Maria Gabriella Trovato

Oslo

Maria Gabriella Trovato, PhD Associate Professor of Global Landscape Studies Department of Landscape Architecture Faculty of Landscape and Society Norwegian University of Life Sciences https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0999-6871 Maria Gabriella Trovato is Associate Professor and Leader of the International Master’s in Landscape Architecture for Global Sustainability at the School of Landscape Architecture, LANDSAM, NMBU, Norway, and Adjunct Associate Professor at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Trained as both an Architect and a Landscape Architect, she holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture. Her practice and research explore innovative responses to the landscapes shaped by climate change, natural resource depletion, forced migration, and ongoing conflict — work that consistently seeks to blend ecological performance with design culture rather than treat them as separate concerns. Her research at NMBU spans the Nordic Network for Landscapes and Welfare, Migration Governance, Women in Scandinavian Landscape Architecture, Landscape Assessment, and Waste Management. As director of the IFLA Working Group Landscape Architects Without Borders, she focuses on contested landscapes in Middle Eastern countries affected by disasters, crises, and displacement, including new geographies of migration in the Mediterranean basin and informal Syrian settlements in Lebanon. This work is supported by the European Union, the Cross-Border Cooperation in the Mediterranean, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. In recent years, her research has converged around a landscape approach to socio-ecological repair in conflict-affected territories. Drawing on case studies from Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and climate-affected regions, and engaging with post-humanist, decolonial, and political ecology frameworks, she argues that landscapes are integrative spaces where ecological restoration, cultural memory, community adaptation, and relational justice are mutually constitutive rather than sequential or separate. A landscape-based approach, she maintains, offers planners and designers a framework capable of coordinating ecological, infrastructural, and social interventions across scales, and of fostering recovery that is adaptable, resilient, and socially just, rather than merely expedient. This agenda is currently sustained by three funded research projects as Principal Investigator: Sustainable Urban Return and Reintegration in the Middle East (SURE-ME, NFR, 2026–2029), Urban Resilience through Open Science, Education, and Community Engagement in War (Erasmus+, 2025–2028), and Filling the Gap: Development of Ecological Planning and Design Learning Network and an Adaptive Smart Training Module for Disaster Resilient and Sustainable Cities (Erasmus+, 2024–2027). She has taught landscape architecture in undergraduate and graduate programmes, seminars, and design workshops across Europe, Canada, Africa, and the Middle East.