“The Center for Landscape Design & Stewardship , a 501©(3) non-profit organization that promotes environmental and community sustainability through education, demonstration, and public outreach secured a grant to host a workshop. Your Town: The Citizen’s Institute on Rural Design is a national program funded by the National Endowment of the Arts. With support from Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture’s Hamer Center, two advanced design studios from the Department of Landscape Architecture participated and helped to facilitate the Your Town: Lower Luzerne County. This workshop invited municipal officials, planning and zoning commission members, farmland preservation organizations, land developers, tourism and economic development officials, business owners, real estate professionals and farmers to all participate in a 3-day workshop focused on farmland preservation and its relationship to community planning and design. These two studios facilitate several hands-on exercises for participants that developed place-based recommendations to help protect the important agricultural and rural resources of Luzerne County as well as promote its agritourism potential..." For more information on the Your Town workshop, visit the The Citizen’s Institute on Rural Design website.

Since the workshop twelve students in the Larch 414.3 Depth Studio have expanded upon the charrette exercises and individually developed site specific designs that relate to infill development, Greenfield development and/or brownfield reclamation. Funding from the Hamer Center has allowed these students to not only participate in the 3-day workshop and draw from those experiences, but also develop relationships and travel to this area of Northeast Pennsylvania throughout the semester to better acclimate themselves with the landscape through site inventory and analysis studies and interviews/correspondence with area stake holders. Partners in the Your Town workshop will be here to review these student projects the week of December 10th. Three student projects have been accepted to the National Brownfields 2011 Conference, four student projects will be submitted to the national ASLA student competition, four student projects will be submitted to the PA/Delaware Chapter of ASLA student competition, and one student project will be submitted to an international community design competition. A CELA paper has been accepted for the 2011 conference which focuses on the use of multi-media in community design which has been experimented with this semester with this studio. Without Hamer support for travel, this studio experience would not have been as engaging nor would the relationships between Northeastern Pennsylvania residents and the Departments students been as strengthened.