BY BRADFORD MCKEE

FROM THE MAY 2020 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Not much good is coming from this parlous time, as the novel coronavirus floored just about everything people normally rely on, and with shocking speed. Some strands of hope, should they hold up with time, have appeared amid the desperate confusion. There is an odd but significant reassurance in how quickly so much of daily life buttoned up early on. That progress has been uneven, depending not least on brands of leadership. But once the severity of the situation everywhere became clear, enough people took heed of the stay-home advice that the numbers of holdouts thinned quickly if, alas, not to zero. Everything can change fast. The public compliance, the mass cooperation, happened without much pronounced role for the police, whose jobs have grown steep with new danger, like the work of all public safety professionals. Having everyone stay apart is the only way to contain the crisis. Each infection avoided supports the health care and public health community, who offer societies the only chances of stopping loss and getting through it all.

For landscape architecture, there’s a deep paradox. The bad part is that there is pain, and will be more pain as this business contracts along with everything else. The profession is looking into a future far more unknowable than during the Great Recession a decade ago, when it lost a generation of new landscape architects, and some not so new. Total employment in the profession, federal data shows, fell from 22,000 in 2006 to 15,750 in 2012. Membership in ASLA fell to 15,000, from 18,000 before the economy collapsed; it never bounced back. For emerging designers during the recession, there was no path forward, no new jobs, and many jobs lost. Interns had no place to get the office time they need to qualify for licensure. They went elsewhere. We are still feeling it.

The good part during this crisis is that landscapes for people have seldom seemed as vital and as visible. People have had to stay apart, but also keep their sanity. They’ve turned to parks in droves as a first resort, so much so that keeping parks open quickly became a point of contention. In Italy, hit hard soon into the crisis, the city of Milan closed its parks in mid-March. Across the United States, park officials at first ventured to keep parks open but keep them, and their staffs, safe. Some found they couldn’t. And not everybody has a park, meaning the environmental disparities have shown all the more clearly.

The soul of what landscape architecture does could not be more apparent—this should be a reminder in all the discouragement. This profession has to hold on to every partisan for public life that it can. It has new challenges, ones we haven’t seen in our lifetimes. But one salutary thing everybody should share in a time of surprise confinement is room to move outdoors. It has always been our mission to make it possible.