental, spatial, and cultural dimensions, redefining spaces of division as platforms for coexistence, environmental regeneration, and democratic spatial practices. The landscape project thus becomes not only a design intervention but also a cultural and political act capable of fostering new imaginaries of cooperation and collective belonging across geopolitical boundaries.