The Wintergreen Conference Center in the hills of Spring Green, Wisconsin, near Taliesen, was the site of a recent Your Town workshop, September 28- 30, 2005. The focus of the workshop was regionalism—building a vision for the future across jurisdictional boundaries.

Organized by Alicia Acken and Sue Thering of the University of Wisconsin (River Falls and Madison), the workshop together speakers and participants from across the state to wrestle with issues of visioning, planning, and designing across local boundaries. The keynote speaker was Parris Glendening, former Governor of Maryland, whose Smart Growth initiatives have won wide recognition and awards and who is helping to spearhead the new Governors’ Institute on Community Design. Glendening provided inspiration to Your Town Spring Green on interjurisdictional cooperation and better ways to grow and develop.

The workshop was based on a hypothetical Your Town—Green Valley, Forestville, and the Town of Prairieville. Spring Green’s participants were enthusiastic in exercising their new design skills, and picked up magic markers and trace more eagerly than most Your Town participants are willing to do. Their design solutions were colorful, creative, and insightful.

-Excerpted from Your Town: Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, Update, Fall, 2005

‍