Licensure ensures that landscape architects have the education, experience and expertise to design safe, sustainable and functional spaces that protect public health, safety and welfare. As a STEM-designated profession, landscape architecture requires technical knowledge in science, engineering and environmental systems to effectively manage stormwater, transportation corridors, public parks and community spaces.
Without licensure, unqualified individuals could design projects that pose risks to public safety, property and the environment. Regulatory oversight ensures that only competent professionals practice, safeguarding communities and critical infrastructure.
What landscape architects do
Landscape architecture encompasses analysis, planning, design, management and stewardship of the natural and built environment through science and design. Landscape architects create well-planned, livable communities, leading the way by creating neighborhood master plans, designing green streets, managing stormwater runoff and planning highutility transportation corridors.
Landscape architecture includes iconic and neighborhood places, local parks, residential communities, commercial developments and downtown streetscapes. Larger well-known examples include Central Park and the Highline in New York City, the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C., the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Chicago’s Millennium
Park.
Why landscape architects must be licensed
The practice of landscape architecture includes keeping the public safe from hazards, protecting natural resources and sustainably managing the natural and built environment surrounding our homes and communities. It requires a breadth of knowledge and training in many substantive areas of science, engineering and aesthetics earning STEM designation for the profession by the Department of Homeland Security.
The adverse risks and consequences of negligent, unqualified, unethical or incompetent persons engaging in landscape architectural design services without the requisite education and training are significant — sometimes irreparable — economically, environmentally and in terms of public safety, health and welfare. At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure and site improvements every year, and the safety of persons and property these improvements affect. Licensure of landscape architects permits consumers to manage these risks and reduces exposure to liability from hazardous and defective design.
To properly serve and protect the public, these risks and consequences—and the potential for harm—must be minimized and prevented. The public interest is best served when qualified, licensed professionals carry out these responsibilities safely following rigorous and essential professional standards, and when other non-qualified individuals are prevented from providing such services to the public. Moreover, licensing is necessary and appropriate given landscape architecture’s technical nature—and consumer/public inability to accurately and reliably assess the competence of such providers.
Without regulatory standards, consumers have no mechanism to ensure they can rely on a professional to produce design and technical documentation meeting minimum standards of competence.
