Conference Program

Contemporary debates on democratic educational landscapes increasingly emphasize openness, porosity, and participation, particularly in relation to the overlapping of educational, civic, and ecological spaces. Schools are no longer understood solely as bounded institutions, but as part of wider landscapes in which learning, social interaction, and democratic practices are negotiated across spatial and institutional borders. Yet these debates often remain tied to architectural form or programmatic intention, while the processes through which democratic agency actually emerges in everyday educational practice remain under-theorized. This paper proposes an ecological reading of educational space, understanding educational landscapes not as static or bounded entities, but as living systems whose democratic quality depends on their capacity for access, adaptation, and continuous transformation across spatial scales.
Against this backdrop, the paper draws on a learning design framework originally developed in constructionist learning (Papert, 1980) and later expanded in the context of creative learning (Resnick, 2017). Recently translated into the field of pedagogical architecture (Moog, 2026), the framework is here situated within debates on porosity, open systems, and democratic participation, and used as an analytical lens to examine how educational landscapes can actively enable democratic practices rather than merely accommodate them.

Drawing on open systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968), educational landscapes can be understood as porous configurations in which boundaries between spaces, actors, and practices remain negotiable rather than fixed.Porosity does not primarily refer to architectural openness, but to the capacity of spatial arrangements and development processes to enable exchange between formal and informal learning, between school and community, and between different forms of knowledge and expertise. Democratic participation emerges under these conditions as a situated practice produced through access, negotiation, and shared responsibility over time.
Participatory school development processes make these dynamics visible where spatial transitions are jointly designed, shared zones support multiple uses, and pupils, teachers, and other stakeholders engage in real spatial decisions with tangible consequences. Research on participatory school building highlights how such processes foster democratic learning and agency (Zenke, 2020). Studies on innovative learning environments further emphasize that the robustness of such spaces depends on sustained participation and alignment between educational vision and spatial practice (Frelin & Grannäs, 2021). Work on pedagogical architecture underlines the importance of a shared language between pedagogy and design for maintaining participatory processes across professional and institutional boundaries (Weyland, 2017).

This understanding of educational landscapes as porous and open systems connects to broader theoretical discussions on urban and spatial openness (Sennett, 2018) and resonates with current European research on educational transformation, such as the CLEAR project (2025). More recent contributions further frame schools as places of dwelling rather than fixed institutions, foregrounding long-term inhabitation and everyday practice as central to democratic educational landscapes (Weyland & Sigillo, 2025).
Rather than presenting a new empirical case, the paper synthesizes insights from participatory school development practice and contemporary research to propose a transferable analytical perspective. It argues that democratic educational landscapes emerge where spatial porosity and participatory processes intersect, enabling education to be experienced as a shared, negotiated, and continuously evolving democratic practice.

This paper explores the concept of "porous educational landscapes" through the lens of two innovative projects at TU Wien: Transformer and Cultural Collisions. Both initiatives tackle the urgent societal challenge of climate change adaptation by creating democratic spaces for exchange between higher education, schools, and the public.

The core of this analysis focuses on how traditional institutional boundaries are bridged through transdisciplinary collaboration and peer-to-peer mediation. A key element in both projects is the involvement of university students who, within their curriculum, develop and facilitate educational modules. This approach transforms students into role models and ambassadors, bridging the gap between complex scientific research and the lived experience of children and adolescents.

The projects represent two distinct yet complementary formats of "porous" learning:

While Cultural Collisions functions as an interactive exhibition featuring various stations where students engage with scientific and artistic perspectives on climate change, The Transformer acts as a laboratory, providing hands-on formats that encourage experimental learning and technical empowerment.

The "porosity" of these landscapes is manifested on three levels:

Transdisciplinary Synergy: Collaboration occurs among students from diverse academic backgrounds and between university facilitators and school teachers, blurring the lines of traditional expertise.

Methodological Sensitization: By utilizing hands-on laboratory work and exhibition-based learning, pupils are empowered to participate in democratic discourses regarding climate resilience.

Institutional Openness: The projects dissolve the "ivory tower" of the university, carrying scientific discourse into the public sphere and directly into the everyday environment of schools.

The contribution reflects on the potential of these formats to foster a democratic culture of learning. It demonstrates how involving young adults as mediators not only enhances their own sense of agency but also strengthens the engagement and self-efficacy of the next generation in the face of the climate crisis.

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.

This contribution explores how low-cost upcycling practices can function as material infrastructures for democratic engineering education. Within the Transformer project at TU Wien, an interdisciplinary outreach and co-creation initiative addressing climate and energy challenges, discarded office folders, plastic packaging, and other waste materials are shaped into furniture, inflatable mechanisms, and experimental prototypes. Rather than relying on specialized equipment and conventional purpose-designed workshop materials, these workshops deliberately employ materials that are commonly perceived as trash.

Drawing on Richard Sennett’s notion of porous boundaries in urban and social systems (Sennett, 2018), such material choices dissolve boundaries between formal engineering education and everyday life. By bringing everyday materials into structured workshops, informal experimentation and formal learning begin to overlap. By working with low-value materials, participants experience engineering not as a distant, high-tech discipline, but as an accessible practice grounded in experimentation and improvisation.

(1) Threshold Accessibility: Upcycled materials reduce financial and psychological barriers, creating liminal spaces of experimentation that resonate with the concept of threshold learning (Meyer & Land, 2003). Engineering principles become approachable through hands-on exploration rather than abstract instruction.

(2) Material Emancipation: Objects designed for disposal are reconfigured as tools of agency. This shift resonates with emancipatory pedagogical traditions that emphasize active transformation over passive consumption (Freire, 1970), finds contemporary expression in democratic education theories foregrounding agency and subjectification (Biesta, 2017), and aligns with socio-material approaches that understand learning as entangled with material practices (Fenwick et al., 2011).

(3) Reframing Engineering Practice: By working with discarded and low-value materials, participants encounter engineering as a process of exploration rather than precision and control. The absence of expensive equipment and predefined outcomes shifts attention from technical perfection to iterative experimentation. Engineering thus appears not as an exclusive high-tech discipline, but as an accessible civic practice grounded in creativity, responsibility, and collective problem-solving.

Through these practices, Transformer extends engineering education beyond the laboratory into civic and everyday contexts. Upcycling becomes not only a sustainability strategy, but a pedagogical approach that embodies democratic values through material practice. In line with research on maker education as a democratizing force in technical learning (Blikstein, 2013; Martin, 2015), such low-threshold environments contribute to the creation of porous educational landscapes where technical knowledge, ecological responsibility, and civic participation intersect.

A central problem in university planning lies in the limited involvement of students and other user groups. Long planning cycles, institutional hierarchies, disciplinary compartmentalization, and the indeterminacy of future needs often hinder meaningful participation. Spatial planning risks reproducing hierarchical structures and traditional seminar rooms shaped by surveillance, standardization, and fixed seating arrangements rather than enabling democratic agency and student-centred learning.

Our guiding question is therefore: How can universities become “future-fit” by fostering permeability both in their planning processes and in their architectural outcomes? How can dialogical formats and participatory practices contribute to creating changeable, adaptable educational landscapes?

Drawing on Richard Sennett’s concept of porous boundaries and theories of dialogical education (e.g., Rogers’ notion of self-actualization, Roger 1983), we argue that permeability must first be cultivated socially before it can manifest architecturally. Porous educational landscapes emerge through dialogical cultures that enable interdisciplinary collaboration and empower those affected by spatial decisions. Moving from participation as consultation toward participation as dialogue transforms planning into a co-creative learning process.

These theoretical reflections are grounded in interconnected projects such as LEA – Learning Environment Applications, 2020 - 2023 and HESD – Higher Education Space Development, 2024 – 2026 at the university of teacher education in Lucerne. Within the own Campus development for the future location of Lucerne University of Teacher Education in Switzerland we supported the implementation of a structured participation concept. Student participation was embedded into credited workshops. Inspired by Barcamp formats and structured through Ruth Cohn’s (1984) Theme-Centered Interaction model, dialogical workshops linked individual needs, social interaction, and spatial design questions. A key methodological innovation was the “Social Dimensions Mapping” approach, combining organizational constellation methods (MAST) with group-dynamic models of proximity/distance and continuity/change (Berdelmann et al 2016, 113-116).

Findings from our ongoing HESD research project on the systematic analysis of teaching and learning space development in Switzerland, Germany, and Denmark complement this participatory work. Using videography, document analysis, and interviews, we examined innovative didactic–spatial configurations such as inquiry-based learning workshops, active-learning seminar rooms, and interdisciplinary innovation labs. Success factors identified in the study were directly integrated into the co-development of open teaching and learning areas at PH Lucerne and PH Schaffhausen.

Taken together, these projects demonstrate that porous educational landscapes are not merely architectural outcomes but the result of dialogical planning cultures, empirical analysis, and iterative co-design. We therefore propose conceiving the university as a heterogeneous and evolving educational landscape characterized by spatial diversity, adaptability, and continuous transformation.

The relationship between educational practices, architecture and open spaces has been explored for more than a century. Well-known pedagogical approaches developed by Froebel, Montessori, Pizzigoni and Steiner emphasized the importance of nature and outdoor environments in supporting children’s cognitive, physical and social development, opening a broader reflection on the spatial dimension of learning. During the twentieth century, this debate intensified with the spread of the principles of the modern movement and influenced the architectural and pedagogical discourse on school design in the post-war period (Rogers, 1960; Buzzi and Polo, 1960).

Despite these theoretical advancements and the typological evolution of school complexes, the current situation in Italy is still characterized by a widespread condition of poor-quality school open spaces. Schoolyards are often poorly integrated with indoor environments and rarely connected with pedagogical programmes, limiting their potential as places for learning, social interaction and well-being. The Covid-19 pandemic made these shortcomings even more evident, reopening the debate on the importance of outdoor environments within educational systems and on the role that school open spaces can play in supporting more resilient forms of education and urban life (Sabbadini et al., 2011; Mirchandani and Wright, 2015; Fianchini, 2017; Dessì and Piazza, 2020; Belloni and Manganaro, 2022).

In this context, school open spaces can be reconsidered as strategic components of broader socio-ecological infrastructures. Rather than residual areas within school complexes, they can become catalysts for ecosystem services, environmental awareness and active learning practices, contributing to the construction of educational landscapes where formal, informal and experiential learning processes intersect.

The paper discusses the case of the city of Savona, where the Territorial Strategy for Sustainable Urban Development co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund identified school open spaces as key components of a broader urban regeneration strategy.

Starting from an integrated urban, environmental and socio-economic analysis that involved local stakeholders and civil society, the strategy proposes a reorganization of public spaces and urban heritage through a constellation of punctual landscape interventions aimed at activating a socio-ecological network capable of mitigating environmental and social vulnerabilities while strengthening territorial resilience.

Within this framework, two pilot projects – one located in a central school and the other in a peripheral neighbourhood – explore the transformation of schoolyards into biodiversity gardens and environmental awareness spaces for active learning, play and social interaction, while fostering their integration with surrounding public spaces and ecological networks.

By re-signifying schoolyards as civic nodes and experiential learning environments, the project reframes schools as socio-ecological infrastructures within the urban landscape. The paper discusses the methodological approach underlying this process and identifies key landscape design criteria addressing aesthetic-formal, ecological-environmental and pedagogical-functional dimensions, contributing to the broader debate on educational landscapes and resilient urban environments.

Can a lightweight, nature-based design transform a school into a community plant nursery, reclaiming a neglected heritage as a common good? This proposal addresses this central question by focusing on the relationship between a school building and the Archaeological Park of the Greek Walls (Pierre Wuilleumier) in Taranto, which it overlooks. Located in a city severely affected by industrial pollution, the park represents a vital green lung and a small urban forest with over a thousand trees capable of CO2 absorption. However, this 5th-century BC Spartan archaeological site currently suffers from neglect, a lack of informational signage, and urban decay.

The project proposes an interdisciplinary approach—integrating pedagogy, architecture, contemporary art, and nature—to reimagine the school as a community hub and a gateway to the park. Adopting the concept of porous educational landscapes, the school transcends its traditional walls to serve as a catalyst for outdoor learning and civic engagement. In this context, the school is conceived as a plant nursery: a place where new democratic relationships and environmental awareness are cultivated, mirroring the "Green Belt" initiative aimed at purifying urban air.

The interdisciplinary design can utilize lightweight exhibition systems to create a "threshold" between the institutional space and the archaeological site. This solution facilitates fluid exchanges, transforming the park into a functional extension of the classroom. To activate this space, the project incorporates collaborative art, inspired also by the philosophy of Hervé Tullet. By engaging students and citizens in co-creative processes, such as the "Expo Idéale", the project challenges stereotypes of isolated talent and promotes an inclusive environment where the creative process itself becomes a tool for social justice.

The school, acting as a plant nursery, becomes the park's guardian, providing the necessary "pedagogical tool" to make archaeological ruins accessible and understandable to the public. Ultimately, this research demonstrates how interdisciplinary dialogue between pedagogy and architecture can transform materiality from an instrument of control into a medium of emancipation. By reclaiming the Greek Walls as an active place of learning and art, the school strengthens its role as a common good, demonstrating that even in contexts marked by industrial crisis, porous design can foster a sustainable and democratic future for the entire "educating community".

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.

The relationship between children and the natural environment represents one of the most generative terrains for early childhood education, yet sustainability is still too often approached as a declarative value rather than a lived experience. This contribution proposes Land Art as a pedagogical language capable of fostering the understanding of sustainable ways of living from an experiential and place-based perspective, with particular attention to early childhood education and care (ECEC) contexts. The theoretical framework draws on embodied and situated learning (Rivoltella, 2013), grounding the proposal in the conviction that values such as sustainability can only be genuinely understood and shared through direct, immersive engagement with the environment. This perspective recalls the experiential approach of Patrick Geddes — Scottish biologist, sociologist and pioneer of regional and urban planning — whose expression "Vivendo discimus — by living we learn" (Kitchen, 1975) anticipates many of the principles that today inform place-based education and active citizenship pedagogy. Land Art is mobilised here not merely as an artistic reference but as a transdisciplinary and transversal practice. Originating in the 1960s in parallel with the rise of environmental awareness, it develops art within and through the environment, reclaiming and re-signifying space through collective and inclusive processes of environmental care. This bottom-up dimension opens educational processes to dynamic and overlapping relationships between learners, environment, and community, linking pedagogical experience to democratic engagement with place. The acquisition of an observational and exploratory gaze (central to Land Art practice) aims to reconstruct children's sense of place belonging in terms of civitas, and to unclose that genius loci (Brusa Pasquè, 2020) that is necessary to shape more open, participatory, and sustainable educational practices. The foundational principles of Land Art find a particularly fertile common ground in young children's ways of exploring the world through all five senses, making ECEC contexts a privileged site for this kind of educational experience. These theoretical assumptions are explored through a qualitative case study involving three 0-6 services distributed across the Italian territory. Participants include teachers, educators, and a local community representative for each context, whose perspectives are gathered through semi-structured observation and interview tools. Data will be analysed through the identification of meaning aggregations, allowing for the emergence of recurring patterns and situated interpretations of how Land Art practices intersect with sustainability education, community belonging, and spatial re-signification in early childhood settings. The contribution aims to offer both a theoretical elaboration and an empirically grounded reflection on the potential of Land Art as a tool to act local and think global, connecting educational innovation, environmental awareness, and civic participation from the earliest years of life.