On the Tappeiner Promenade in Meran, a neglected herb garden is being replanned. As the promenade is a popular destination for visitors, the garden is primarily a place for humans to relax – but at the same time, its diverse plant life also has the potential to enrich urban biodiversity. If we consider both in the new design, what if this garden could become a space of interconnection, where people can learn about the plants properties — both for human use and for their ecological value?

In the village Gufidaun a participatory afternoon is taking place. Residents are discussing the replanning of the village square, where to integrate green spaces and where to create possibilities for playing and relaxing. Why don’t we ask communities more often how they would like to shape the places they actually live in?

These are just a few insights into urban planning today and its ties to environmental topics. Public spaces must mediate between social and ecological needs, as well as between heritage and transformation [1]. As an eco-social designer collaborating with landscape planners, I observe how landscape design is interwoven with challenges of climate change, urban heat, overpopulation, and biodiversity loss — complex issues that remain difficult to plan for. Sometimes I find myself wondering: can, or even should, a landscape be planned? And if so, how should we fulfil this task in the future?

In the past, humans adapted to the rhythms of nature — to floods, droughts or changing seasons.
Today, we adapt landscapes to human needs, and for most of the story, planners treated nature as something to be dominated and reshaped [1]. The German word Landschaft (landscape) combines the two words land and shape and already points to the idea of land being shaped by people [2]. With this in mind, landscape planning and urban design becomes not just a technical task but a task with much responsibility. If we take this responsibility seriously, planning becomes transformative by necessity.

And this leads to another, more pressing question: who can take on that responsibility? If we truly want to be transformative, we must look deeper into the many layers a landscape is entangled with: specific ecological but also social contexts, technical and material solutions and much more. Who has the knowledge to address all these dimensions?

Figure 1: Participatory Workshop in Gufidaun. Photo by Lia collective. August 2025.

It becomes clear that, in this context, urban planning only makes sense when approached interdisciplinarily, involving people with different backgrounds and knowledge. This is already acknowledged in current literature: “To drive transformation, urban designers must deepen their collaboration with other fields, not to become experts but to lead through interdisciplinary teamwork.” [1]. Because the challenges are so broad, they require a team with a broad range of skills. However, in practise this remains difficult, and many planning studios still tend to work in isolation.

In South Tyrol, Lia collective is experimenting with this new approach [3]: working as an interdisciplinary team that includes planners, mobility experts, sociologists — and now me, with a background in eco-social and graphic design. Together, we cannot cover every layer, but we can touch many. For Meran’s herb garden, this means addressing technical aspects like water flow, while also exploring ways to activate the space socially, for example through workshops, and visually, with signs communicating the plants value. At the same time, the work calls for even broader collaboration: partnering with biologists to better understand plants and insects, or with specialists in sustainable materials to explore new approaches to building.

Yet interdisciplinarity alone is not enough. Equally important is a transdisciplinary approach — one that goes beyond disciplines by involving those who are still excluded from planning processes, such as villagers themselves. In Gufidaun, for example, this has taken shape through participatory afternoons with the local community, where we collectively envisioned and planned their village square.

Figure 2: Forgotten labels of herbs in Meran. Photo by autor, July 2025.