Landscape Architects Knew…Planning with the aim of “gardening the world”.

peer reviewedThe shift towards a more “global scale” is not new for landscape architecture. It is already in nutshell in its earliest forms (XIV century) and in the debates of the XVIII century on the evolution of the concept of Nature and the art to "Take Care of Earth" by “Gardening the World” (H.Repton, G. Clément). From the awareness of the “green revolution” landscape’s approaches were defined as: Gardening, Landscape Gardening, Landscape Architecture, until the contemporary dimensions of Landscape Urbanism and Landscape Planning. This defining discipline’s process, going on for a long time, is the search for ways for the hybridisation required to cope with the complexity of the landscape. The widening of scales or their interscalarity, depends on the change of human capacities: the ability to mentally grasp the space experienced and/or acted upon; to think through space and time; and to understand 'space in motion' or 'space of living conditions'. Therefore, what is new is not the scale of the processes of change, which has always been global, but rather the acceleration of changes that led us to interpret them today as urgent challenges. A ‘global nature of the responses’ is required and concerns the sphere of design, planning and politics. What might seem like a modest shift of emphasis, instead reveals a major shift of approach implying a systemic conception of reality free from the Cartesian dichotomy between Subject and Object. This has profound repercussions on the profession because it calls to greater responsibility for the project and it implies its transcalarity, its interdisciplinarity, its farsightedness and memory and therefore the ability to know how to interact with complexity, without trivializing it, eliminating it or flattening it, but on the contrary knowing how to empathize with it by innovating the processes to create quality landscapes