Landscape architecture is currently facing a crisis of diversity. African Americans and Latinos together account for less than 10 percent of graduating landscape architects. These demographics fail to reflect those of the wider U.S. population. U.S. Census data project that minorities, now 37 percent of the U.S. population, will constitute 57 percent by 2060. To remain relevant and useful to the country’s increasingly diverse communities, landscape architecture must become a more ethnically and culturally diverse profession.
Four years ago, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) inaugurated the Diversity Summit in order to better understand and address the profession’s lack of minority members. The fourth annual ASLA Diversity Summit brought together 12 landscape architects to identify tactics that ASLA could implement over the next 12 months in order further the cause of diversity. Discussions were geared towards recruitment of minorities in to academic programs and mentorship of minority students and practitioners. Summit participants drew on their experiences as minorities in the field to devise ways of leveraging school outreach programs, scholarships, professional networks, and technology to achieve said goals.
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https://www.asla.org/land/LandArticle.aspx?id=49009
