Storm Lake Pilot Tribune, IA
05-02-06
ISU program, instrumental in SL lighthouse, wins national planning honors
Main Street pocket park... roadside prairie plantings... town entrance signs...
even a lighthouse... All along Iowa's roadways, visible accomplishments like
these are testimonials to the success of a one-of-a-kind program that has helped
113 of Iowa's rural communities.
Now, the Iowa's Living Roadways Community Visioning Program is being
recognized nationally. The program is receiving the American Planning
Association's 2006 Outstanding Planning Award for a Project, Program or Tool at
the association's national convention in San Antonio.
Iowa State University landscape architecture faculty developed the program
in 1996. ISU manages it in partnership with Trees Forever, a nonprofit
environmental organization based in Marion. The Iowa Department of
Transportation funds the program.
The Community Visioning Program provides planning and landscape design
assistance to communities with populations of less than 10,000. It helps citizens
and officials in rural communities identify issues, set goals, envision designs,
develop conceptual plans, write grants and raise private funds. The program
brings together teams of ISU design students, professional landscape architects
and town residents in a participatory planning process.
And it has a high success rate: Nearly 90 percent of the communities have
implemented at least one project, and about 70 percent have ongoing, phased
projects under way. Of the 192 projects proposed in the 113 towns, 163 - 85
percent - have been completed.
Storm Lake was a 1997-98 participant, and created a plan to develop a
community gateway that would attract visitors from the U.S. 71 bypass. The plan
became a reality in 2000 with the construction of the Gateway lighthouse and
landscaping to represent a lake and shoreline.
Cherokee was a 2000-2001 participant, and beautified the Highway 59 corridor
by planting native grasses, plants and trees along the roadside, and installing a
new entrance sign.
The visioning program was created in the mid-1990s by Julia Badenhope,
associate professor of landscape architecture, who was extension landscape
architect at the time. In her travels through rural Iowa, she saw that small towns
lacked the services of professional designers. She developed a pilot program
and worked with three communities, honing in on the concept that would become
community visioning. In 1996, she approached the iowa DOT to form a publicprivate partnership with ISU and private planning and landscape architecture
firms. From there, Iowa DOT facilitated collaboration with Trees Forever, which
had many community contacts and a shared interest in sustainable community
planning and design.
Each year, 12 communities are selected to participate in the Community
Visioning Program.
"Having ideas and love of the town validated by an outsider is important to
people who work hard to make small communities great places to live,"
Badenhope said. "The big idea here is that the cumulative effect of many small
actions adds up to a much better quality of life in the countryside of Iowa."