Landscape Architects as Policy Shapers
This article introduces ASLA's Public Practice Advisory Committee's series "Policy Shapers." In the coming months, LAND Online will feature stories about landscape architects who are active in shaping public policy either through their work or as volunteers.

What pressing issues affect your community or your practice? Do you see new opportunities for landscape architects to define and address problems in your region? Every landscape architect is affected by public policy, and landscape architects have the opportunity to shape the policies that affect them.

In every project, landscape architects protect public health, safety, and welfare. Public service, volunteer or paid, provides landscape architects with many more opportunities to shape the built environment and protect natural resources, enhancing contributions to environmental sustainability and quality of life.
 
The opportunities to serve abound, and the rewards are great for landscape architects as individuals, for the profession as a whole, and for the communities that benefit from this profession’s point of view and unique expertise. When landscape architects shape policy, they expand the parameters in which landscape architects work, and they support higher aspirations for environmental quality in settings that range from site specific to global.

Landscape architects bring a wealth of skills to the policy table. As visionary professionals, landscape architects are experts in design technique, skilled communicators, and consensus builders. By becoming involved in public decision making as a citizen advisor, volunteer commissioner, or paid public official, landscape architects can reshape the environment of assumptions in which goals are established and implemented and in which the scope of their practice is defined.

Why are you a landscape architect? The profession has many allures: the creative aspects of design, the challenge of overcoming site constraints, the magnificence of working with nature and the outdoors, the excitement of engaging with people and politics, and the fulfillment of improving the quality of people’s lives. If you are a landscape architect who is active in public affairs, ASLA’s Public Practice Advisory Committee invites you to share your experiences as a “Policy Shaper.”

We want to tell your story and share your successes. Please contact Jennifer Strassfeld (jstrassfeld@asla.org) if you are interested in being interviewed for this series.