A Continuum of Leadership to Set the Course
In 1966 as its first major initiative, LAF convened Ian McHarg, Grady Clay, and other leaders of the day to compose a Declaration of Concern decrying the burgeoning environmental crisis and outlining what was needed to multiply the effectiveness of landscape architects to solve it.
Fifty year later in 2016, LAF’s New Landscape Declaration: A Summit on Landscape Architecture and the Future brought a diverse group of the world’s leading landscape architects together to reflect on the half-century and define a new call to action for the discipline. A subsequent Action Plan translated this into straightforward actions individuals could take.
Now 60 years since LAF's founding, the Future Now summit will continue this momentum with a focus on strategic actions.
From reflection to agenda setting to action
The Future Now summit marks ten years since LAF’s Summit on Landscape Architecture and the Future, when a diverse group of the world’s leading landscape architects reflected on the last half-century since LAF’s founding in 1966 and presented bold ideas for the future. Their ideas resulted in a new vision and 21st century agenda for the discipline of landscape architecture codified in the inspirational New Landscape Declaration call to action and subsequent Action Plan.
LAF’s 2026 Future Now summit will reflect on progress and change since that watershed moment and look to the future with speakers and workshops that demonstrate transformational leadership and share bold ideas, innovations, and actions that answer the calls to action in the New Landscape Declaration to address climate change, rapid urbanization, species extinction, and inequity.
This is bigger than the moment.
The defining issues of our time transcend the current political moment. The summit is not meant to be reactionary but rather to deepen the commitment and resolve of landscape architects to find ways to get things done. How are you showing up? Come to be energized, to find your community, to spark ideas, to share resources for individual and collective action.
The summit is organized around these action areas.
- Up Your Game – Learning, skill-building, research, and expanding professional or cultural literacy to innovate and transform practice, education, and advocacy
- Design with Purpose – Innovative design models and emerging practices
- Prove It – Showing measurable impact – environmental, social, economic, and cultural – that influenced decision-making and policy
- Walk the Talk – Leading by example through values, organizational culture, and mission-driven practice models
- Partner, Partner, Partner – Collaboration across disciplines, sectors, funders, and communities to create change and transformation
- Future Proof – Working upstream to inform policy and planning, shaping or changing existing systems and the status quo, securing resources, and reimagining practice models to navigate and thrive in a changing world
- Use Your Voice – Impactful advocacy and communication strategies for more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable processes and outcomes
- Give Back – The impact of civic and social responsibility through service, philanthropy, or advocacy.
- Imagine – Future focused, speculative, based in reality but imaginative, or not yet proven
