LANDSCAPE ARCH TRAIL BOTTOM MANUAL

It is now time that we, as a professional community, do better in acknowledging, respecting, and appropriately compensating their labor. As landscape architects, what we do and how we cultivate the land is intrinsically tied to the people who put in the physical work to realize these projects. The $93 billion landscaping industry is built on the backs of a nearly two-thirds immigrant workforce, the majority of which, on the West Coast at least, is of Mexican and Central American origin.

LANDSCAPE ARCH TRAIL BOTTOM MANUAL

While we, as landscape architects and designers, may receive nearly all of the fees, attention, and accolades for our work, the majority of that work is built and maintained by the manual labor of low-wage immigrant workers, many of whom are undocumented. Landscape architecture has a labor acknowledgment problem. Rather than waiting for national protests to cue us to reconcile systemic quandaries, we’d like to talk about it now. But there exists another highly problematic issue that has historically remained unaddressed in our chosen sector of work. Last summer brought a long-overdue reckoning with race in this country, including within our profession of landscape architecture-both in terms of the egregious lack of racial diversity among accredited landscape architects and in regard to the environments we create and who feels welcome in them. SoCal Landscape workers move a boulder at Terremoto’s Oak Pass project, a home in Beverly Hills.

Landscape arch trail bottom