This year’s edition of the annual ECLAS conference took place in Delft from 16 to 19 September 2026 under the theme Take Care – Planetary Landscape Architecture.

With participants from more than 40 countries, the conference brought together around 350 academics, PhD candidates, designers and practitioners in person and a further 50 participants online, with approximately 400 participants taking part across the four days.

Take Care was structured around five interconnected tracks, each offering a pathway for knowing and doing in a planetary age. Across presentations, workshops, round-tables and discussions, the conference explored theory and discourse, ways of knowing and doing, emerging perspectives and voices, planetary challenges, and transformative education. Together, they formed a framework for a profession that is ethically engaged, relationally aware, and equipped to foster a regenerative future for the planet.

The keynote programme brought these questions into focus. Noreen Masud opened with A Flat Place, exploring the relationships between landscape, memory, identity and trauma. Dirk Sijmons followed with Changing World Views: Our most urgent transition?, reflecting on the implications of our Anthropocene condition for the design community. 

On Thursday, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes presented Politics of Maintenance, addressing the environmental and sociopolitical implications of contemporary development practices, while Tim Waterman’s Reworlding: Planetarity and Future Imagineries explored imaginaries and the role of power and democracy in shaping public life and landscape.

The conference also brought participants out into the landscape through a series of excursions. From the changing coastline of South Holland and the Midden-Delfland polder landscape to the dynamic delta of Zeeland and East Flanders and the diverse urban landscape of Rotterdam, the excursions connected the theme of care to landscapes undergoing urgent transitions.

The conference concluded with the formulation of a memorandum and call to action around Take Care, bringing together the discussions of the preceding days in the ECLAS Conference Statement. The memorandum identifies five pathways towards a planetary landscape architecture of care: Reframe our worldviews, Renew our design methods and tools, Engage diverse voices, Act on urgent transitions and Transform landscape architecture education. 

Read the full document here. 

The exchange of ideas will continue after the conference through a peer-reviewed publication planned for publication in early 2027.