This course offer a rare opportunity to work within a strong landscape architecture research culture that is recognised internationally and reflected in the range of collaborations with other leading researchers. Our innovative, practice-led research engages with developing agendas in the public realm, urban open space, green space networks and sustainable, healthy environments. Our research profile includes the following areas: inclusive access to outdoor environments, led by the OPENspace research centre. This takes a cross-cutting approach to explore how public open space, urban parks and squares, green spaces and rural areas can contribute to quality of life. Our work includes a focus on the benefits to be gained from getting outdoors and the barriers currently experienced by different users, particularly those from disadvantaged groups; innovative, practice-led design research, especially involving collaborations with artists and designers from disciplines outside landscape architecture; environmental perception, including empirical research on the transactional nature of people's engagement with place; landscape design and planning to support young children, teenagers, older people, and other age groups and sectors within the population; the history and theory of landscape architecture, including development of the public role of the landscape architect in the 19th and 20th centuries; research on salutogenic environments (the health-enhancing qualities of engagement with certain types of landscape) and on discerning the mechanisms behind any links between wellbeing and the natural environment.