Landscape in Motion: Historical Adaptation and Digital Futures

This programme examines nomadic and transhumant pastoralism as historical models of adaptive landscape management, focusing on rural, mountainous, and coastal-inland transitional regions. It explores how seasonal mobility, diversified food systems, and local ecological knowledge shaped resilient socio-ecological environments under conditions of environmental uncertainty and limited resources.

Landscape is approached as a dynamic system formed through movement, adaptation, and continuous negotiation between human communities and their environments. Particular attention is given to the relationship between crisis and resilience, analysing how food insecurity, climatic pressures, and socio-economic transformations generated innovative survival strategies and sustainable land-use practices.

The programme also places strong emphasis on contemporary digital methodologies for interpreting and protecting vulnerable environments. Approaches such as geospatial modelling, digital twin technologies, and landscape biography are explored as tools for analysing environmental transformation, biodiversity shifts, erosion processes, and environmental pressures and human spatial transformation. These digital frameworks enable landscapes to be understood not only as physical territories, but as evolving cultural and ecological narratives shaped by both human and non-human actors.

By connecting traditional ecological knowledge with advanced digital representation and sustainability-oriented analysis, the programme encourages students to critically reflect on how historical models of mobility and resource management can inform present-day strategies for balancing environmental protection, cultural heritage preservation, and human use of space.

Delivered fully online, the programme is structured through lectures by eleven international experts from different disciplines, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue across archaeology,

geography, architecture, heritage studies, environmental sciences, and sustainability research, and offering students a multi-perspective understanding of landscape as a complex socio-ecological system. The programme is delivered in two teaching blocks, allowing students sufficient time for independent research and essay preparation between the intensive lecture sessions.

Learning outcomes:

• Analyse nomadic and transhumant systems as adaptive land-use models.
• Evaluate relationships between environmental change, food systems, and resilience.
• Interpret spatial transformation using interdisciplinary landscape approaches.
• Apply digital methodologies in landscape analysis and heritage interpretation.
• Assess sustainability challenges in rural and coastal environments.