The notion of educational landscapes today extends far beyond the school. Alongside formal educational institutions, a growing number of community organisations, cultural associations, and civic initiatives are developing their own educational programmes as drivers of social connection and collective value: neighbourhood houses, community gardens, cultural hubs, hybrid indoor-outdoor spaces operating in the interstices of the contemporary city as genuine third spaces (Galateo, 2024). In these settings, education is not an ancillary service but a structural element, and the quality of the space in which it unfolds becomes a political question: space is never neutral, and its material configuration either enables or inhibits democratic relationships, participation, and agency (Weyland & Galateo, 2023).
Contemporary educational landscapes cut across built environments, open spaces, threshold zones, and spatial configurations designed to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside. This is the porosity between space and society that Sennett (2018) describes, the spatial capacity to sustain fluid exchanges between formal and informal learning, between school and community, between disciplines. Yet designing and transforming such environments demands competences that remain siloed across separate fields. Educators, architects, landscape designers, product designers, and ecologists each operate with their own tools and vocabularies, with few opportunities for genuine cross-disciplinary dialogue. This fragmentation is increasingly untenable. What is needed is both a professional figure capable of working across these domains and a training model that is itself porous.
EDENSPACES, a second-level master's programme launched in 2025 at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and the first of its kind in Italy, was established to develop precisely this figure. The curriculum weaves together pedagogy, architecture, landscape, design, botany, and ecology within a programme built around intensive residential sessions that combine lectures, co-design workshops, field visits, and collaborative project work. This immersive format is rooted in sustained, situated dialogue among students, scholars, and practitioners from diverse backgrounds. The choice of residential intensives is not a matter of logistics but of pedagogy: porosity between disciplines requires shared time, common physical spaces, and the opportunity to unlearn the boundaries of one's own field.
The first cohort of 20 students confirms the nature of the demand: 16 come from architecture, engineering, design, or communication, and only 4 from education sciences. These figures point to a strong demand for pedagogical competences among spatial professionals, and equally to the need to make the field more accessible to those working in education. From the earliest sessions of the programme, a collective taxonomy of educational landscapes took shape, spanning school gardens to urban squares, corridors to neighbourhood houses, coastal parks to museums: categories that overlap and cross-pollinate, porous by definition. It is precisely this permeability that demands a perspective capable of holding together the scale of nature, the scale of construction, and the scale of social relations, rendering any monodisciplinary approach inadequate.
This paper presents the rationale, structure, and early evidence from EDENSPACES, arguing that training professionals capable of operating across disciplinary boundaries is a necessary condition for the democratic transformation of educational landscapes, within and beyond the school.
