DAVID RUBIN Land Collective is a landscape architecture, urban design, and planning studio defined by its emphasis on empathy and its commitment to social purpose. The firm prioritizes holistic and sustainable design principles, fused with community resilience. 

Land Collective sees landscape as a connective tissue that brings people together to create positive change. Since the beginnings of the practice, the firm has operated from the understanding that we are all more alike than different, and that, even as we celebrate our diversity, good design can bridge differences. 

Land Collective recognizes that effective public space is defined by its ability to draw people in; therefore, the impact of its work depends on how people engage each other in it, no matter the scale. Design decisions are made with the desire to create an equitable environment in which people from very different walks of life might come together. Imagine a scenario where a retired professor and a young activist find themselves together in a public space designed by Land Collective. As a result of the quality and character of the landscape, they choose to linger and end up sitting next to one another, and, in the act of sitting, they enter into a conversation, and as a result of that conversation, they come up with an idea, and that idea, ten years down the road, saves the world. Then Land Collective will have created the place in which that idea was formed. That is the firm’s definition of success, and its mission: to use design as a tool to save the world.