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Rural Practice

Professional Practice Network


This PPN is for ASLA members dedicated to improving rural environments and shaping the future of rural practice.

2023 ASLA Professional Residential Design Honor Award. Collected Works, Restored Land: Northeast Ohio Residence Hunting Valley, Ohio, United States. Reed Hilderbrand LLC

Paul Sobota

The Rural Practice PPN serves as a forum for landscape architects and allied professionals in a wide range of roles engaged across the full spectrum of rural contexts.

Rural places face challenges far more complex than the tools we’ve traditionally used to address them. Designing for thriving rural places requires approaches that can hold cultural, economic, ecology, environmental, and social complexity at once. The Rural Practice PPN draws from the full spectrum of rural knowledge—design, planning, policy, infrastructure, agriculture, housing, and community and economic development—to respond to the intertwined forces shaping rural people and places. We’re here to challenge assumptions, share emerging practices, and strengthen the profession’s understanding of rural resilience. 

If you’re motivated by the puzzle of why some communities thrive while others fade—and if you believe rural places deserve design that matches their depth—this PPN is the place to lead that change.

Who Should Join

  • Practitioners, researchers, and emerging professionals who want to move beyond one size fits all rural frameworks and engage with the real complexity of rural work.
  • People motivated by rural rooted, community driven futures — and who see rural practice as a complex, cross pollinating, future shaping discipline.

Why Join

Because rural America deserves better tools — and we imagine this PPN as a place where those tools are being imagined, tested, and shared. Join the PPN to help build the next generation of rural design thinking: 

  • Engage with a community of practitioners who understand the complexity of rural work and are committed to rural rooted, community driven futures. 
  • Learn and share approaches that reflect the full spectrum of rural knowledge and respond to cultural, economic, environmental, and social realities. 
  • Strengthen your ability to support rural resilience in your own projects and help elevate the voices and priorities of rural communities. 
  • Help shape new frameworks that match the depth, diversity, and dynamism of rural life.
Click Here to Join

PPN Chair

Tanya Olson, PLA, ASLA

Tanya is a landscape architect and partner at Tallgrass Landscape Architecture, bringing nearly three decades of experience in planning and design. A rural resident for most of her life, she is dedicated to working with rural communities to create flourishing everyday environments through collaborative, place‑inspired design. Her areas of expertise include community planning, rural economic development, and engagement processes that build local capacity and support community‑driven outcomes. She contributes her professional experience at local, state, and national levels and helps advance rural issues within the design professions.

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Tanya Olson, PLA, ASLA

I’m driven by the unfinished work of understanding rural places, honoring rural people beyond the land they steward, and protecting the interdependent communities that still embody the democratic promise.

Tanya Olson, PLA, ASLA

ASLA members in conversation during a Professional Practice Network event at the ASLA conference

Leadership Delegates

Leadership Delegates are volunteers who help turn the Chair's vision into action by leading projects, contributing to deliverables, and driving the network's goals forward.

  • Andy Fox
  • Anne Weber
  • Barbara Wyatt
  • Clay Gruber
  • Laura Stedenfeld
  • Lindsay Burnette
  • Megan Terry

Want to Join a Professional Practice Network?

Joining a PPN is a ASLA membership benefit. Members can join up to three networks without additional cost!

Click Here to Join