Landscape transition has a massive impact on the quality of life. Indeed, landscape changes can effectively contribute to boosting the quality of life or presenting a serious threat to the human life. Most of reasons leading to a transition in landscapes are caused by human activities and misbehaviors.

Over the past few decades, in the Middle East, a hotspot of growing socio-economic changes and environmental degradation, landscapes have undergone massive changes due to the effect of a vast variety of driving forces like drought, migration, immigration, political struggles and wars. As a result, the health and resilience of natural and cultural landscapes, and consequently people’s livelihood, have been seriously threatened by lots of crises.

So it is an urgent to conduct studies about these changes and effects they have on the quality of life and the whole environment, and the way they should be managed and controlled.

In the midst of these significant natural and socio-cultural changes, landscape experts should deal with new challenges, taking advantage of new advanced technologies and, at the same time, expanding their understanding of how complicated and multifaceted the concept of landscape is.

By holding The IFLA Middle East Conference (7th and 8th of May 2018, Tehran, Iran) we are going to expand an ontological dialogue to gain a better understanding of the concept of landscape and landscape transition, develop interdisciplinary approaches and explore new technologies in landscape planning and design, and ,in general, gain a useful insight about how landscapes change and the ways we could respond to environmental and socio-cultural transitions in order to safeguard our valuable landscapes and protect our shared environment.