Themes and topics for theses
- Agri-Food Business Management
- Environmental Governance and Adaptation to Climate Change
- Fisheries and applied ecology
- Horticulture
- Landscape Architecture (BSc: Environmental Planning and Landscape Design)
- Landscape Protection and Preservation
- Nature Tourism
- Production and Marketing of Agricultural Products
• Perception of urban landscape quality: how to measure and to integrate to sustainable urban planning?
Supervisor: Anton Shkaruba (Estonian University of Life Sciences)
Urban landscapes are outstandingly diverse globally, and even across Europe. Likewise, the perceptions of landscape quality by citizens are different, and such things as compactness of building block, type and quality of architecture, availability of trees, water or open spaces may score very differently depending on cultural preferences, historical background, geographical conditions. In terms of the development of policies and management action for resilient and livable cities this poses several challenges:
- The citizen’s visions of quality urban landscape can be fundamentally different from what a resilient and/or a livable city needs
- The citizens’ actual perceptions can be different from what politicians and developers deem as their perceptions, or out of several options equally favored by citizens politicians or developers may pick up less sustainable ones to promote
- Citizens’ perceptions of landscape quality may consist of fundamentally stable value components, and also of more dynamic ones, which may be affected by education, information, awareness raising campaigns, contrasting life experiences etc.
The MSc student would focus on one or more of those issues in order to discuss their role in the development of inclusive planning policies and/or management practices for the resilient and livable city. Possible focus could be on the development of a toolkit for community participation in planning process, on the development of a methodological framework for mapping perceived landscape quality, on the identification of core values driving the landscape quality perceptions etc. Depending on the specific focus the thesis projects will be affiliated with Horizon Europe projects Better Life of LAND run at EMU.