IFLA Europe launches 2025 youth competition to reshape urban landscapes with green innovation
IFLA Europe has launched its 2025 Youth Competition for Landscape Architecture students and young professionals, titled ‘NEW URBAN LANDSCAPES – Regenerating Cities – Revealing new urban landscapes’. This prestigious competition aims to provide emerging landscape architects an invaluable platform to gain visibility and recognition at a European level. Through showcasing innovative projects and fresh ideas, participants contribute to the evolution of the profession while underscoring landscape architecture’s critical role in tackling contemporary environmental, social, and urban challenges.
The competition serves multiple functions: it supports participants' academic and professional development, enhances applications for scholarships, and strengthens engagement with the international landscape architecture community. More broadly, it fosters dialogue among students, young professionals, and experienced practitioners, contributing to a cohesive European landscape architecture community and encouraging collaborative thinking for the future of urban environments.
The theme reflects current urban realities, noting that over half the global population now lives in cities, with this expected to rise to nearly 70% by 2050. Many cities have undergone rapid, often unplanned expansion, resulting in significant environmental and social inequities. Vulnerable urban areas frequently suffer from a lack of green spaces and face heightened urban heat effects, while redevelopment efforts sometimes displace rather than include residents, reinforcing social segregation.
In response, the competition invites participants to rethink urban landscapes through three core strategies that align with major European initiatives like the New European Bauhaus and the European Green Deal. These strategies focus on adapting existing urban fabric by greening surfaces and unsealing soil, reclaiming underused spaces to foster biodiversity and community use, and unfolding spatial opportunities such as converting rooftops or repurposing industrial interiors for public benefit. Applicants are encouraged to imagine urban landscapes as active drivers of transformation and collective wellbeing rather than mere backdrops.
Eligible participants include enrolled landscape architecture students and young professionals up to 40 years old who are members of National Associations affiliated with IFLA Europe or from Council of Europe countries. The competition features two categories with €1,000 awards each for first-place winners, who are then invited to present their projects at the General Assembly meeting in Brussels in October 2025. This event affords winners a unique opportunity to engage directly with a broad network of European landscape architecture leaders, further enhancing their professional profiles.
Across the profession, other related competitions and congresses reflect a shared commitment to addressing global challenges through landscape architecture. For example, the upcoming IFLA World Congress 2025, taking place in Nantes, France, will host a Student Design Competition under the theme ‘Guiding Landscapes’. This event aims to galvanise landscape-based strategies addressing climate change, social inequality, and biodiversity loss on a global stage, with submissions due earlier in 2025 and awards presented during the congress.
Previous IFLA Europe youth competitions have also emphasised environmental innovation. The 2024 Youth Competition, ‘Plan(e)Tscape’, encouraged plant-based solutions to environmental challenges and identified emerging talents focused on sustainability and climate resilience in urban landscapes. Such competitions, along with IFLA Europe’s ongoing events, contribute to a dynamic and forward-thinking community that champions landscape architecture’s potential to create inclusive, resilient, and beautiful urban environments.
Overall, the 2025 IFLA Europe Youth Competition highlights a crucial moment for landscape architecture students and young professionals to influence the regeneration of European cities. It not only advances their personal careers but also reinforces the profession’s vital role in shaping urban futures marked by equity, sustainability, and creativity.