Jackson Rollings is director of communications and associate principal at SWA, a global landscape architecture, urban design, and planning firm with eight studios across the U.S. and China. Based in New York, he previously led comms at SCAPE and other design firms, non-profits, and publications in New York and Louisiana, focused primarily on large-scale climate adaptation and resilience planning. He’s originally from Savannah, Georgia, and is an avid birdwatcher.
The truth is that most people don’t know what landscape architecture is. Operating in a stealth zone between environmental design, the sciences, and the arts, landscape architects claim a miniscule fraction of architecture/engineering services’ combined market value. Their ranks are small—about 16,000 licensed practitioners in the U.S., many of whom strive for the effect of an unseen hand shaping the land, and shying away from the spotlight. Misapprehensions abound. The media routinely describes them as architects; my family in rural Georgia thinks I write press releases for gardeners.
Today, those of us who communicate the value of landscape architecture find public perception at an odd threshold. Nationally, leading designers are breaking through on major platforms as champions for climate action, environmental justice, and community-led design. In the past five years alone, three landscape architects have appeared on Time 100 lists. When we present landscape-based solutions clearly and strategically, people sit up and listen. We might forgive those who, through the years, have regarded designed landscapes as mere objects of privilege or frivolousness. Landscape can still be about beauty but, today, our work is also seen as a matter of public and planetary affairs.
Understanding these trends is useful for many reasons, the first being basic self-awareness. Many designers believe the media should find their work fascinating simply because they do, but this attitude extinguishes interest in half a second. When you study how publications tick and the market forces that shape them, you can identify how landscape attaches itself to relevant stories. Then you might begin to build strategy and answer the most crucial question in communications: Who’s your audience, really?
The Trade Crunch
Today’s digital upheaval has already transformed media as we know it, hardening the market into fewer and less diverse outlets. Since 2005, the U.S. has lost a third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its journalists. While a few institutions like The New York Times have adapted, smaller outfits have fallen victim.
The ripples have reached us, and trade publications are rapidly consolidating. In our corner of the industry, we’ve long relied on a single essential monthly, Landscape Architecture Magazine, operated by a membership organization and overdue for a digital refresh. Otherwise, in design, most trades focus on the broadly familiar disciplines of architecture and interiors (with the advantage of product tie-ins)—and, to sustain subscribers and ad revenue, many have leaned even further into aspirational, lifestyle, and celebrity content. For outlets that insist on niche beats like landscape and urban design, corporate acquisition has been one of the only lifelines, and coverage is often remixed to become more consumer-facing. The few remaining independent publications face tremendous pressure to find a buyer, and soon.
With its messiness and systems thinking, landscape usually doesn’t check the boxes to secure coverage unless projects or firm leaders are themselves packaged as aspirational. Editors scrambling to align the two may wind up reinforcing clichés: the 1.5-acre park that will solve flooding and heal a fractured society; dignitaries posing with blocks of melting ice. These may be effective marketing tools, but they’re dull, distract from original thought, and overpromise the impact of a discipline that has much more to offer. On the national stage, many of the same tropes have been adopted in service of bigger stories.
Scaling Up
In recent years, a small group of landscape architects have risen to prominence in national publications, broadcast news, and beyond—some with the juggernaut of a once-in-a-lifetime public project, others with a cocktail of ideas and imperatives that align with the emergence of solutions journalism, climate desks, and COVID-driven interest in the public realm. The niche is having its moment in the sun. Suddenly, it seems, everyone with a social media account has detailed opinions about transportation policy, and knows the vibe (if not the meaning) of regenerative ecology. At the Venice Biennale, an elite and largely inaccessible forum where architects work out their narratives in public, many seem to have just learned about landscape architecture—countless installations about “designing nature” with a breathless tone of discovery. While this is funny, ahistorical, and often misguided, I lean optimistic and think the exposure is a net positive. Many disagree, but it’s happening either way. For a discipline in a 125-year quest for recognition, why now, and why these few?
The starchitect has been around as long as architecture. Aside from Frederick Law Olmsted himself, the landscape starchitect is a new and multifaceted figure, propelled by the energy of the youth environmental movement and embodying the issues of the progressive left, with climate and equity as core drivers. Situated outside of “traditional” expertise, landscape architects are a foil to the character of the mainstream media wonk, offering a synthetic, interdisciplinary approach to environmental and social mores that resists categorization and is almost impossible to boil down into a headline.
Five years ago, this complexity may have been a disadvantage. Today, amid the “earsplitting noise-to-signal ratio” of digital media, per Jonathan Rosen (see orchestraco.com), the niche point of view may be the only thing that stops our thumbs from endless scrolling.
Nurturing the Niche
With both these trends in mind, I often implore designers to think like a media company, and spend a little more time paying attention than demanding it. Not seeing the coverage you want? No problem—invest in original content on your own socials and website. Identify compelling, outspoken people at different levels, not just leadership, and put them front and center. Figure out what sticks, and try again. There’s no one solution.
On the editorial side, it’s not all dismal. For landscape-oriented writers and editors, the path forward might involve embracing the niche not just as a content strategy, but as a financial model, leveraging an ever-expanding digital toolkit that now includes Substack and short-form video. I’m heartened by those already doing this work—Julia Gamolina for Madame Architect, and the wonderfully spicy New York Review of Architecture—but I wonder what it could look like for landscape architecture and urban design. I don’t know when, or if, this will emerge. Perhaps it already exists. Executed with intention, it could even be profitable.
I do think that while the national coverage we’re experiencing is ultimately good, it needs balance, nuance, and the kind of introspection that may be best suited for smaller platforms, written by people inside this industry of soils and stones, who are sincerely invested in its future.