Amie MacPhee (honoris causa)
Inspired by the California coastal oak woodland landscapes of her childhood, Amie MacPhee, AICP, has made a career designing, advocating, and creating environments where people and nature can thrive. For Amie, landscape architecture is the melding of art, design, nature and stewardship to lay the groundwork for lasting vibrant and healthy communities. She thinks of herself, foremost, as a steward of the natural world, and approaches all design efforts as an integrated system of culture and nature. After getting her BA from UC Berkeley in Landscape Architecture, she began her career as a planner and landscape architect in a global firm, Hart Howerton, working on community development and landscape architecture projects with an emphasis on integrating conservation and stewardship into all projects. There she worked on the design and implementation of many early innovative conservation communities, including The Santa Lucia Preserve in Monterey, California and Palmetto Bluff in Bluffton, South Carolina.
In 2011, she founded Cultivate, to pursue her deep commitment in making an impact on changing the “business as usual” approaches to improving, managing, and most importantly, stewarding land. Cultivate is a conservation planning and community design practice that focuses on working with agencies, local communities, municipalities and private developers to craft a shared vision around the creation of a more resilient and equitable future. As a landscape architect, naturalist, urban designer, environmental planner, artist and photographer, Amie uses her combined talents to work with creative teams to imagine a more healthy, equitable and balanced development approach that supports the natural world, and which in turn sustains communities.
Currently, Amie leads many state-wide and regional planning efforts that focus on the importance of preserving our working and natural lands to foster greater climate resilience. This includes her work with Santa Clara County, where she helped to craft the Santa Clara Valley Agricultural Plan, a strategic plan that balances the preservation of working lands and smart growth. This plan won the 2019 Governor's Environmental and Economic Leadership Award. Amie continues to work with State agencies, non-profits, developers and municipalities to craft interdisciplinary approaches to preserve natural and working lands, while balancing climate-smart growth and the creation of vibrant and healthy communities.