CIRD Staff

In 2018, Valentine, Nebraska (population 2,630) partnered with CIRD for a Local Design Workshop, bringing together hundreds of citizens, local elected leaders, the Nebraska Department of Transportation, and rural design experts to reimagine Valentine’s Main Street corridor, which doubles as a state highway. A recent Norfolk Daily News article highlights ongoing progress in Valentine, mentioning CIRD’s catalytic role.

Learn about CIRD's August 2021 local design workshop hosted by the Pueblo of Laguna after a year-long delay due to COVID-19. The Main Street revitalization project centered on a new community hub and marketplace for artists and food vendors that responds to ongoing community needs and deep historic ties to sacred indigenous land.

These CIRD communities offer a plethora of helpful hints and creative ideas for hosting community-wide events that address diverse rural design issues.

Highway 83 runs from North Texas straight through to Canada. Valentine, Nebraska sits somewhere in the upper middle, the closest neighbor the Rosebud Lakota Sioux reservation, where Highway 83 morphs into Main Street. Valentine is lucky: the looming façade to façade reconstruction of Main Street is seen as a cause for celebration.

Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have facilitated thousands of projects for artists and entrepreneurs. In exchange for donating, some perk or nod of recognition may come your way. You may have even contributed to a project without a promise of something in exchange, understanding that, while you’re supporting something you believe in, you will never get those dollars back.

With deliberate investments that nurture local initiatives – alongside the organization of economies of scale, local producers and small businesses – the Tuttle Rural Innovation Center (TRIC) is planting the seed for a healthier and more equitable food-based economy to take root in Central North Dakota and beyond.

Franklin, New Hampshire, like many post-industrial communities, is seeking ways to bolster employment opportunities and revitalize its downtown. In addition to finding ways to spur economic development, Franklin wants to ensure the availability of affordable housing options for seniors, who often leave the city to find housing elsewhere, robbing Franklin of vital civic, economic, and cultural resources Franklin for a Lifetime focused on creating a healthy and vibrant community and a reinvigorated downtown for all ages to enjoy.

The landscape of Lancaster County, Nebraska is dominated by the state’s capitol, Lincoln, whose institutions and cultural resources serve as fantastic assets to the community. Lincoln drives the economic growth and cultural vitality of the county. This past March CIRD, in partnership with the Lincoln/Lancaster County Planning Department, convened a two-and-a-half day workshop to assist 12 rural villages of Lancaster County, Nebraska, recapture their sense of place and cultural identity.

We spoke to Maria Sykes, a citizen architect and the co-founder of the public interest design firm Epicenter, to learn more about what it takes for rural projects to become successful.

The unique culture of Oregon County, MO played an integral role throughout their workshop, which was dedicated to creating a vision for the Co-Op’s expansion into a vacant building-- from a presentation of the Ozarks’ vernacular architecture that kicked off the workshop, to the live folk and country music that ended each day of great work— to the designing itself.

On September 12th, we arrived in Alton, Missouri, and stepped into the warm, eclectic and fresh-baked pie scented space of the Oregon County Food Producers and Artisans Co-Op to plan their November workshop-- which will cover vernacular architecture, local food production, regional food security, green building design, and Co-Op development.

This past July we sent out a request for stories of rural communities fighting the decline of their main streets and town centers. Berwick, Maine told us their story of their town's revival, and how they incorporated different strategies, including community-wide engagement and visioning in the wake of the closing of their leather tannery, and the vacant site it left behind.

Last November, Live Oak, FL hosted a CIRD workshop on how to rebuild their downtown. Eight months later, we are so impressed with how much the town has already improved, and has turned the guidance and ideas from the workshop into major strides towards revitalization.

The National Solidarity Programme has vastly improved Afghanistan's rural infrastructure and communities by giving Afghan citizens an active role in government to "identify, plan, manage, and monitor their own development projects"--demonstrating the power of community-driven change.

We are very excited to have recently discovered The Art of the Rural, an organization entirely devoted to “elevating the rural arts” through their digital platform and on-the-ground projects that preserve and revive rural arts across the country. We closely examined a few of their many initiatives to explore: How does integrating art improve and impact rural communities?

Rural design involves the planning and manipulation of the environment for the betterment of the community. Design is a process that involves brainstorming ideas, developing plans and proposed designs, and implementation of a project.

In dozens of communities across the country, CIRD workshops have helped rural communities use design to solve challenges like improving walkability, curbing sprawl, and attracting tourists by enhancing local heritage.

We have had a whirlwind of a year at CIRD! We held four fantastic workshops that were catalytic events for each of the host communities, launched the rural-design.org website with an extensive set of Resources for Rural Communities, and held four informative and inspiring capacity building conference calls with our partners at the Orton Family Foundation and Community Matters.

With funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Federal Highway Administration, the Federal Transportation Authority, and the Driggs Urban Renewal Agency, the City of Driggs Idaho (pop. 1,660) plans to transform over 13,000 square feet of public space in its city center...