Maria Gabriella Trovato

Maria Gabriella Trovato serves as an Associate Professor and leads the International Master's in Landscape Architecture for Global Sustainability at the School of Landscape Architecture, LANDSAM, NMBU, Norway. She also holds the position of Adjunct Associate Professor at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

She holds licences as both an Architect and a Landscape Architect, and she earned a PhD in Landscape Architecture. In her practice and teaching of landscape design, she explores innovative urban living forms amidst changing and uncertain conditions caused by climate change, natural resource depletion, conflicts between globalisation and local development, and the reintegration of refugees, migrants and displaced people. Her work emphasises responding to these challenges by blending ecological performance with design culture.

Her recent research, conducted at the NMBU Centre for Landscape Democracy (CLaD), focuses on the Nordic Network for Landscapes and Welfare, Migration Governance, Women in Scandinavian Landscape Architecture, Landscape Assessment, and waste management, addressing landscape crises and contested territories. Prominent organisations, including the European Union, the Cross-Border Cooperation in the Mediterranean, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, back these projects. As director of the IFLA Working Program Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience, she works on contested landscapes in Middle Eastern countries affected by disasters, crises, ongoing conflicts, migration, new geographies in the Mediterranean basin, and informal Syrian settlements (ISs) in Lebanon. 

Thus, she is exploring landscape methodologies that could permit the definition of a flexible, relational, and creative strategy capable of managing continuous changes and transformations.