The complexity of landscape ideas and the issue of landscape democracy in school and non-formal education: exploring pedagogical practices in Italy

Landscape-related pedagogical initiatives present a multifaceted panorama of assumptions, approaches and goals, with some contradictions and common issues, reflecting on the one side the theoretical ambiguity and the inherent tensions of the concept of landscape itself and on the other side the different institutional approaches to landscape management. This paper discusses the results of a national survey conducted in Italy on landscape-related initiatives in non-professional education. In particular, five ideas of landscape emerge from the analysis, on which educational projects are grounded: ‘anthropic and lived landscape’, ‘perceived and green landscape’, ‘landscape as an arena’, ‘heritage landscape’ and, finally, ‘natural landscape’. This diversity proves the need, in educational contexts, for theoretical frameworks and methodological tools to address the complexity of landscape through an insightful reading. In particular, we focus on the ‘landscape as an arena’ idea, and we explore its limits and potentialities in relation to the debate on landscape power and democracy.