ASLA adds Urban Design category for 2020 awards

The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) added urban design as a new category for its 2020 awards.

This new standalone category was identified by ASLA’s honors and awards advisory committee for submissions of suitable work by professionals and students of landscape architecture.

Leading this effort was Doug Hoerr, FASLA, representing the Honors and Awards Advisory Committee, and Thomas Schurch, ASLA, cochair of ASLA’s Urban Design Professional Practice Network.

The ASLA previously awarded urban design achievement within the broader framework of the “General Design” category.

ASLA said that landscape architecture of sustainable urban design includes urban parks, public spaces and greenways; mixed land use; complete and interconnected streets; urban waterfronts; understanding three-dimensionality in urban form; and urban agriculture.

“The world around us is shifting to a more urban population, and by the year 2050 it is anticipated that 68 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. Well-crafted and beautifully designed projects have the ability to transform communities, drive economic development, impact large numbers of people and completely change one’s perception of place,” Hoerr said in LAND, an ASLA publication. Hoerr is CEO and principal at Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects.

For both the ASLA Professional and ASLA Student awards programs, juries comprised of leading landscape architects select a number of Honor Awards in Urban Design and may select one Award of Excellence. These new awards are an opportunity to highlight the best urban design projects around the world, according to ASLA.

“Urban Design as a separate award category in the ASLA’s Honors and Awards Program now gives special recognition to the profession’s achievements in those respects,” Schurch said in LAND. “Within the highly competitive and greater design community that includes our peer professions, landscape architecture can now better showcase and promote the vast array of our capabilities in shaping a rapidly changing urban realm.”

With urban design identified as an award category, landscape architects and those aspiring to be landscape architects now have the opportunity for recognition of their capabilities and accomplishments.

Entries for the 2020 professional and student Awards are not yet being accepted but are expected to open by the end of 2019.