This October, the ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture returns to New Orleans — a city that, twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, continues to embody resilience, innovation, and cultural vibrancy.

For landscape architects, the setting could not be more fitting. New Orleans is both a living classroom and a global case study in how design shapes healthier, more resilient, and more beautiful places for all.

In the two decades since Katrina, New Orleans has embraced a new approach in how it lives with water, invests in public spaces, and fosters civic reinvestment. Such sessions as FRI-C01: 20 Years Later: Spatial, Economic, and Civic Lessons Learned Since Katrina invite participants to trace the city’s journey. From the nation’s first water plan to today’s forward-looking adaptation strategies, New Orleans has achieved much. Attendees will explore lessons of disaster recovery, urban design, and policy innovation, while examining the critical role landscape architects have played in shaping adaptation at the civic scale.

“Climate adaptation and its impacts are part of daily life in New Orleans,” says Delaney McGuinness, PLA, NGICP, ASLA, who will lead the sold-out field session FRI-FS-10: Living With Water: History and Future of Resilience in New Orleans. “As landscape architects, we’re constantly learning—not just through our projects, but even in everyday experiences, like trying to get to work when the streets are flooded. It’s very real here.”

The conference offers additional opportunities to step outside the convention center and into the city itself—and appreciate its recovery. In the field session, MON-FS-06: Sankofa Wetland Park and Nature Trail: Ecological Restoration and Community Resilience, participants will visit a 40-acre wetland park that transformed neglected land into a thriving landscape of flood mitigation, biodiversity, and cultural reconnection. The site exemplifies how community-driven planning and ecological restoration create resilience and equity together.

“There’s only so much you can learn indoors,” McGuinness adds. “That’s why experiencing New Orleans firsthand is so valuable—you see the city’s challenges and innovations up close.”

The ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture is the profession’s largest annual gathering, drawing thousands of landscape architects, designers, architects, planners, engineers, ecologists, developers, educators, and students. With more than 300 exhibitors, hundreds of educational sessions, and countless opportunities to connect, the 2025 conference offers unparalleled professional growth.

But in New Orleans, the experience is layered with something more: the reminder that landscape architecture is not just about design, but about resilience, memory, and community.

See a full list of programming that includes a New Orleans Focus.

For a profession committed to creating healthy, beautiful, and resilient places for all, New Orleans is both a cautionary tale and beacon of progress. Twenty years after Katrina, the city shows how landscape architects lead in transforming vulnerability into resilience, and how design can shape civic, economic, and ecological recovery.

This October, join us in New Orleans to learn, connect, and be inspired in a city whose lessons continue to shape the future of landscape architecture.