International Practice PPN Meeting

The International Practice Professional Practice Network (PPN) will showcase the diversity and variety of the kinds of work landscape architects are doing internationally—range of the scale, complexity, settings—via short, engaging presentations from PPN members:

Urban Agri-Parks: Guiding Cities and Territories Toward Food Security
Lessons from the Islands: Singapore and Puerto Rico
Ming-Jen Hsueh, ASLA, PLA
Island cities like Singapore and Puerto Rico underscore the urgency and potential of food sovereignty in land-constrained, import-dependent contexts. Singapore’s “30 by 30” initiative, which aims to locally produce 30% of the nation's nutritional needs by 2030, reframes agriculture as a high-tech, knowledge-driven sector. In Puerto Rico, efforts to strengthen regional agriculture following Hurricane Maria have catalyzed a broader conversation around food justice, self-reliance, and regenerative land use.

Designing Beyond Extraction: Reimagining Forestry Futures in Uruguay
Amanda Coen, ASLA, PLA
Extractivism, in its plurality of forms, is a prompt to examine nature-culture relations, colonial legacies, and shifting territorial identities that span a range of geographies, histories, and cultures. In Uruguay, forest plantations—backed by the 1987 Ley Forestal and transnational capital—have emerged as a quiet yet powerful force, transforming ecosystems and reframing landscapes as sites of production. With over half of zoned forestry land still untouched, the country stands at a critical juncture to imagine regenerative, pluriversal landscapes that challenge colonial land configurations, expand definitions of productivity, and accommodate local, more-than-human needs.