Pathway to nurture practical skills of landscape architects in the Baltics by continuous professional growth

Abstract

Landscape architect’s activities are facing complex socio-economic and environmental challenges such as suburban sprawl, depopulating city centres, vast urban landscapes and others. In search for the best solutions, the similarities and differences of solutions in different places allows analysing the particular cases in more regional and even international perspective. Still experiences differ from city to city and from place to place on how to mitigate the impact of these factors on sustainable urban development. In this context, sharing and transfer of knowledge and skills has become a mainstream of continuous professional development in different regions where professionals cooperate across the borders and across the professions. The paper analyses impact of continuous professional development framework developed by Lithuanian, Latvian and German landscape architects on development of instrumental, communicative and systemic competences of landscape architecture professionals. Training need analysis revealed the most favoured themes of training leading to both compensation of academic gaps and upgrade for current innovations in planning, design and maintenance of urban landscapes. While compile the contents of training Landscape architect’s associations used the instruments of transfer and blending the knowledge and experience from partner’s countries.