News from project TELOS - Towards a European Landscape Economy for a Sustainable Urban Development

• 10/11/2022

TELOS stands for: Towards a European Landscape Economy for a Sustainable Urban Development

This project brings five European metropolitan areas together to address this spatial and educational challenge in a new way: we link Rome, Stuttgart, Brussels, Gdansk and Antalya. IFLA Europe is proud to support this project in promotion and dissemination of the project activities and results.

TELOS contributes to a large-scale transnational educational transformation and empowers a new generation of visionary professionals, decision-makers and urbanites, to address sustainability challenges through problem-solving approaches that integrate systems thinking, anticipatory strategic competences, real life scenarios and insights,
and interpersonal skills.

TELOS aims to build ‘knowledge and action bridges’ between the seemingly competing systems of ecology and economy, as they appear in our everyday urban environment. The target groups of the TELOS project are primarily university staff and students from the following subject domains: urban planning, landscape planning, architecture and landscape architecture, agriculture, regional development, economics, business administration and real estate.

Related stakeholder groups are equitable finance players, real estate developers and related industries, NGOs, municipalities, and the wider public, aiming to break down barriers and foster collaboration while encouraging knowledge exchange at all levels.

TELOS Project Objectives

1. To develop the first Landscape Economy curriculum by which learners can deeply immerse in the theories, dialectics and methodologies associated with these emerging concepts
2. To build capacity among university teachers, enabling them to successfully implement interdisciplinary and transformative learning settings
3. To build up key competences for sustainable urban development
4. To create and share knowledge, by documenting TELOS methodology as an open educational resource
5. To disseminate the TELOS curriculum and methodology as widely as possible.

Activities

TELOS project includes the following main activities:

1. Development of the TELOS curriculum (design, testing, evaluation,exploitation and dissemination)
2. Conceptualisation and implementation of two TELOS staff training events.
3. Piloting the TELOS curriculum by means of two blended learning events.

TELOS blended learning events consist of the following elements:
- We will further implement two Multiplier Events during which we involve a wider stakeholder network and diversified audiences into the development and dissemination of the TELOS intellectual outputs.
This includes all open educational resources, such as lecture recordings, a glossary of core terminology, presentations and learning materials.
This output is targeted to educators in the sense of a facilitation handbook. It will include the theoretical background of landscape economy, the learning goals and competence framework of the TELOS curriculum, methodical guidance for interdisciplinary learning settings, workshop facilitations guidance, assessment criteria and evaluation methods, assignment descriptions, and full evidence of the TELOS experience.
European audiences and up-scaled in other European locations. Our methodical framework embraces a pedagogical action research cycle, which will allow for a rapid prototyping on the TELOS curriculum, early testing and continuous adaptation and improvement based on the feedback of the actual end users.

TELOS is expected to have its main impact in the following two dimensions:

• the TELOS online course
• the TELOS local labs
• and the TELOS charette.

Expected Project Results

Output 1: TELOS Landscape Economy curriculum

Output 2: TELOS Landscape Economy teaching/learning toolbox

Qualitative Outcomes

• Substantial capacity and skills development among the core target groups of the TELOS project, which will be transferable to other

Expected Impact

Short term impact on Higher Education: more effective education for sustainable development through staff capacity building and curriculum innovation. The following main competence fields will be addressed: (1) systems thinking, (2) anticipatory competence, (3) normative competence, (4) strategic competence, and (5) interpersonal
competence.

Long term impact on the local communities and their territorial contexts: mainstreaming TELOS competences will transform planning and development practices. This will lead to better spatial design and planning solutions characterised by sustainable economic models that support social and environmental goals. Keywords of this landscape-based approach are: circular economy, ecosystem services, green infrastructure, sustainable housing, digitalisation and smart city and community applications, all combined with democratic leadership skills, creative financing models, and innovative governance.

The TELOS Project has been (partially) funded by the ERASMUS+ grantprogram of the European Union under grant no. 2021-1-DE01-KA220-HED-000031123. Neither the European Commission nor the project’s national funding agency are responsible for the content or liable for any losses or damage resulting of the use of these resources.