It should be the number one priority of a professional organization to educate the public about the profession. But there is a huge problem with that in this case. The profession is not identifiable and has nothing that is uniquely its own. It is extremely broad while at the same time those within it do not truly have a common thread that runs through all of us other than doing some kind of design on the land. Some do this, or that, or countless other things, but there is nothing that ALL of us do or a characteristic that EVERYONE in landscape architecture has. Furthermore, there is nothing that we do that is inherently excluded to others.
We’ve had many threads here and tons more elsewhere in which people try to define landscape architecture. All you get is people describing what they do as being the real landscape architecture and things that they don’t do as being not worthy.
If ASLA defines landscape architecture in a specific way, it would be cutting out those that don’t fit the definition. By the time they are done covering most things done by landscape architects it is the usual cliche wishy washy description.
We’ve all seen the landscape contractor who puts a list of what he specializes in on his card that is so long that you conclude that he specializes in nothing.
