“Thirty years after the “landscape” law, we need to bring together States General on landscape education and the landscape project”

2023-06-20 19:30:10

The law “on the protection and enhancement of landscapes”, the first legislative text dedicated to the quality of ordinary landscapes – and no longer just remarkable sites – is 30 years old. At a time when we are celebrating this anniversary, the conditions in which landscape and landscape project professionals are trained today are however greatly degraded.

The situation is all the more alarming in that it is part of a context of ecological, climatic and social upheavals in connection with which these professionals have demonstrated over the past decades, in close collaboration with local actors, their capacity for innovation. . They have thus contributed to formulating local responses integrating the ecological, social and cultural specificities of the territories, but also the sensitive dimension of the relationship of populations to their living environments.

Diversity of ministerial supervision

In order to implement rapid and coordinated responses, the College of Teachers of Higher Landscape Schools (CEESP) is calling for General States on landscape education bringing together all the players concerned: ministries, local authorities and institutions, professional associations, teachers and researchers.

The teaching of landscape and the landscape project is not doing well in France. Training courses and establishments have for too long been subjected to a severe test, weakened as they are by the same processes: pedagogical autonomy questioned, lack of access to decision-making and loss of visibility in connection with groupings and/or changes in governance. , reduction in financial resources, absence of recruitment and/or renewal of positions, increased precariousness, structural weakness of continuing education, etc.

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This weakening is greatly accentuated by a dispersion inherent in the diversity of ministerial supervision involved in the training of landscapers and in the management of the establishments hosting them. Five in number, these establishments come under three distinct ministries – those in charge of agriculture, culture, higher education and research – with often divergent interests.

As for public landscaping policies, they are carried out by a fourth ministry, the one in charge of ecological transition which, since 2016, has been in charge of issuing the landscape architect-designer title, granted by right to master’s level graduates from these five establishments.

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