When someone asks what I do, the answer has become increasingly difficult to give in a single sentence.

I studied Landscape Architecture.

I have worked as a landscape designer.

Today, much of my work involves Urban Planning, Master Planning, Urban Design, Public Realm Design, and Landscape Design.

These fields overlap, but they are not the same.

Moving between them has made me think more carefully about what each discipline actually does, and more importantly, which questions continue to interest me regardless of professional title.

What Is Landscape Architecture?

Landscape Architecture is sometimes understood simply as designing parks, gardens, or planting.

Those things are certainly part of it, but the field is much broader.

To me, Landscape Architecture is about shaping the relationship between people and the outdoor environment.

It works with land, ecology, water, vegetation, topography, buildings, movement, materials, climate, and human activity.

A landscape architect may work on a private garden, a public park, a university campus, a waterfront, a street, a plaza, a residential community, or an entire landscape system.

The scale can change dramatically, but the central question remains similar.

How should people experience this place?

Landscape Architecture deals closely with physical experience.

How someone arrives.

Where they walk.

Where they sit.

What they see.

What is shaded and what is exposed.

How water moves.

How vegetation changes through time.

How a material feels underfoot.

How an outdoor space relates to the architecture surrounding it.

And how all of these elements work together rather than as isolated objects.

What attracted me to Landscape Architecture was this ability to work between different worlds.

It sits somewhere between ecology and construction, architecture and nature, infrastructure and human experience.

It can be highly technical, but at the same time deeply experiential.

A successful landscape is not simply something to look at.

It is something people inhabit.

What Is Urban Planning?

Urban Planning operates at a different scale.

If Landscape Architecture often asks how a place should be experienced, Urban Planning asks how many different places should work together.

Planning deals with the larger structure of cities and communities.

Where should people live?

Where should jobs, schools, shops, parks, and services be located?

How much development should occur?

How should people move between different areas?

Where should major roads and public transportation go?

How should land uses relate to one another?

How should a city grow over the next ten, twenty, or fifty years?

Urban Planning therefore involves subjects such as land use, density, mobility, infrastructure, development, housing, public facilities, open space, regulations, and long-term growth.

It is less concerned with the exact material of a bench and more concerned with whether the park containing that bench is in the right place, whether people can reach it, whether the surrounding population has enough open space, and how that park contributes to the larger urban system.

That shift in scale changed the way I understood cities.

Landscape Architecture taught me to pay attention to the experience of a place.

Urban Planning taught me to look at how places connect to one another.

A park cannot be understood without its neighborhood.

A neighborhood cannot be understood without its transportation network, employment, schools, commercial centers, infrastructure, and surrounding districts.

Each scale reveals something that the other cannot.

Somewhere Between the Two

The more I have worked across Landscape Architecture, Urban Design, and Urban Planning, the less interested I have become in drawing strict boundaries between them.

My real interest lies somewhere between these scales.

I am interested in how places develop identity.

Why can two neighborhoods within the same city feel completely different?

Why does one public space become deeply connected to local life while another becomes an international destination?

Why are certain cities immediately recognizable?

Why do some places remain vivid in our memory while others disappear almost as soon as we leave them?

The answers are rarely found in one discipline.

A neighborhood’s identity may come partly from its architecture, but also from its streets, trees, public spaces, businesses, residents, history, climate, transportation, and patterns of everyday life.

Its identity may have been carefully designed, or it may have emerged gradually over decades.

Usually, it is some combination of both.

This relationship between design and identity has interested me since my early studies.

During graduate school, I explored how outdoor spaces could strengthen identity and legibility through materials, circulation, spatial sequence, consistency, and memorable moments.

Today, working at the scale of cities has made that question larger.

Instead of asking only how a landscape expresses identity, I find myself asking how an entire district or city develops a sense of place.

What Makes a Place a Place?

The term sense of place appears frequently in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design.

It can easily become abstract.

For me, the idea is actually quite simple.

It is the feeling that somewhere could not simply be somewhere else.

A place has accumulated enough relationships, between people, landscape, buildings, history, culture, movement, and everyday life, that it becomes distinct.

This does not necessarily require a landmark.

Sometimes identity is created through ordinary things.

A particular type of street.

The shade of mature trees.

The distance between buildings.

The way shops meet a sidewalk.

A familiar material.

The smell of vegetation.

The sound of traffic in the distance.

The way people gather after sunset.

A view that appears at the end of a street.

Individually, these things may seem insignificant.

Together, they can make a place unmistakable.

This is where my interests in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning begin to overlap.

I am interested in the large systems that organize cities, but also in the small experiences through which people actually understand them.

A master plan may determine the structure of a district, but nobody experiences a master plan at 1:5000 scale.

People experience a sidewalk.

A building entrance.

A crossing.

A tree.

A park.

A ten-minute walk home.

The challenge is connecting those scales.

What I Am Really Interested In

So, if I had to define my real interest, it would not be Landscape Architecture or Urban Planning as separate disciplines.

It would be the relationship between place, identity, and experience.

I want to understand how landscapes, buildings, streets, infrastructure, culture, history, movement, and people come together to create environments that feel distinct and meaningful.

I am interested in how larger urban decisions eventually become everyday human experiences.

And I am interested in how small spatial decisions can, over time, influence the identity of something much larger, whether it is a neighborhood, a campus, an institution, or a city.

Perhaps that is also why my interests continue to move between scales.

Sometimes understanding a city requires stepping far enough back to see the entire system.

At other times, it requires getting close enough to notice how one person chooses where to sit.

Both matter.

And the space between those two scales is where I find the most interesting questions.