Stewardship with Josh Lapp

January 11, 2018

Author: Josh Lapp, Urban Planner – Designing Local

Stewardship is responsibility to culture

To me all meaning is derived from context. My context is that I am an Urban Planner and fortunate to have found a career that allows me to put my passions to work. We are called upon to help people and communities understand, preserve, and celebrate their history and culture.

Stewardship begins with responsibility. What do we as design professional have a responsibility to do? I believe that we have a responsibility to abandon homogeny and instead strive to harness the uniqueness and creativity that already lies within.

That means we must safeguard our local history and our historic buildings; we must use artists and artisans to inject creativity into our built environment; we must celebrate what makes our communities special and unique – our stories, our people, our diverse perspectives, and our resources; and we must embrace our past mistakes and use them to create a brighter future. These are all practices that we uphold in our work at Designing Local.

Our profession has a unique responsibility. What we create impacts our communities and all the people within them. In our work we try to remember that we’re not only responsible to our clients, but we are stewards of the past and creators of our future.