Virtual LA CES™ Education Sessions

- Differentiate between maintenance and stewardship and describe how stewardship functions as social infrastructure that supports long-term park success.

- Identify how power dynamics between project vision, leadership, community priorities, and available resources influence stewardship outcomes.

- Explain the value of co-creating stewardship during the design process, including how it shapes design decisions, aligns roles, and builds long-term capacity.

- Develop a basic Stewardship Starter Plan that includes key pillars such as financial health, awareness and advocacy, care and maintenance, and succession.

The second 2026 Virtual Oberlander Prize Forum will be a conversational webinar with Mexican landscape architect Mario Schjetnan—winner in 2025 of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize and founder of Grupo de Diseño Urbano—and María Bellalta, exploring Mario’s legacy, ethos, and the state of landscape architecture education—across Latin America and the Global South. Drawing on Mario’s decades of practice and his own formation as a scholar—including graduate study at UC Berkeley and a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design—the conversation will explore how education, culture, and institutional structures shape landscape architecture across the Americas. The forum will examine both the urgent need and the great potential to expand the discipline to address the region’s deepening urbanization and environmental challenges. Bellalta brings to this conversation her own sustained engagement with Mexico City through advanced design studios in the region, where cross-cultural and cross-contextual lessons speak directly to an expanded field of landscape architecture, one shaped by the full range of ecotones, cultural traditions, and urban conditions that define the Americas. Mario and María will reflect on the foundations of a renewed and timely 21st-century landscape architecture and environmental design paradigm.