Course summary

This forward looking and innovative MA Landscape Architecture course offers you the opportunity to further your career as a professional landscape architect and give the first steps to become a Chartered Landscape Architect. The MA Landscape Architecture course provides you with opportunities to explore responses to climate change emergency and biodiversity loss, and help in planning and designing meaningful, fair and resilient landscapes, places and communities of the future. Exploring these themes and issues is central to our common future and our Landscape Architecture course is very well placed to build employability skills that will position you at the forefront of these subjects. The course stimulates a design studio culture and encourages high levels of research, design innovation, creativity and distinct ownership of ideas and concepts. We put an emphasis on contemporary practice and real-world projects aligned to develop the critical integration of theory and practice across scales, from landscape planning to master planning to detail design. We invite applications from students with an undergraduate degree in Landscape Architecture or an international equivalent. What's covered in this course? This course is professionally oriented. You will build on existing knowledge and skills acquired in your Landscape Architecture degree and further develop creative, artistic, technical and intellectual abilities through a diverse range of design projects that explore contemporary issues and problems, which grow in scale and complexity. The format of studio learning is continued with an increased emphasis on research and experimentation. Design themes include research-led design projects relating to landscape health and wellbeing, habitat creation and biodiversity, climate change, settlement design and food security as well as large infrastructure schemes like High Speed 2 (HS2) and the West Midlands National Park. The landscape as a sequence of interrelated designed environments provides the scope for a design laboratory connected by land, ecology, water, climate and infrastructure, linked to a cultural context that extends from parish to global political and economic systems. Our modules, including our new Design for Climate Change module, provide a fascinating forum for systems scale interventions, innovation and exploration of new sustainable approaches to respond to the climate change emergency, imaginative solutions to extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and for the planning and designing of ecologically inspired places and communities. Our links to industry, local authorities and our Co.Lab partners offer an opportunity for you to be involved in the complex nature and challenges of being a landscape architect in the real world. These extend to collaborating with local stakeholders and institutions, and working alongside colleagues across the University on projects that demonstrate the authority of Landscape Architecture in improving the quality of future urban and rural living.