From We Declare in the May 2016 issue, five landscape architects, scholars, and advocates revisit “A Declaration of Concern” for the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s 50th anniversary celebration.

 
FIFTY YEARS OF THE DECLARATION: EVOLUTION AND PROSPECTS
BY MARIO SCHJETNAN, FASLA

The 1966 Declaration of the Landscape Architecture Foundation established very clearly the group?s concern about the poor environmental conditions, social inequalities, and loss of quality of life prevalent in most North American cities around that time. It was a timely and valorous call, an outcry and a moral declaration by landscape architecture leaders of their time.
To be honest, many U.S. cities have in these 50 years upgraded their levels of air quality, decreased their contamination of soils and water, and improved their public open spaces. Many of these cities have rehabilitated and repopulated their city centers and enhanced habitability in general. However, many other challenges and global concerns have now arisen, including climate change, the horizontal expansion of cities, and, in the United States, still the highest levels in consumption per person of natural resources, energy, land, and water in the world.
Fifty years ago in Latin America, there were very few landscape architects and not a single organized professional society or specialized school. Today there are several schools and master?s degree programs in the region and 16 professional associations....