Towards a European Landscape ecOnomy for a Sustainable urban development

TELOS has built ‘knowledge and action bridges’ between the seemingly competing systems of ecology and economy, as they appear in our everyday urban environment. TELOS, our common goal, means: moving towards a European Landscape Economy for a Sustainable Urban Development. Our project brought five European metropolitan areas together to address this spatial and educational challenge in a new way: we linked Rome, Stuttgart, Brussels, Gdansk and Antalya.TELOS has addressed the need for a large-scale educational transformation. Our project activities and results empower a new generation of visionary higher education educators, professionals, decision-makers and citizens to address sustainability challenges through problem-solving approaches that integrate systems thinking, anticipatory strategic competences, real life scenarios and insights, and interpersonal skills. Target groups were primarily university staff and students from urban planning, landscape planning, architecture and landscape architecture, agriculture, regional development, economics, business administration and real estate. TELOS has achieved curriculum innovation and competence development among staff, students and the non-academic groups in our learning activities.

TELOS had the following key objectives: (1) To develop the first Landscape Economy curriculum by which learners can deeply immerse in the theories, dialectics and methodologies associated with these emerging concepts (2) To build capacity among university teachers, enabling them to successfully implement interdisciplinary and transformative learning settings (3) To build up key competences for sustainable urban development (4) To create and share knowledge, by documenting TELOS methodology as an open educational resource (5) To disseminate the TELOS curriculum and methodology as widely as possible

The project included the following main activities: (1) Development of the TELOS curriculum (design, testing, evaluation, exploitation and dissemination) (2) Conceptualisation and implementation of two TELOS staff training events in Rome and Gdansk. (3) Piloting the TELOS curriculum by means of two blended learning events. The blended learning events consisted of the following elements: the TELOS online course, the TELOS local lab and the TELOS charette. (4) Implementation of two Multiplier Events in Nürtingen and Brussels during which we involved a wider stakeholder network and diversified audiences into the development and dissemination of the TELOS project activities and outputs

(1) Intellectual Output 1: Landscape Economy Curriculum & Learning Materials. This includes all open educational resources, such as lecture recordings, a glossary of core terminology, presentations and learning materials. (2) Intellectual Output 2: Landscape Economy Handbook. This output is targeted to educators in the sense of a facilitation handbook. It includes the theoretical background of landscape economy, the learning goals and competence framework of the TELOS curriculum, methodical guidance for interdisciplinary learning settings, workshop facilitations guidance, assessment criteria and evaluation methods, assignment descriptions, and full evidence of the TELOS experience. (3) Substantial capacity and skills development among the core target groups of the TELOS project, which will be transferable to other European audiences and up-scaled in other European locations. Our methodical framework embraced a pedagogical action research cycle, which allowed for a rapid prototyping of the TELOS curriculum, early testing and continuous adaptation and improvement based on the feedback of the actual end users.