The first workshop, hosted November 16-18, 1995, engaged design and community planning professionals and laypeople from eight Midwestern states to consider ways by which community design issues can be more fully integrated into local planning activities. Faculty from the landscape architecture and planning programs were the primary speakers, along with team members from KSU’s Kansas Center for Rural Initiatives and Community Service Program. The design problem focused on real-world challenges in Lincoln, Kansas, but with the community name and details transcribed to be more hypothetical. 

The second workshop, dubbed “On the Rez,” was held on February 19-21, 2002 and took place in part on the campus of Haskell Indian Nations University. The workshop engaged members of numerous regional Native American tribes, including the Kickapoo Tribe of Kansas and the Omaha, Ponca, Santee Sioux and Winnebago Tribes of Nebraska. The keynote speaker was renowned architect JohnPaul Jones (Cherokee/Choctaw), who stayed throughout the workshop to support the various design projects and challenges under discussion. In contrast with the traditional Your Town workshop format using a typical but fictional small community as a setting for design workshop exercises, each small group focused on the specific design and planning needs/issues of a particular tribal reservation. This new approach became the standard for the Your Town program going forward. 

Learn more from the Lawrence Workshop Notebooks from 1995 and 2002.

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