Realistic optimism;
a positive educative approach to a radically changing world 

Het onderstaande abstract is een inzending voor de ECLAS conference 2026: TAKE CARE Planetary Landscape Architecture.

In a constantly changing world it can be challenging to imagine a bright future with pressing issues around you every day: geopolitical tensions, biodiversity loss, rising sea levels, food scarcity, etc. To take care of students is to give them perspective for this changing world—to not be stunned by the number of challenges, but to be focused on contributing to what they can oversee. Students need to leave university with a sense of urgency, but more importantly the feeling that they are able to contribute to handeling these issues. As the brightest and freshest minds, unburdened by impossibilities and the dread of the upcoming future, their projects need to be relevant and changing the paradigm. 

We call our approach ‘realistic optimism’. Like ‘urgent optimism’ (Ritchie, 2024), we acknowledge the challenging and dire situation we find ourself in, but from there on look forward with optimism instead. We want our students to always choose positive action and work on building a better world with big ideas and small steps, with ambitions and plans that are verifiable and approachable. The approach is realistic: we have to understand the existing system, its potential and limits in order to build a new system. Systemic change will not happen overnight. We cannot stop with the old system and immediately go on with a new system. It consists of three simultaneous steps: constructing a new system, reconstructing parts of the old system, and deconstructing the obsolete parts of the old system. And the approach is optimistic: it holds the attitude that we can take active measures to alter our course. Individual efforts might be small, but together, students can challenge the status quo of inaction, indifference and confusion by bringing, creative, inspiring and bright ideas on the table. 

With this in consideration, we believe that the role of landscape architecture as a renewing profession is underdeveloped. Often the focus is improving systems that are already there; greening cities, restoring polluted grounds. Highly important, but undervalue the importance of creating landscapes where nature, landscape, and men result in new systems or machines (Paul Roncken, et al, 2011). And undervalue the need for transgressive and transformative imagery, to show how the world has to change, and how a new world can look like (Ketonen-Oksi and Vigren, 2024). 

Therefore it is important to let students get familiar with systemic issues and designing and thinking on this large scale. By seeing reality and its challenges in its entirety, and accepting the limited role within this, the burden of carrying the future on their back can be replaced with ownership and intrinsic motivation of the student. Student projects made from the personal and vulnerable attitude, results in more powerful and meaningful projects, and ongoing change in approach. Projects that do not confirm negatively, but surprise positively. From this approach we see a growing relevance for the field of landscape architecture. 

Teachers, professionals, and students are aware of the vast array of challenges we face. However, being aware does not always lead to action. And creating glossy images will not always lead to realistic plans for the future. In our practice we therefore try to take radical steps towards the future and from there ask students to design, calculate, and theorize how we will get there. It is research by design thinking with a strong scientific base. In our developing practice we are uniting research students, design students, and people working in the field, with cases that take big leaps in to a possible and optimistic future. It is a growing collaboration between educational programs and transdisciplinary education with students of the Academy of Amsterdam, TU Delft, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and University of Leiden.

The projects do not result in rose colored futuristic projects, but stories for real people. We believe that with providing the realistic optimistic approach, we help students to have more trust in their own futures, and thereby we hope to add to their capacity to change the future of our world.

This approach has lead to three courses run in the above mentioned institutions. 

• Space for choice (2024); an exploration of how the province of Drenthe and Overijssel will function when the society is completely vegan. 

• A Greener Hart (2025); a research in how the Green Heart can be completely regenerative in 2100

• Generation regeneration (2026); a design and research on the South Holland Delta can be completely regenerative in 2100. 

Sources:

RITCHIE, H. (2024). Not the End of the World. Penguin Books Limited

KETONEN-OKSI, S., VIGREN, M. (2024). Methods to imagine transformative futures. An integrative literature review. Futures, Volume 157,

RONCKEN, P.A., STREMKE, S., PAULISSEN, M. P. C. P. (2011). Landscape machines: productive nature and the future sublime. Journal of Landscape Architecture / spring 2011 (pp. 68-81).

Voor:
ECLAS conference 2026: TAKE CARE Planetary Landscape Architecture

In samenwerking met:
MSc Joran Lammers, onderzoeker Universiteit Leiden

Jaar:
2026