As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of what was formerly called ‘the European Landscape Convention’ spare a thought for upcoming generations: Generation Z and especially Generation Alpha are having a difficult time. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place, between the perils of the real world and the dangers of life in the virtual one. But we believe landscape can, and indeed must, come to their rescue. The Landscape Convention can show the way.

First of all, we need to understand the nature of the challenge they are facing. The first generations of ‘digital natives’ are increasingly trapped in the virtual world created by the Big Tech industry, that is being enthusiastically promoted by politicians everywhere as ‘the digital future’ for which we must all prepare. But at the same time, they are being continually warned that they are existentially threatened by a tsunami of crises in the real world, from climate breakdown to biodiversity loss. Although their generation was not involved in causing any of these ‘real world’ threats, they are now expected to step up and join the fight, and it is they who will increasingly have to face the consequences. Little wonder, then, if after momentarily flinching with shock, they are tempted to refocus their gaze rapidly on the screens of their smartphones and escape back into the virtual world.

Indeed, it is the virtual world that education policy seems mainly to be concerned with: Teaching digital literacy at school is, we are told, the answer to keep young people safe and in control in the increasingly unregulated on-line world of Meta, Google, X and Co. Yet, even as the same education policy makers – cheered on by ‘Big Tech’ – are rushing to introduce screen-based learning with laptops and tablets into the classroom, they are also pushing for the screen-mediated worlds of smartphones and social media – again as promoted by Big Tech – to be banished from schools¹. Rationalise that if you can?

In the meantime, Generation Alpha is rapidly losing touch with the real world. The more their attention is captured by the virtual world, the less will – necessarily – be their engagement with and their meaningful experience of the real world that is under threat from the climate and biodiversity crises. “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” wrote William James, the “father of American psychology”. A recent study cited in the Guardian newspaper by nature writer and academic Robert McFarlane², found that children aged eight and over were now better at recognising Pokémon characters than native plants and animals. How can we expect to call on the current generation of school children and young people to help in the fight to save the natural world if they no longer have any direct meaningful experience of what we are talking about?

But it is not worries about children’s lack of experience of nature nor their insufficient grounding in the ‘real world’ that is driving the current debate about restricting mobile phone use by young people and banning them from schools. Instead, the primary concern is about the negative impact they are having on their mental health³. Nevertheless, the problem with banning something is that it generally tends to be a certain way of making it interesting and attractive. And given the stress being placed on learning digital literacy, it seems unlikely that any efforts to limit access to the virtual world will be doomed from the start. Another strategy is clearly needed, one that is given equal weight to the drive for digital literacy.

Enter landscape literacy. A recently completed Erasmus+ project – EduScape, about teaching landscape in schools – provided the groundwork for this concept (eduscape.online/)⁴. By teaching children and young people, not just about but also through, landscape it will be possible to provide both a positive counterbalance and an important complement to the current focus on digital literacy and the fixation with the virtual world, as well as a firm grounding in and understanding of the real world in which they live.

Spending shared time in the landscape has also been shown to have positive psychological benefits. Furthermore, there are several good pedagogical arguments for taking landscape and landscape literacy as starting points in education and learning processes⁵.

Firstly, landscapes are the spatial arena in which most of the current societal challenges manifest themselves. Environmental problems are obviously embodied in the landscape. While landscapes are the places where many challenges originate – industry, transportation and traffic, the various forms of land use and the processes behind them are part of and embedded in the landscape – the opportunities for action and design are just as often grounded at the landscape level. The physical-material level of societal challenges such as climate change are also directly experienced in landscapes. Landscape stands for the complexity of the ‘real world’, but also for its concreteness and accessibility.

Secondly, landscapes represent the subjective, individual side of human relationships with the environment – they have meaning. Everyday landscapes are the places where people come into direct contact with their environment. This physical proximity is the basis for emotional closeness, the identification with place, the development of empathy and the willingness to take responsibility. Landscapes offer environments for active, intrinsic and sustainable learning processes.

Thirdly, landscape literacy is the prerequisite for people to get involved in preserving and shaping their own living environments and facing up to the social challenges associated with this. The landscape perspective draws attention to the opportunities, power and responsibility to shape them (the landscapes) according to our needs. Or – as Anne W. Spirn (2005)⁶ – put it when she first introduced the term landscape literacy: “Like verbal literacy, landscape literacy is a cultural practice that entails both understanding the world and transforming it”.

This, of course, presupposes an understanding of landscape which corresponds to that on which the Landscape Convention is based, and not an outdated romantic idea associated with spectacular vistas of rural areas far from home and school: landscape is where we all live our everyday lives. Landscape is the environment as perceived by people – to paraphrase the Landscape Convention. And for 25 years signatory states to the Convention have signed up both to provide teaching about landscape in schools as well as to raise awareness of landscape more widely. The problem is that until now little has been done to translate these well-meaning commitments into practical action. Teaching landscape literacy, both in schools and beyond can provide the answer to resolving this issue, and to addressing many of the problems outlined above. Most importantly, it can provide a real counterbalance to the screen-based childhood and reconnect and ground young people in the real world where we must all confront the challenges of today’s polycrisis. Children should be enabled to bring the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ worlds into an appropriate relationship with each other, in such a way that the experience of the landscape of the real world is the guiding force, which can then be further illuminated with the help of the virtual world.

The 25th anniversary of the Council of Europe Landscape Convention can provide an occasion to help restore the balance between the virtual and the real worlds by complementing digital literacy with landscape literacy. What is more, a generation newly conversant with landscape literacy can also be expected to enjoy a heightened sensitivity to landscape architecture.

References

¹ For example, as of May 1 2025, cell phones, smartwatches and similar devices may no longer be used at school and at school events in Austria up to the eighth grade nationwide.

² https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/30/robert-macfarlane-lost-words-children-nature

³ Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin.

⁴ The EduScape project was led by the Prague University of Technology with partner institutions from four European countries (the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, and Austria) between 2022 and 2024. The project was carried out by an interdisciplinary team of landscape architects, architects, and educators. EduScape aims to introduce and establish landscape (and the diversity of landscapes across Europe) as a teaching and learning environment in school curriculums. The focus is on the landscapes that children can experience on their own doorsteps and in the neighbourhoods where their schools are located: the landscapes in which they live their everyday lives. The overarching program of EduScape is—following Palmer (1998, p. 272)—”Learning in, about, and through landscapes“:

a) Gaining a better understanding of landscapes as a basis for life and existence, what they achieve, what shapes them, what threatens them, and what they mean for our everyday lives, our well-being, and our existence – the dimension of learning about landscapes as sites of societal challenges.
b) Using landscapes as a medium through which knowledge and skills can be generated in various fields and providing examples for teaching content defined in school subject curricula. Landscapes as learning laboratories – the dimension of learning through landscapes.
c) Creating learning environments that promise more sustainable forms of learning by enabling practical learning processes in the surrounding “real world” outdoors with firsthand experiences – the dimension of learning in and with landscapes.
The guiding idea that connects all units is to use the landscapes surrounding the schools as starting points for research-based learning processes in order to explore the phenomena of climate, climate change and its impacts, as well as possibilities for adaptation and/or mitigation.

⁵ The importance of the psychological and emotional dimension of landscape relationships, not least mediated through aesthetic experiences, is becoming increasingly clear through findings from neuropsychological research. Brain research teaches that the landscape is not simply “something out there” that we passively perceive, but that the relationship between the landscape and humans (and their brains) is a reciprocal one. It is not only that the brain shapes our perception and understanding of landscape, but that the landscape itself has shaped our brains over the course of evolution (Ball, 2022).

⁶ Spirn, A. W. (2005). Restoring Mill Creek: Landscape literacy, environmental justice and city planning and design. Landscape Research, 30(3), 395-413.