The 2019 Council of Educators In Landscape Architecture (CELA) Conference

The CELA Annual Conference brings together more than 400 attendees from around the world to exchange recent scholarly activities from teaching, research, and service engagement projects. The 2019 CELA Annual Conference, Engaged Scholarship, was held March 6–9, 2019, in Sacramento, CA, and was hosted by the University of California at Davis (UC Davis). It was supported by eighteen sponsors: Vectorworks, the UC Davis Office of Public Scholarship and Engagement, Atlas Lab, Land F/X, ASLA Sierra Chapter, CELA Fellows, Permaloc, Hunter Industries, HLA Group, Landscape Journal, Places, Taylor and Francis, Anova, WRT, Actar, Design Workshop, Sigma Lambda Alpha, and Most Dependable Fountains. CELA had a stellar year in 2019, breaking two records for abstract submissions (more than 500) and poster presentations (133) for the annual conference. According to UC Davis, Engaged Scholarship was chosen as the theme to help address disconnects between scholars and practitioners and as an opportunity to examine contributions to community-based education and real-world problem solving.

Forty-three poster, panel, and oral presentations were given as part of the Engaged Scholarship theme track. The track made significant contributions to the global, multidisciplinary discussions on engaged scholarship to move beyond earlier servicelearning models to an approach that fully integrates teaching, research, and service. Presentations such as “Scholarship of Teaching through Engaged Scholars” from Mississippi State University (Sadik Artunc) and “Enterprise-based Design Research on LIM Workflow: Practical Research on Landscape Architecture Information Technology Application” from Tsinghua University (Yong Guo) highlighted the range of locations and topics in this track.

The conference was organized by the core tracks and the annual theme track and featured by a new pilot track titled “Research by Design.” The pilot track was largely successful in its first year, receiving sixty-one abstract submissions, and it has now been officially accepted as a yearly CELA track. It presented myriad case-based research projects that integrated design analytics as a means of solving issues identified through research. A range of research topics were explored in this field, from campus planning, urban design, virtual reality and gaming, streetscaping, water management, ecosystem services, and beyond.

The 2019 CELA conference also made significant strides in showcasing activities on critical topics such as enrollment, climate change, and diversity, all of which have been a focus of concern for various allied organizations, such as the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board (LAAB), the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), the Council of Landscape Architecture Registration Boards (CLARB), and the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF).

Recent enrollment issues, including student application decreases, diversity issues, student/faculty retention, and program development in landscape architecture, were highlighted in nearly a sixth of the presentations at CELA. Relatedly, 17 percent of the talks focused on research identifying causes of decline in recruitment and retention, examining issues in current and/or under-development landscape architecture programs, faculty hiring, and curriculum and course improvements. Enrollment related topics were primarily covered in the “Design Education and Pedagogy” and “Engaged Scholarship” tracks.

For example, one of the panel discussions on recruitment composed of academics from Kentucky, Mississippi State, and Clemson (Ned Crankshaw, Michael Seymour, Matthew Powers, Tasha Cotter, Jordan Phemister, and Brian Lee) was titled “Recruiting Students into Undergraduate Programs in Landscape Architecture: Predictive Data, Methods, and Tracking.” The discussion built on past literature and LAAB-compiled enrollment data to highlight effective recruitment/retention strategies. Better understanding of prospective students’ interests and attitudes, links between recruiting and advising, how to both develop and implement recruiting programs, how introductory courses can be used for recruitment, and data on graduate placement proved to be effective strategies for enhancing recruitment efforts across universities.

Nearly 45 percent of the presentations related to climate change. The research investigated a broad range of related issues, such as flooding, extreme weather, sea level rise, wildfire, and management/adaption approaches to these effects. Additional presentations covered risk reduction, mitigation, adaptation, and preparedness, including potential solutions to climate change, such as green/blue infrastructure and low-impact development. Although nearly every track had some level of coverage related to climate change, a majority of the research in this area was highlighted in the “Landscape Performance, Sustainability, People-Environment Relationships” and “Landscape Planning and Ecology” tracks.

Sea level rise was an especially popular topic. A researcher from the Boston Architectural College (Bo Yang) examined the economic and ecological implications of sea level rise in a presentation titled “Facing Sea Level Rise: Strategies in Establishing a Global Community in Coastal Ecological Planning.” With a thorough meta-analysis of published literature, the study advocated for establishing a supportive global community through ecological planning, green infrastructure, and cultural heritage preservation.

Other related research on climate change explored global temperature increase through urban heat islands. Research from UC Davis and the American University of Beirut (Stephen Wheeler, John Dialesandro, Yaser Abunnasr) titled “Dynamics of Heat Islands for Dryland Cities and Implications for Mitigation” explored how arid landscapes surrounding urban areas cooled more rapidly at night than did cities, leading to nighttime urban heat islands. Results showed that surprisingly, xeriscaped landscapes contributed to daytime heating rather than cooling in many areas and that the most effective cooling strategies for arid cities were a combination of urban forestry using drought-tolerant tree species and shade-maximizing built form.

Keynote and plenary sessions specifically targeted topics surrounding diversity and inclusion in education and practice. Keynote speaker Dr. Timothy Eatman (Rutgers University–Newark) discussed environmental education, using the voice of academia to engage with difficult conversations regarding inequality to change the status quo in landscape architecture. The plenary session, covered by three academics from Social Innovation and the Urban Opportunity Lab by UCFS and SFSU, California College of the Arts, and Cal Poly, San Louis Obispo (Antwi Akom, Janette Kim, Ellen Burke), specifically focused on exploring new tools and techniques for participatory design and their impact on social equity.

Presentations focusing on diversity, public engagement, equity and inclusion, and cross-disciplinarity (including multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity) totaled 300 presentations, each directly or indirectly referring to diversity/inclusion (62.1 percent). Among them, public and community engagement was critically examined in nearly 38 percent of the presentations; each included research related to service learning, civic participation, and/or tactical urbanism. Social equity, justice, and the inclusion of vulnerable and/or minority populations was also a prevalent topic, involving around 37 percent of talks. Other related presentations included the role of cross-disciplinary collaboration and inclusion. A majority of the research in the diversity and inclusion topics came from the “Design Education and Pedagogy,” “History, Theory, and Culture,” “People-Environment Relationships,” and “Urban Design” tracks.

CELA 2019 showed that many underserved communities face issues of climate-related resiliency and experience greater damage during weather events than do affluent communities. Many presentations related to this issue used service-learning projects to work with marginalized communities. For example, a researcher at Penn State University (Maggie Hansen), in a presentation “Teaching Design as Advocacy” worked with Hurricane Katrina–affected neighborhoods to test how design could help with issues of social change using deep collaboration. Relatedly, research led by Texas A&M University (Galen Newman,Marccus Hendricks, Jennifer Horney, and Siyu Yu) titled “The Costs and Benefits of Green Infrastructure in Underserved, Flood-Prone Neighborhoods” applied Landscape Performance tools to master plans for three underserved, flood-prone communities in Houston, TX. The research showed that the use of green infrastructure as a solution for flood issues benefited neighborhoods in the long run.

A discussion focusing on cross-disciplinarity and diverse practices titled “Urban Design in Landscape Architecture: Taking the Pulse in Education and Practice” was presented by members of the academic and professional communities from Clemson, UT-Arlington, Design Workshop, and WRT (Thomas Schurch, Taner Ozdil, Allyson Mendenhall, John Gibbs, and Michelle Eichinger). The panel highlighted the need for increased attention to urban form through proactive urban design for advancing the diversity in urban populations. Relatedly, anecdotal evidence presented by Kansas State (Stephanie Rolley) titled “Professors of Landscape Architecture: Where and Who Are They?” highlighted the limited numbers of qualified promotion and tenure reviewers, the low visibility of professors, and the higher rate of retirements than promotions in landscape architecture. The characteristics (including gender, ethnicity, race, and age) of professors in landscape architecture in accredited institutions were displayed and discussed.

The 2019 CELA conference focused on collaboration and dialogue among scholars, practitioners, community partners, students, and allied organizations. Anecdotally, the conference showcased a balance of interactive sessions that focused on both the art and the science of landscape architecture, reminding us that the art of the practice is in the heart of what landscape architects do, but we are evolving from an individual case study–based field into an evidence-based comprehensive/issue-driven one that also integrates robust scientific methods. The successes of CELA 2019 should not only be attributed to the many submissions, presentations, and attendance but also to its concerted efforts to focus on topics that continue to shape our collective future, such as climate change, enrollment, and diversity and inclusion. These concerns have clearly become important avenues of research and investigation, and a significant amount of CELA scholars have shown efforts to cover these and other current topics related to landscape architecture profession and education. Although this conference illustrated significant sensitivity and coverage in these critical topics, we must continue to address these growing concerns. Two innovative new tracks “Geo-spatial and Digital Analytics” and “Landscape Architecture for Health” for the 2020 conference will lead enhance our efforts to tackle these issues with new approaches, tools, and techniques. While landscape architecture has begun to realign its focuses toward evolving environmental challenges, it also faces many socioeconomic challenges that affect academia and the profession. In our view, the 2019 CELA annual conference created a strong baseline for research, education, and service related to these topics as we move toward CELA’s 100-year anniversary at the 2020 conference, March 18–21 in Louisville, Kentucky.