Professional Practice Networks (PPNs)

This PPN focuses on the personal skills and resilience side of the profession. It's a space for landscape architects at every stage to share experiences, ask questions, and build the leadership capacity that strengthens firms and careers alike. If you're curious about office culture, navigating professional growth, or simply want a community where honest, supportive conversations happen — this is your network. Join to assess, discuss, and refine your professional trajectory alongside peers who understand the journey.

Small Practice is unique because it focuses on the intersection of design and entrepreneurship. Unlike topic- or project-type PPNs, this group is about: 

• Running a business, not just practicing design. 
• Decision-making with limited staff and resources. 
• Agility, independence, and direct client relationships. It’s one of the few spaces where conversations about fees, contracts, staffing, and growth strategies happen openly among peers facing the same scale of challenges.

What sets Technology in Practice apart is its role as ASLA’s hub for innovation in how we work, not just what we design. While other PPNs might focus on specific project types, this network looks across them all to explore how AI, smart infrastructure, data, and digital workflows are actively changing the day‑to‑day practice of landscape architecture and how we as a profession can stay at the forefront of technology.

The Materials, Methods, Sourcing PPN is for landscape architects who care deeply about how great design actually gets built, coupled with how the decisions we make today affect performance, resilience, sustainability, cost, and craft over time. This PPN is uniquely positioned at the intersection of design, technical execution, material innovation, and construction realities. While other PPNs may focus on project types or design typologies, this network focuses on the systems, materials, detailing, sourcing strategies, and implementation methods that shape every landscape project regardless of scale or sector.

Compared with other practice areas, the Urban Environments PPN focuses on the places where many of the profession’s biggest questions converge: 

• How do we retrofit existing cities for climate change? 
• How do we design public spaces that are welcoming and accessible to many different users? 
• How do we support density while still creating meaningful relationships between people and nature? 
• How do we honor local culture and history while planning for growth and change? 

This PPN creates a space to share how we navigate those questions in real projects, real communities, and real constraints. It recognizes that designing urban environments are not only about making places look better; it is about helping cities and towns function better for people, ecologies, and future generations.

The Rural Practice PPN serves as a forum for landscape architects and allied professionals in a wide range of roles engaged across the full spectrum of rural contexts. Rural places face challenges far more complex than the tools we’ve traditionally used to address them. Designing for thriving rural places requires approaches that can hold cultural, economic, ecology, environmental, and social complexity at once. The Rural Practice PPN draws from the full spectrum of rural knowledge—design, planning, policy, infrastructure, agriculture, housing, and community and economic development—to respond to the intertwined forces shaping rural people and places. We’re here to challenge assumptions, share emerging practices, and strengthen the profession’s understanding of rural resilience. If you’re motivated by the puzzle of why some communities thrive while others fade—and if you believe rural places deserve design that matches their depth—this PPN is the place to lead that change.

The Institutional and Campus Environments PPN serves as a bridge between planning, design, operations, and institutional leadership. While many PPNs focus on specific practice areas or project types, our PPN examines the broader systems that influence how campuses function, evolve, and thrive. We recognize that successful institutional environments require collaboration across multiple disciplines and stakeholders. Our members explore how landscape architecture intersects with campus planning, mobility, sustainability, resilience, student experience, public space design, facilities management, and strategic decision-making. By connecting ideas from across the profession, the PPN provides a comprehensive perspective on creating places that support institutional missions and enrich the lives of their users. The Institutional and Campus Environments PPN creates a space where passionate professionals can come together to share knowledge, challenge assumptions, and advance the practice of landscape architecture and planning.

This PPN focuses on these heavily used spaces as critical public infrastructure, how long-term maintenance and management shapes the design long before construction, and the realities that parks and public facilities face with funding, operations and care in perpetuity. Looking at the design and construction from a macro perspective--from resource planning and infrastructure to maintenance and multi-generational use--is critical to the success of parks and recreation. 

This network is for: Landscape architects engaged in land-use planning, large-scale transportation and infrastructure projects, master planning, international practice, and global hospitality and resort development.

Interested in becoming the Chair for the Master Planning & Development PPN? Please fill out this form, and a ASLA staff member will be in touch soon