IFLA Student Design Competition 2023 - open for submissions

Submission deadline 31 May

As part of the key activities of the 59th IFLA World Congress, a students’ competition has been organised in order to receive, compare, share and advance landscape planning, design and management ideas from across the world. The congress’ main theme is Emergent Interaction with the subthemes Leave No One Behind, Beyond Borders, and Act Local-Think Global. It aims to explore new forms of collective problem solving, borderless strategies and possible networks of ideas and cooperation while at the same time keeping the issues of climate change, social inequality and biodiversity-loss at the forefront of the congress.

Further, the theme looks at possibilities of connecting local action with global strategies and facilitation of interaction across national and institutional boundaries, between citizens and governments; Interaction between academic institutions and private practices, between political frameworks and planetary boundaries; between culture and nature, between the digital and the physical, between cities and ecologies. Perhaps by exploring the possibilities of such new cooperative frameworks together will allow us to mobilize our collective ingenuity and professional capabilities towards global action in order to confront the challenges facing us. Possible outcomes will be a discovery of uses of these new modes of interaction for our profession, new tools and applications that we can expect on the theoretical, strategic and operational levels of Landscape Architecture. In the end, we shall learn from each other as a global network of landscape architects, urban planners, designers and professionals in the built environment, representing a wide diversity of nations, traditions, practices and cultures.

Read more about the brief and how to enter here.