Landscape Architect Kate Orff has been named in Time Magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people for 2023.  

The New York-based Scape founder, who will be presenting at next month’s 2023 NZILA Firth Conference in Nelson, is widely recognised as a leading voice in landscape architecture, urban design and climate adaptation. 

In the Time tribute, Architect Jeanne Gang says “Kate Orff is a Landscape Architect who’s never been hemmed in by garden walls—seeking instead to liberate landscape to do nothing less than repair our warming planet through design.” 

“Kate’s ecological vision contains a larger environmental ethic to help people protect biodiversity and adapt to climate change. By rallying communities to participate in her restorative, nature-based projects, she shows us how landscape can also help repair a fractured society.”

Kate will be an in-person keynote speaker at the NZILA conference next month and delegates will also have the opportunity to take part in an Abel Tasman weekend with her and other international presenters Kotchakorn Voorakhom and Jala Makhzoumi. Full details of that opportunity are available here. 

Kate also presented a NZILA Streetscape Webinar alongside kiwi landscape architect Tama Whiting in 2021. You can see that presentation here. 

In 2017 Orff was included on Rolling Stone's list of “25 People Shaping the Future in Tech, Science, Medicine, Activism and More” and that same year she was awarded the MacArthur "Genius" Grant fellowship which was a first for Landscape Architects nationwide.

Scape’s website has paid tribute to the company’s founder saying she “has advanced broad-front initiatives to retool the field of Landscape Architecture to address global issues of climate and social justice—both through practice and through research, publications, exhibitions, and education, as Director of the Urban Design program and Co-founder of the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes (CRCL) at Columbia University.”

Orff has also authored and co-authored several books, including Toward an Urban Ecology (Monacelli, 2016), co-author, with photographer Richard Misrach, of Petrochemical America (Aperture, 2012), and a contributor to All We Can Save (Penguin Random House, 2020), an anthology of women climate leaders.

Her work has received dozens of professional awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and a 2019 National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. 

She currently serves on the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Advisory Board for Urban Ocean Lab, a policy think tank.