Maria Goula is  Professor of Landscape Architecture and department chair at Cornell University. She is a licensed architect and landscape architect, holding a PhD with a focus on Landscape Design Theory. Before joining Cornell, she taught and practised professionally for over twenty years in Barcelona, Spain.

Since 2000, she has been a founding member of the scientific and organising committee of the European Landscape Biennial of Barcelona (later International), one of the most influential platforms for critical debate in landscape architecture worldwide. Through this role and her academic work, she has contributed significantly to shaping contemporary discourse on landscape design, theory, and practice.

Maria Goula has lectured extensively at universities and institutions across Europe, North America, and Latin America. She is a board member of Landscape Architecture Europe (LAE) and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Landscape Architecture. She also served on the tenth LILA jury in 2025.

Everyone agrees landscape architecture—and society, for that matter—is facing problems. Fewer agree on which ones matter. So—which problems trouble your work?

One of the things that does not exactly trouble me, but really agitates me intellectually, is the shift of our work toward participatory design. I remember when I arrived in Barcelona, all the narratives about preparing the city for the 1992 Olympics and the transition to democracy were full of references to neighbourhood associations that had been, for many years—especially during the last years of the dictatorship—extremely active in reclaiming public space, schools, hospitals, and so on. Yet there was a period when the practice was reacting in default ways, reiterating the ‘’successful Barcelona model”.

The dramatic shift in city politics in Barcelona and other cities proves that democracy is something you have to build every day. It is not something you do once and then forget. However, we now know that it is critical not only to include people in the decision-making process, but also to enhance perspectives defined and promoted by a new, and challenging, posthumanist framework that nourishes theories on the pluriverse and multispecies approaches in our work. I think this became a fruitful terrain for practice, teaching, research, and perhaps we have not seen the real transformation of what we are collectively aiming for, but I miss a methodical exposure to what really works in participatory designs.

We probably all agree that participation is critical, especially for the unheard, but what are the protocols that actually allow this? Which commissions support it? Which policies really make it possible? And where is the transdisciplinary discussion between planners, sociologists, ethnographers, and others? I often feel that we, as designers, have ended up playing the role of sociologists and ethnographers. I am not talking about exceptional, well-funded, long-term, research-based participatory processes, but about what happens in everyday practice. In academia as well, a serious evaluation of participatory processes is largely missing. I understand the ethics of participation, and I subscribe to it, but I want to know more about its real effects and outcomes.

I also miss, and I will say it in a provocative way, I feel we are missing a conversation about the core of what we do: space-forming and making. Opening up the design process to [new] publics is definitely necessary, as it is theorising and expanding on field work, which I would say is the other remarkable trend of our times, but I miss discussions as the ones we had in the LILA jury: rigorous exchange on design thinking and design criticality. Moreover, design, after all, is also a matter of craft—rooted in deep, situated knowledge and in traditions that have evolved through careful, grounded responses to specific questions, at its best.

I also believe—and I do not think I can change my mind about this—that there is an asymmetry in participatory processes. We are responsible experts, and the people who participate are not. This asymmetry is something we need to be very careful about. This tension is one of the productive frictions driving my work at the moment, and it is why we started this research by closely examining participatory processes in scholarship and practice.

Do you mean those boards with colourful stickers that often get reduced almost to being a symbol for participatory design?

Also. For me, the most problematic issue is the exponential use of the term co-design. Co-creation requires time, trust among participants, and specific design protocols that actively reduce the asymmetry between the expert designer and others. I am not talking about participation in something like designing a client’s garden. I am talking about waterfront and coastal resilience work, design of the commons, planning transitions in the countryside, national park management, managed retreat—some of the most critical issues our profession is leading today.

This tension is productive. It pushes me to teach differently, to discuss these questions with my students, and to scrutinise our practices through research. In a project with colleagues from Cornell, we were very critical of how participatory processes are currently carried out. In many of the processes I have been involved in, both in Spain and in research projects at Cornell, immigrants, for example, are simply not present.

We tried to develop research methods to address this, and the findings still need to be written. But the point is clear: we need to be truthful and transparent about how participatory processes actually work. This is a core ethical responsibility—of us as a collective, as a profession, and as individuals acting in the public realm.

Modernism introduced a strong idea of transparency—social, political, and material—through glass facades, exposed structures, and an effort to make the mechanics of architecture visible, partly as a response to war, crisis, and social upheaval. Do you see a comparable moment emerging today in landscape architecture: not a movement, but an attitude that insists on transparency in processes and outcomes, where nothing is masked—especially in participatory practices, power relations, and exclusions?

I am not sure how this would translate directly into physical space, although traditions of process-driven design already gesture toward this. They challenge the idea that after a couple of years we simply deliver a finished park or public space, while masking extractive, non-reciprocal processes or forms of labour behind it. These discussions exist, but for the sake of critique—which is still underdeveloped in our field—I think we need much more transparency among ourselves.

For me, this means that while we should explain our ideas to the public as clearly as possible, we must at least be honest among ourselves about challenges and failures. In the last participatory process I was involved in, there was funding for translators in case immigrants attended. The translators were there on three occasions, they were paid, and no one came. Is it not then my responsibility to make this failure visible and to explain it?

Following up on transparency—and given your recent role on the LILA jury—I want to touch on something we care deeply about at Landezine. We are particularly proud of the Revisited Projects category, which recognises projects older than fifteen years. Yet we receive surprisingly few submissions. I suspect offices hesitate because these projects show graffiti, decay, and misuse—signs that disturb a controlled image. But that is landscape. Professional juries know how to read these traces of life, use, and even graffiti as part of a project’s reality. In that sense, we should probably be more honest with ourselves and acknowledge that a project’s success extends far beyond its intended image. We still seem stuck on the image.

This resonates strongly with how I teach. In my landscape architecture foundations course, I assign students key articles and book chapters to situate them within the last thirty years of landscape architecture theory, which is vast. The way I’ve found to ground these theories is by asking students to dissect important projects that are at least fifteen to twenty years old—really canonical, “best of the best” projects.

The struggle, and sometimes the success, is pushing them beyond simply listing what works well or which theories support a given design attitude. I ask them to look at the entanglements, at the actual implementation. Often they can’t visit the sites—maybe they’re in Europe, California, or Latin America—but even using Google Street View changes everything. The moment they arrive there, they begin to understand the space differently, to relate to it, and to write from that encounter. For me, this is crucial to how I approach the relationship between theory and practice—through critical reading of what actually unfolds over time.

Many colleagues from my generation are very interested in talking about that. So I think there is a tendency there, and it will actually help us to strengthen our voice and be able to also be more critical of architects and engineers, with which we still have a very complicated relationship, I think.

We often hear that architects and engineers are moving into what used to be our territory—from parks to urban forests. At the same time, landscape architects are entering forestry, hydrology, and ecology. Sometimes it becomes difficult to recognise a landscape architecture project as distinct from ecological restoration or urban forestry. Is this kind of disciplinary queerness something to be expected and embraced? How do you prepare students for it? What do they need to become beyond the traditional role of the landscape architect, and how do you frame these entanglements?

I try to make clear to my students that it is not enough to understand the reality in front of them—what they see on site or what is written in the brief. They also need to have ideas. Fieldwork and engagement in meaningful ways and analytical work are critical. Yet, from analysis to synthesis, there is a big leap, and we need to be ready to make it.

A professor and later collaborator of mine, Ricard Pié, used to say that design is about having an idea and then spending a lot of time proving that it is both possible and a good one. If we don’t do that, we are not necessary at all. You could simply assemble different disciplines, run a multifactor study, let people vote, and then have contractors build the project. We would be redundant.

I see landscape architects as generalists. The most successful professionals are the ones who understand which disciplines need to be brought into the conversation to deepen and expand the design thinking process. I am particularly interested in mapping moments of design decision-making—when something unexpected happens, when you shift direction, when certain factors become non-negotiable and force other gestures or tactics to be subordinated.

Students often get frustrated when they think they have resolved a project, and a critical question suddenly destabilises everything. But I find that moment extremely stimulating. I always recall what Michel Corajoud said in his nine pedagogical propositions: open up your project, open it up again, invite multiple positions and forms of feedback—but remain the owner of your project.

Georges Descombes often stresses how critical it is to build the problem, not to invent it, but to recognise and define it properly.

Exactly. And this is something I have heard from several important voices. One of my mentors, Manuel de Solà-Morales, used to explain—even to politicians—that urban design does not solve problems; it reformulates the question.

There is also that magnificent article by Rob Holmes, The Problem with Solutions. It finally gave us, in landscape architecture, a strong text to engage with students—especially because many colleagues and academics, particularly in the United States, continue to speak uncritically about “solutions,” and more specifically about so-called nature-based solutions. I find this position deeply uninformed. Anyone who has spent time actually building things knows that spatial problems are never solved. At best, one may address one or two issues in a satisfactory way, but this inevitably produces new conditions from which other issues emerge.

This is why I so deeply appreciate Ellen Braae’s understanding of design as transformation. It acknowledges that change is never neutral, and that form is always implicated in what we do—inseparable from the very act of transformation itself.

What should landscape architecture learn to embrace rather than avoid?

Well, as I just said, I think it’s a time to start talking about design as trans-formation. Because form is not the result of Euclidean geometry, form is shaped by memories of use; everything that has a material foot, has a form, can be drawn, can be experienced and should be designed.

How has teaching theory evolved during your time in education?

When I started teaching theory in the mid 1990s, there was very little to rely on—almost no literature that could support teaching theory in landscape architecture. Then, around the 2000s, occurred this explosion of books, readers, companions, and research publications, written and edited by remarkable people. That shift allowed me to teach much better.

At the same time, I think we still struggle with a theory that genuinely feeds design thinking. When I ask students about theory, they often bring technical or best-practice manuals—how to design rivers, promenades, systems that work efficiently. That reveals a gap. We experiment a lot in landscape architecture—with testing plots, materials, spatial arrangements—but we rarely talk explicitly about how those experiments translate into design thinking.

I remember a moment in 2016 at a Landscape Architecture Foundation conference in Philadelphia, marking fifty years since the first landscape declaration. I was on a panel about aesthetics with Ken Smith, Chris Reed, Claude Cormier and Mikyoung Kim. Chris said something that stayed with me: when architects talk about projects, they talk about the core; we tend to talk about the periphery—remediation, performance, proof that things function. Efficiency dominates the conversation.

That made me realise how often aesthetics is still treated as something separate. For me, the cultural underpinnings of material resolutions in space are essential. I see myself primarily as a designer. That is how I recognise myself, even though I have been fully an educator for many years now, especially since leaving Barcelona. Design remains central to how I think and work.

I am deeply interested in the epistemological differences between languages and traditions—how knowledge is framed, articulated, and practised in different contexts. I try to uncover these differences to dig into them, and to keep reflecting on them continuously, with the aim to design better.

This is very present in the work I do with Jamie Vanucchi, for example in forest design projects along the Erie Canal National Heritage corridor. We are interested not only in how fallow forests can act as carbon sinks or generate revenue for struggling farmers, but also in the cultural histories of species—especially now, with species migrating north or struggling to survive. Choices of species are never neutral. Foresters understandably prioritise productivity and efficiency, but design needs a broader understanding of what those choices mean culturally and historically.

Do you mean the cultural significance of particular species or materials?

Yes. Ultimately, interpretation is human—stories, memories, histories. If you look at history, you see cycles, returns, reinterpretations. Much of the new scientific knowledge about soils, fungi, and trees feels to me like a return to animistic ways of understanding the world. It is exciting, but it is not entirely new.

In teaching, I often give students a list of books that claim to be landscape architecture theory and ask them to analyse one. We then build a comparative matrix. I also ask them what they think theory is. For years, many students brought landscape urbanism texts—that was the theory. That exercise helps me see what frameworks they carry with them.

The comparison usually leads to an important insight: theories have different focuses—political, formal, critical—and all of them are incomplete. That is a crucial lesson. Some books do not even claim to be theory, yet they generate deep conversations about design. Julia Czerniak’s and George Hargreaves’s book Large Parks is a good example. It teaches designers enormously without declaring itself theoretical.

I value political ecology, philosophy, art—all of that is necessary. But when I read a strong text about design itself, mostly written by practitioners, I feel closer to what landscape architecture design theory could be. There is often a gap between historical narration, contextualisation, critique, and design. My ongoing effort is to shorten that gap, to get to the other side without falling in between.

Which aspects of landscape architecture do you think remain under-theorised today, besides the participatory processes? Where else should theoretical focus intensify?

I have been closely following work on the new publics, the commons, and landscape, and I find it genuinely exciting. At the same time, I still see a persistent divide in theory: those who write about the political and social on one side, and those who focus on the ecological on the other. Despite all the talk of hybridity, the segregation remains visible. Perhaps this is inherited from our education; perhaps new generations will begin to think and write in more hybrid ways. But for now, the divide is still there.

As educators, we carry a responsibility here. I see this clearly at Cornell University. Some students are deeply engaged with social questions but show little interest in plants—no real effort in representation, selection, or systemic understanding, nor in how ecology relates to experience. The opposite is also present. And here I return, again, to aesthetics. As a Greek person, I understand aesthetics as aisthesis—the sensorial, lived experience. Everything is there. And what could be more ecological than the sensorial, especially now that we know so much about how perception, bodies, and environments are entangled?

The divisions persist. I did not study biology—I studied architecture—and I have worked for nearly twenty years with Anna Zahonero, a Catalan ecologist and landscape architect, learning alongside her, and with a great group of colleagues, all former professors and students. Our backgrounds can be a productive condition only if we are open to change. But the real question remains: are we educating hybrid practitioners who are equally comfortable moving between these realms, bringing them together without fear or hierarchy? I am not sure yet—but I hope so.