Unitec graduate Lyrck Maiava has been making a mark in the world of play theory and decolonisation, and was named best student presenter at the Architectural Science Association (ASA) conference held at the University of Melbourne in December.

The matching of Peter Sergel, creator of the Hamilton Gardens, and photographer Grant Sheehan has resulted in a not-to-miss film soon showing as part of the Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival: The Time-Traveller’s Guide to Hamilton Gardens

Given we live on a planet being buffeted at regular intervals by disruptive turmoil and converging challenges, the determination of Gary Marshall and Finn Mackesy to prepare new pathways through permaculture is inspirational. Check out their fundraising campaign.

The public realm design for Te Ngākau is guided by mana whenua’s aspirations to give te taiao (the natural world) primacy, embracing the Māori world view which positions us within nature, a state of taupuhipuhi: symbiosis with all flora and fauna.

This year’s NZPI conference - NZPIC26 - featured a bountiful range of award presentations, keynote speakers, breakout sessions and a precursor of the level of political debate we’ll be hearing more of as Election campaigns gather pace during the year.

Cinema-goers and popcorn-lovers have a treat to look forward to from later this month, with the nationwide roll-out of the 15th Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival - which coincides with Resene’s 80th birthday.

It’s no understatement to characterise Te Ngākau Civic Square as a ‘new beginning’. Citizens of Wellington flocked to the revitalised open space and to the drawcard re-opening of the central library Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui on Saturday 14 March. See more photos here.

The opportunity for voicing concerns about the Coalition Government’s proposed new planning system was taken up by New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects Tuia Pito Ora on 12 March via a compelling oral submission. Now comes the ‘wait and see’.

Finlay Thompson, of data science company Dragonfly, gets to hover across an exceptionally broad range of data-driven projects. It’s work focused on “doing good with data” and providing insights into landscape impacts and biodiversity challenges.

In its submission on the Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill the Natural Hazards Commission has made strong arguments for the role that effective land use planning makes to reducing and managing the recurrent risks posed by natural hazard events and the effects of climate change.

A valued aspect of being practitioners in professions like landscape architecture is the enjoyment of taking part in activities that bring light to completed projects. In January the Auckland branch of NZILA organised Te Rimutahi, Raumati Kōrero, a designers talk at Te Rimutahi, to do just that.

The green light given to the Rangitoopuni Riverhead Development is envisioned as a catalyst for iwi-led development and for culturally grounded, environmentally responsible projects on Treaty Settlement land.

Wellington-based writer and editor Susette Goldsmith has produced two companion works that ask important questions about the adequacy of our defence of trees: Tree Sense and Capital Trees.

The first hill to climb on responding to the proposed new Planning and Natural Environment bills has been completed by more than 1300 individuals and organisations: The Submission. Next up is the opportunity to speak to the Environment Committee about why landscape matters!

With the deadline for submissions to the Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill set to fall on Friday 13 February, LAA looks for insights from the planning legislation pathways in Australia.

With a closing date looming ever closer for submissions to the Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill, NZILA Environmental Legislation Committee chair Peter Kensington raises key issues that need resolving during the Select Committee stage.

The clock is ticking on time left to submit on the Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill - with the Environmental Legislation Working Group of the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects Tuia Pito Ora (NZILA) leading a collaborative and robust response.

What’s at stake if the Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill proceed as they are? Shannon Bray of the NZILA Environmental Legislation Working Group puts forward strong reasons not to abandon landscape.

As 2025 was being brought to a close, Unitec’s School of Architecture annual journal Asylum - named for the former hospital building that originally housed the School - was brought to life by four students under the theme of Mana Wāhine.

While the number of people spoken to by LAA often exceeds the capacity for telling all of the stories there are to be told in as quick a turnaround as intended, a new series is on its way to highlight our kōrero with landscape architects, designers, educators, students and more. People like Bridget Gilbert, Peter Sergel and Rod Barnett.

Through a balanced set of contributions from practitioners and researchers the latest issue of the Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal opens up a range of perspectives on the purposes of ‘Green Belts’ and the different contexts of the United Kingdom, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

As well as working across urban design and landscape architecture, Reset has extended its activity in the Cook Islands to sharing lessons learnt by Wānaka Wastebusters to benefit the island of Aitutaki.

Being in Denmark last year gave Ralph Johns a timely pause to think that it’s time we took a slower approach to our thinking on urban and landscape design for the sake of future generations.

The third Oberlander Prize laureate is Mexico-based landscape architect Mario Schjetnan. Read (and watch) more about Mario’s life story and the outstanding work of his firm Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU).

With the deadline for submissions to the Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill set to fall on Friday 13 February, LAA looks for insights from the planning legislation pathways in Australia.

Guest contributor Tony Brophy has found a well of inspiration in Nantes, France. If there was one ‘elephant in the room’ at the IFLA World Congress, held in September, it was what he terms the profession’s prevailing “identity crisis”.

2025 has seen a cornucopia of awards events - here’s a wrap on the Barcelona International Landscape Biennale, the Landscape Institute Awards and World Architecture Festival - all of which took place in November.

The World Architecture Festival made its first touchdown in the USA in November - at which LandLAB, with SCAPE, gained global recognition with a win in the Future Project: Urban Design category for the exciting Te Ara Tukutuku project.

The Asia-Pacific regional chapter of the International Federation of Landscape Architects has a new president: Paul Chan, of the Hong Kong Institute of Landscape Architects.

Similarly to the globally important Adaptation Futures conference recently held in Ōtautahi Christchurch, next week’s International Conference on Urban Health in our capital city will traverse topics that shape both urban and landscape design.

Ahead of COP30, now up and running in Brazil (regardless of notable COP-outs), the International Federation of Landscape Architects released a COP30 Position Statement titled ‘A Call to Action for COP30: Putting Landscape at the Heart of Climate Action.’

Hastings’ Waiaroha – Heretaunga Water Discovery Centre has won international acclaim this month, taking out the City Nation Place Global Award for Best Placemaking Initiative. Announced in London, the award placed Waiaroha ahead of major projects from cities such as Toronto, Stockholm, and Cleveland.

For landscape architect Craig Pocock, travelling to India to speak on the world stage of the IFLA APR Congress in Mumbai is an opportunity to champion the importance of indigenous-led design and to reconnect with the influences that have shaped his love for India.

One week before the 13th edition of the Barcelona International Landscape Biennial, LAA contributor Carles Martinez-Almoyna Gual, a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Te Herenga Waka VUW, provides an insightful overview of what to expect.

Ōtautahi Christchurch has been overflowing with international events, including welcoming more than 2400 delegates and exhibitors to the combined 10th International Water Association ASPIRE Conference and Water New Zealand Conference and Expo.
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From a pool of more than 120 nominees a National Jury convened by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) has selected more than 30 winners - as announced at this week’s gala evening during DARK, the AILA’s Festival of Landscape Architecture.

In his lifetime - tragically ended on 23 September 2025 - world-renowned Chinese landscape architect and educator Kongjian Yu exemplified the role that landscape architects can play in climate adaptation. The combination of his many professional works, personal connections, influence and legacy as an originator of the ‘sponge city’ concept will be, and are already, enduring ones.

The countdown to the Adaptation Futures conference from 13 to 16 October at the Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre in Ōtautahi Christchurch is almost over. It will have all the elements of a UN-level gathering and will put issues and expertise from Aotearoa New Zealand on a world-level stage.

Ralph Johns takes us on the trail of two friends cycling into the past; reconnecting with people and places, professional and personal memories, the future and the present. All encompassed by the spanning of four decades and one hundred landscape architecture projects.

This year’s IFLA Sir Graham Jellicoe Award recipient is Swiss landscape architect and educator Günther Vogt. The imprint he has been making on the profession is insightful and influential.

The matching of Peter Sergel, creator of the Hamilton Gardens, and photographer Grant Sheehan has resulted in a not-to-miss film soon showing as part of the Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival: The Time-Traveller’s Guide to Hamilton Gardens

Trees from 12 nations competed as finalists for the title of 2026 European Tree of the Year, with a tree that has witnessed centuries of autumn colours emerging as the winner and as the subject of an emotive video.

Cinema-goers and popcorn-lovers have a treat to look forward to from later this month, with the nationwide roll-out of the 15th Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival - which coincides with Resene’s 80th birthday.

Wellington-based writer and editor Susette Goldsmith has produced two companion works that ask important questions about the adequacy of our defence of trees: Tree Sense and Capital Trees.

Is going from UK Tree of the year in 2025 to European Tree of the year 2026 going out on a limb? LAA was very taken with this small story of a very tall tree, located in a busy urban street in Glasgow, Scotland.

Lincoln University academics Marcus Robinson, Professor Jacky Bowring and Dr Shannon Davis, along with Dr Sarah Edwards from the Bioeconomy Science Institute, have been researching spatial opportunities for balancing urban growth, food production and ecology.

This essay from postgraduate student Ananda Acharya argues that landscape memory is stored in repeated practices and poses a question for designers: which practices do we permit to become memory, and which do we erase?

In our final ‘book column’ for the year, LAA turns the clock back to a clutch of books celebrating their 10th and 15th anniversaries - as well as presenting a bountiful selection of large illustrated books published in 2025 on flowers, plants, our biodiversity of feathered friends and city mapping.

Quietly located among the celebrations of the centennial year of The New Yorker, was an exhibition of its famous covers that put the urban life of Parks at the centre of the storied city’s stories.

If you’re looking for a new podcast to draw insights from, the team at Te Papa Tū Whirinaki – The Landscape Foundation have released their third season of episodes inspired by the landmark book Kia Whakanuia te Whenua | People, Place, Landscape.

Aotearoa New Zealand needs robust landslide data to inform decisions on where and how we live. New public research organisation Earth Sciences New Zealand is doing its part by undertaking a major upgrade to the New Zealand Landslide Database (NZLD).

Regular monitoring of changes in our land cover is a critical piece of the environmental monitoring puzzle. It helps us understand the state of our natural and built environments and how they are being impacted by both our changing climate and our land management choices.

Given the range of conjoined events that it brings together - from speaker events to exhibitions - the NZIA’s Aotearoa Festival of Architecture is an illustration of the power of both diversity an collaboration; deserving of being captured for and promoted to a wider audience.

The foreword to Living In Paradox, written by Professor Diane Brand, reads that it is a book “that needed to be written”. Diane reckoned it “should be read as a prelude to the design of future place in New Zealand, so that that enterprise can be undertaken in context”. Some 15 years later, author Garth Falconer lays the book to rest.

Kate Orff (SCAPE Landscape Architecture) and Marco Scano (Harvard GSD Department of Landscape Architecture) joined forces to create ‘Cool Forests’ for the Biennale Architettura 2025 in Venice. For our new ‘Artscapes’ section we’ve highlighted two Biennales and an artists’ residency in Ireland.

If you're still looking for ways to engage with Conservation Week (1-7 September) this short film - fronted by conservationist Sam 'The Trap Man' Gibson and backed by Pure Advantage - will definitely assist.

DOC has produced a kete of resources and suggestions as ways to help to activate Conservation Week - Te Wiki o te Taiao, in 2025. Resources include a double-sided table talker. What will you be doing in your workplace or community? #ConservationWeek2025

In August a DOC team who work on the New Zealand Threat Classification Series released data on the conservation status of mosses in Aotearoa New Zealand. To celebrate this magnificent flora, LAA has also found some poetry to supplement the data and to mark National Poetry Day.

Have you heard of Archisource? Since 2019 they have organised a ‘Drawing of the Year’ award and in 2025 the Digital Media award category was won by MLA graduate Ying Yu Wong - Bartlett School of Architecture UCL, with her entry ‘Rainforest Commons’.

Developed at the New Zealand Centre for Sustainable Cities and promoted by Community Housing Aotearoa, this guide offers ideas to organisations operating in the housing, neighbourhood and urban development sector.