Maria Gabriella TROVATO

Maria Gabriella Trovato is an Assistant Professor in the LDEM Department at the American University of Beirut. She is a licensed Architect and a Landscape Architect with a PhD in Landscape Architecture: Parks, Gardens, and Spatial Planning (UNIRC and the University of Naples, 2003).

As an architect practicing and teaching landscape design, Maria Gabriella is interested in investigating new forms of urban living in a world of change and fluxing conditions. New challenges, like climate change, depletion of natural resources, conflict between globalization and local development, and re-localization of war refugees are constantly shaping new equilibrium, and it urges us to respond to them investigating and proposing combinations of ecological performance and design culture. Maria Gabriella’s most recent researches focus on Landscape in Emergency, EuropeAid project on Landscape Assessment and waste management, HORIZON 2020 on Migration governance, MEDSCAPES project funded by the ENPI/CBCMED, Landscape Atlas for Lebanon, and on FLRM (Forest and Landscape Restoration Mechanism) project funded by FAO and MOA.

As the chair of the IFLA group Landscape Architecture Without Borders (LAWB), she is working on the Landscape in emergency research with special focus on Syrian informal settlements (ISs) in Lebanon exploring landscape methodologies that could permit the definition of a flexible, relational and creative strategy capable of managing continuous changing and transformations.

She has worked in several countries, teaching landscape architecture at undergraduate and graduate programs, seminars, and design workshops in Europe, Canada, Africa, and the Middle East.