The 2-day summit included keynote presentations, lightning talks, workshops, and panel discussions. An optional third day included a morning field session.
The summit brought together established and emerging voices to demonstrate taking innovative ideas to action to shift paradigms and address climate change, biodiversity, and equity through initiatives big and small. All summit sessions were held at the Detroit Masonic Temple.
In the schedule below, the Keynote presentation and Lightning Talk titles link to the recording of each presentation. The full summit recordings are available here.
Thursday, June 4
The first day included keynote presentations and a series of 10-minute lightning talks, curated to energize and inspire.
Welcome and Opening Remarks - Barbara Deutsch
Keynote: Why Detroit? Why Now? - Alexa Bush
Lightning Talks: Up Your Game
- Designing Biocultural Futures: Cultivating Youth Storytelling and TEK in Landscape - Jade Rhodes
- Ethically Sourcing: Investigating Landscape Architects’ Responsibility to Specify Forced Labor Free Materials - Jeb Polstein
- Revealing Care and Neglect in Legacy Cities through AI - Jianxing Guan
- Little Things That Run the World: Designing Insect Biodiversity - Gena Wirth
Lightning Talks: Design with Purpose
- Designing in Kinship - Christina Contreras
- PrideScapes: Documenting, Preserving, and Uplifting Queer Landscapes - Max Dickson
- Including Animals: Co-creating with Our More-Than-Human Neighbors - Roxi Thoren
- Designing a Mega-eco Project: An Example from Dakar, Senegal - Robert Levinthal
Lightning Talks: Prove It
- Equitable Outcomes in Detroit's Underserved Urban Landscapes - Charles Cross
- Why Levees Won’t Keep Rising Seas from Flooding Coastal Cities - Kristina Hill
- Influence, Economics, and the Necessity of Advocacy - Jonathon Geels
Lightning Talks: Walk the Talk
- Unlike Any Other Place: A Call for Regionally Specific Practice - Nina Chase
- From Gen X to Gen Z: An Appeal for Public Service - Matt Arnn
- Landscape Architecture in the Rural Industrial Environment - Carl Rogers, Heidi Hohmann, Hans Klein-Hewett
- Reading the Low-Carbon Landscape - Jonah Susskind
Lightning Talks: Partner, Partner, Partner
- Miyawaki in Detroit: Community Forestry and Climate Resilience - Fai Foen
- Inspiring the Next Generation of Federal Conservation and Recreation Grants - David Goldstein
- Landscape Architects Need to Be Thinking about One Health - Leann Andrews
Lightning Talks: Future Proof
- Landscape as Refuge: Care, Comfort, or Exclusion? - Fiwasewa Ogundipe
- Coastal Legacy: The Case for Graceful Retreat - Sarai Carter
- Plants as Inventors - Catherine Seavitt
- From the Mountaintop: Inventing Futures towards Actionable Goals - Marc Miller
Lightning Talks: Use Your Voice
- Design Isn't Neutral: AI Infrastructure and the Landscapes We Choose - Kendra Hyson
- Art as Preview: Installations for Hopeful Adaptation - Carolina Aragón
- Cinematic Tools for Climate-Literate Landscapes - Evan Mather
- Civic Empathy and Landscape of Care - Taewook Cha
Lightning Talks: Imagine
- Sensorium: In Pursuit of Wonder through Embodied Design - Nate Cormier
- Towards a Living Landscape - Aaron Hernandez
- A Call to Reflection: What if We Practice as Relatives? - Aiman Duckworth
Keynote: Now What? - Lucinda Sanders
Day 1 Closing Remarks
LAF’s 60th Anniversary Party at The Eastern
Friday, June 5
The second day consisted of panels and workshops for attendees to learn skills and models for taking innovative ideas to action. There were two 1.5-hour workshops sessions with 24 workshop offerings to choose from.
Day 2 Opening Remarks
Keynote: Seeding Civic Futures - Cézanne Charles
Panel: Reimagining Practice - Michael Grove, Jenny Jones, Elizabeth Kennedy, Gloria Lau, Roberto Rovira, Moderator: C.L. Bohannon
Workshop Session 1
Summit registrations could sign up to attend one of the following workshops. Workshops were not recorded.
- Bodies in Space
- Co-building a Design Activism Toolkit
- Currents of Change: Imagining Adaptive Climate Futures
- Designing for Healing: Trauma-Informed Community Engagement
- Designing for Time: Bridging Ecological Design and Long-Term Landscape Management
- Emerging Voices: 10-Years Ago, 10-Years Ahead
- Making Chicano Public Landscapes
- Shade for All: Design for Equity in the Urban Heat Era
- Speak with Presence: Turning Big Ideas into Action
- The Site Question: Architecture, Landscape, and Partnership
- Water Signals: Storytelling as a Climate Resilience Tool
- Work in Progress: Design and Labor
Workshop Session 2
Summit registrations could sign up to attend one of the following workshops. Workshops were not recorded.
- Actualizing Just Transitions through Transdisciplinary Design and Participatory Scenario Planning
- Adapt to Coastal Groundwater Rise in Cities with Equity
- Coalition Building Through Design
- Landscape Architecture as Climate Translator
- Leveraging the Power of Food Systems, Food Cultures, and Activism
- Life in the Time of ICE: Take Action
- Mountaintops to Mountain Ranges: Creating Futures and Community
- Rigor, Trust, and Time: 30 Years of Sustained Community Engagement in Detroit
- Soil Literacy in Practice: From Diagnostics to Digital Workflows
- Time to Act: Draft Your Action Plan Now
- Transforming Underutilized Parkland into Native Meadow through Cross-sector Partnerships
- What is the Landscape Architect's Role in One Health?
Keynote: A Just Horizon - The Opportunity and Responsibility of Design in This Moment and Beyond - Chelina Odbert
Panel: Working Inside and Outside the System - Maci Nelson, Kimberly Simmons, Laura Solano, Courtney Spearman, Ernie Wong, Moderator: Diana Fernandez Bibeau
Keynote: Are You Still Down? Solidarity in Design - Ujijji Davis Williams and Matt Williams
Panel: The Future - Sarah AbuDakar, Issam Azzam, Derrick Bradley, Dushawn John, Anne Tong, Moderators: Nina Chase, Azzurra Cox
Closing Remarks
Saturday, June 6
This optional third morning field session included the official bike tour or informally visiting riverfront, greenway, and complete streets sites in Detroit.
Continuing Education Credits
The two-day summit was approved for 15 Professional Development Hours (PDH) through the Landscape Architecture Continuing Education System (LA CES) and meets the health, safety, and welfare requirements (HSW). Attendees could earn 15 PDH (LA CES/HSW) by attending the summit and both included workshop sessions (12 LA CES/HSW if not participating in either workshop session.)
Learning Objectives
- Identify more than 30 concepts, tactics, and models for landscape architects to take action to address climate change, biodiversity loss, rapid urbanization, and social inequity.
- Name examples of how landscape architects are demonstrating measurable environmental, social, cultural, and economic impacts to influence decision-making, policy, and investment.
- Examine leadership, collaboration, and advocacy strategies that expand the role of landscape architects in shaping interdisciplinary projects and initiatives and influencing systems-level change.
- Reflect on the past and future of the landscape architecture discipline including how values-driven practice can increase the broader impact of landscape architecture on health, safety, and welfare.
