Associate Dean, Planning and Landscape Architecture

Dr. Enrica Dall’Ara is the Associate Dean of Planning and Landscape Architecture and an Associate Professor at SAPL. She is also a landscape architect with a radical approach deeply rooted in service, advocacy, and interdisciplinary practice. Her Italian-based firm, P’ARC, has received numerous awards for its work in public space design, urban renewal, and landscape rehabilitation of industrial sites. She pushes for a reimagining of the potential of the discipline that more seriously engages with the poetics of landscape and its potential for service to life. With a career that spans both professional practice and academia, Dr. Dall’Ara brings a unique perspective to her teaching, blending her extensive experience in landscape architecture with a commitment to advancing the field through innovative and culturally sensitive design.

Dr. Dall’Ara’s journey into landscape architecture was defined by an ambition for self-determination and deep appreciation for the poetics of life and place. “I followed my passion. I was an architect with a strong love for all what is nature. I had the sense that nature was sacred.” In Italy, where landscape architecture was not yet fully established as a distinct discipline, she charted her own course and established a professional practice in 2001. In parallel, she pursued a doctoral degree (PhD) in Landscape Design at the University of Florence to cultivate theoretical knowledge. She continued in this practice while pursuing further education and travel, aiming for an international experience at the Master of Landscape Architecture at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB) of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain). “My focus was professional practice and pioneering my own way to be informed, inspired, and prepared for what for me started as a passion.” This journey led her to explore radical ideas and advocate for cultural change in how landscapes are designed and understood.

While continuing to practice, in 2008 she moved into academia when the University of Bologna invited her to conduct research and teach courses in landscape design and landscape architecture history and theory. This opportunity allowed her to bring her professional experiences into the classroom, enriching the academic environment with real-world insights. “Then I found myself in a situation where I was open to changes.” At this time, around 2012-2015, she was increasingly experiencing disappointment in the work context within the industry, for its unresponsiveness to advocacy and efforts to change the cultural environment concerning the potential and role of landscape architecture, and for the multiple barriers to implementation of projects with faithfulness to their substantial project objectives. In contrast, Dr. Dall’Ara’s approach to landscape design emphasizes the ethical dimension —professional responsibility and intellectual honesty— and seeks to fundamentally alter the nature of the profession. “I’m very radical. It’s not easy for clients and project stakeholders to always be in alignment with my radical approach.” This resistance fueled her desire to seek out new contexts, ultimately leading her to Calgary, where she saw greater opportunities to influence the profession through education and pedagogical innovation.

Dr. Dall’Ara’s professional philosophy is centered around a re-imaging of the purpose and potential of landscape architecture. “I envisioned the profession as a service and not merely as a consulting.” She also places strong value on artistic expression as a fundamental aspect of landscape design. “I believe art has a power of communication that we need to preserve, and even though it’s considered subjective, art is about getting that core message that we feel in the stomach, no matter our cultural background, our moment in life, that deeply makes us like feeling belonging to humans. I like engaging with artists because I feel that tension. I’m not defining myself as an artist, but I feel that engagement is very relevant in what we are doing.” The purpose of her design work folds together both artistic expression and service to life, elements she feels to be intrinsically linked. “On one end, I consider landscape design as a poetic work in the broad sense of the term. It implies technique, a sense of beauty, ideas and values. But not as an individual or not like an artist, but also considering all the implications of serving.” She emphasizes a holistic approach, integrating technical skills with a deep artistic appreciation for the cultural and symbolic values inherent in the land, in a way that honours the public good. “I think there is also a tension in design, not just in landscape architecture, between individual expression and collective one. It’s something I’m reflecting on because I emphasize poetic expression as a way of doing. But I also challenge the idea because we are serving societal needs and not just expressing an individual vision or even an individual aesthetic of things.” This approach is evident in her emphasis on simplicity and minimal intervention in design, often to the point of recommending not building at all. Her philosophy is influenced by thinkers like sociologist and economist Lucius Burckhardt and French landscape architect Bernard Lassus, who promoted the idea of “minimal intervention”.  She invites the taking of a “sensitive, gentle, delicate, soft approach to building and transforming our places.”

Dr. Dall’Ara believes that the most effective landscape designs emerge from a dialogue between different fields. “I always enjoyed the vibrant conversations that were happening with, for instance, environmental engineers, biologists, and geologists in my Italian professional practice.” Throughout her career, she has sought to bridge the gap in understanding between landscape architecture and other disciplines. In Calgary, this interdisciplinary approach has led to significant projects like Landscape in Motion, a collaboration with site dance choreographer Melanie Kloetzel. This project, which received an SSHRC Insight Development Grant, explored how both disciplines (landscape architecture and site dance) could contribute to site-sensitive methodologies to inform urban renewal and landscape design processes. “But also, to feature the identity of the context of the community, of the place, through a poetic expression that can go in depth into, as humans, what we really feel matters.” This project served to reinforce her design philosophy of deep respect for the environmental and sociocultural values inherent in the place ecology. “We tend to consider urban ecology and environmental improvement as based on natural sciences. It’s correct. But there are so many implications on the socio -cultural level that we cannot keep things separate and sectorial. What I’m trying to investigate is how we can comprehensively, through design, engage and respond to environmental quality, as well as the socio-cultural components that are intimately related to it.” She is currently publishing reflections on this work, which has provided perspectives that helped her in other projects and research goals. One of these perspectives, gained through discussions with the dance research team, involved the “potential of landscape’s materiality in engaging with tactile and other sense stimuli… The micro scale of the body is one that we don’t always consider in urban design.”

Dr. Dall’Ara also contributes to the knowledge of the field through practice-based research. “Even before coming here, I always considered my practice as research.” The variety of contexts and scales that her practice operated in and her unique approach to design provided abundant opportunities for exploration. “The spectrum was very appealing to me and is what makes me feel fascinated with this profession.” Every project was a new opportunity to work through different ideas and possible solutions, because the needs and environments were always changing. The research work needed to understand these contexts is what she considers to be the academic contribution offered through the lens of the profession. “What I feel motivates me to stay on the two sides [professional practice and academia] is that they nurture each other in a dialectic.” She appreciates the freedom, collaborative atmosphere, and constant stimuli of academia, which she finds helps her to remain current and continue learning. “And you have this theoretical driver to what you are doing that is critical.” On the professional side, she values the opportunity to test that theoretical ideal framework in the field and expose its disabilities and weaknesses. “From practice, you can indeed question and contribute to theory and to teaching.” She inspires feedback from discussions with students, who she encourages to see their own designs as research.

Dr. Dall’Ara views education as a powerful tool for community impact, both within academia and through professional practice. “As professionals, we lead the design process, and we have a responsibility to share our expertise in the process.” She engages in this professional advocacy through a co-design approach, collaborating with industry stakeholders who are some of the most active and influential members of the community. “They are part of who is transforming practically and concretely the environment at different levels.” The value of this approach has been demonstrated by her work on waste management sites, energy plants and industrial landscapes, through both direct community impacts and shifting perspectives. “The discussion with colleagues from other disciplines, as I mentioned, environmental engineers, geologists, structural engineers, and the clients, I think, step by step, built a new culture around these places.” In her future work, she is seeking more opportunities to forge deeper connections with communities. This includes a recent Pan-Canada project Dr. Dall’Ara has joined the project as a co-investigator, Quality in Canada’s Built Environment: Roadmaps to Equity, Social Value and Sustainability, led by Project Director Jean-Pierre Chupin at the Université de Montréal and Brian Robert Sinclair as the UofC Lead and Principal Investigator. This project is bringing her “closer to public engagement and having time for discussion at different levels with communities.”

An important value she hopes to foster in these endeavours is sincerity, which she perceives as crucial for truly effective collaboration. “There are trends in conversation, there are trends in the terminology we use… But that kind of deeper level of engagement in contributing to a change not always is there.” Dr. Dall’Ara is instead seeking ways to enable more profound, and less conventional approaches to the profession and the issues it seeks to address. She believes that a desire to appear informed and up to date often arrests conversations at the surface level, leading to echo chambers where the focus is on trying to be part of what is novel, emergent, and cutting edge instead of actually looking for the next step or challenging what that might be. “That kind of intellectual criticism at that deeper level, I think, is something we need to conserve.” She urges a balance between confidence and humility in this approach. “Interdisciplinarity also happens to fill that gap.” By both speaking and listening to people with diverse areas of expertise, she believes that interdisciplinary collaboration can collectively compensate for individual limitations, catalyzing radical change. “It is critical that we teach our students to have this attitude… You need to be prepared in your speciality and confident in what you can contribute to, but also recognize that there is so much that the other can bring, and it is normal to adapt.”

Looking to the future, Dr. Dall’Ara is increasingly focused on the social components of her work, particularly in the context of public space design. Her current project, Figure Ground, in collaboration with a photographer, aims to explore the role of public spaces as places of encounter, especially considering immigration phenomena, “how we honor the values that different people attribute to the public space, how they cohabit in the space, and the implication to design.” Through this and other projects, she seeks to expand the notion of accessibility beyond mere practicality, emphasizing the importance of creating places that are welcoming and provide a sense of belonging to people “coming from all diverse backgrounds, conditions, inspiration, and expectations, so that we have a place that can be inspiring and imaginative.” She believes that while practical accessibility is essential for all users of the built environment, the current cultural understanding of this term falls short of its potential to reimagine the public realm as a place that celebrates “the vulnerability and power of the human body by creating accessible, comfortable, and welcoming spaces.” She hopes to expand on the idea that people should essentially feel well in the environments they inhabit. “The symbolic values, the cultural values, the sense of participation, cohabiting is something that for me goes beyond the accessibility concept.

Dr. Enrica Dall’Ara’s work at SAPL reflects a deep commitment to advancing the field of landscape architecture through a combination of radical innovation, cultural advocacy, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her teaching and practice are guided by the belief that landscape architecture is more than just a profession—it is a service to society, a means of fostering community, and a vehicle for cultural and artistic expression. As she continues to explore new ways to engage with the social and environmental challenges of our time, Dall’Ara is shaping a new generation of landscape architects who are not only technically proficient but also deeply attuned to the cultural and poetic dimensions of the landscapes they design. 

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