Sadık C. Artunç
Abstract
Education and practice of planning, design, and construction disciplines and/or professions, similar to the landscape architecture, have been required to adapt to multiple outside forces to remain both relevant and timely. Each era’s related “contemporary” issues inevitably led to necessary pedagogical and practice-related adjustments, ultimately changing the field, either positively or negatively. The recent focus on such diverse topics as spatial design allocation, teaching adjustments related to COVID-19, climate change and urgency for sustainability, and changing circumstances surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion have resulted in both critical discourses and debates on past approaches to these (and similar) issues, as well as differing views on what the “new normal” for all disciplines and professionals should become. If we cannot predict the outcome of a certain action, but the possibility remains that it may have potentially disastrous side effects, we should refrain from that action, or, at the very least, experiment on a scale and with the appropriate measures of protection that would keep negative effects to an absolute minimum. It is time to drop old habits of indiscriminate and worldwide application of what is technically possible and economically marketable (Daniel Wahl, 2005). The main task in this century will be to apply our ecological knowledge and systemic thinking to the fundamental redesign of our technologies and social institutions, so as to bridge the gap between human design and the ecologically sustainable systems of nature. Natural, ecological, and salutogenic design tries to learn from nature how to integrate more effectively into nature’s natural process (Fritjof Capra, 2001). Extremely complex and comprehensive (wicked) challenges posed by the climate change and more than ever urgent need to achieve global sustainability, requires breaking academic and professional silos. This presentation will propose that integration of diverse data could only be achieved in closely allied teams working in collaboration in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary formats.
Keywords
Interdisciplinarity, Sustainability
