Teaching and Research: An integrated Approach to the Undergraduate Studio in Landscape Architecture Education

Abstract

This paper contributes to a debate, ongoing and worldwide in landscape architecture academia, about how research activity can be increased in what has developed as primarily a design-based and practice-oriented educational system. The introduction outlines the research context for UK landscape architecture educators and introduces the paper's central theme: that teaching and research can be integrated in some studio-based tasks at undergraduate level. This is followed by an account of an undergraduate studio that focused on socially responsive approaches to residential regeneration and that was organised to achieve both teaching and research objectives. The paper discusses how the studio contributed to advancing the research agenda of the author by helping to develop components of interviewing and mapping methods for reading experiential potential in neighbourhood settings. It is argued that the project's strong theoretical framework, critical approach to problem evaluation, and contribution to wider research objectives help establish its value as equivalent to more conventional research outputs and, therefore, its relevance to research activity auditing procedures, such as the UK Research Assessment Exercise.