About Dealing with the Impossible: An Account of Experience in Landscape Planning Courses

Abstract

Interdisciplinarity is a magic spell. As with all spells, it is used when normal practice fails and recourse to a higher art is necessary. My first experience of interdisciplinarity was as an evil spell. I teach in a subject which has, for better or worse, committed itself to interdisciplinarity. There was no alternative, since three courses at four institutes, altogether comprising some 25 single subjects, had been amalgamated into a single university discipline. This meant that since each of the three courses already combined several disciplines, two successive stages of interdisciplinarity were involved. When stated in abstract terms this sounds monstrous, but when put in concrete terms it is much clearer, and even seems quite unremarkable: the subject I refer to is landscape planning. Both the nature of its content and its practical application compel it to take this route; the older subject of landscape design within landscape architecture faced more or less the same problems as today's scientific discipline, except that formerly less fuss was made about the magical nature of the subject. Four institutes have been allocated departments which offer courses in landscape planning, as follows.