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Program Solicitation: Governors' Institute on Regional Design

The National Endowment for the Arts (Endowment) currently funds two Leadership Initiatives in Design:

The Mayors’ Institute on City Design, co-sponsored by the National Conference of Mayors and administered (through a cooperative agreement) by the American Architectural Foundation. This program focuses on teaching the power of design – and design skills – to big-city mayors by teaming them with designers to critique projects in their cities.

Your Town: Designing its Future, administered (through a cooperative agreement) by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This program applies the same objectives of the Mayors' Institute to more rural areas where professional mayors are generally not present.

These programs have also established a powerful methodology of teaming decision makers with designers to positively impact the quality of the built environment. However, it must be noted that these two programs, which are by their very nature local, do not operate at the scale at which design has the greatest impact, that of the region.

Regional planning is the most important scale of design because it is the region – not the town or the city – in which most Americans lead their daily lives. We wake up in one jurisdiction, work in another, and often recreate in a third. This is particularly the case in newer metropolises such as Tampa and Phoenix, where huge areas of densely-settled land are not even incorporated into towns or cities, but rather exist as subdivisions within counties. In these places, the need for effective regional planning has become evident, as the actions of individual jurisdictions on development, environmental protection, and economic growth often have repercussions well beyond their municipal boundaries.

Very few governmental institutions exist at the scale of the region, so in most cases regional planning authority must be bumped up to the next largest scale of governance, the state. In several states, most notably Maryland, New Jersey, and Utah, strong leadership has resulted in significant regional planning progress. Governors that have embraced regional design, which they often call smart growth, have received much positive national attention, and other governors are interested in learning from their successes.

To respond to this demand, this initiative, the Governors’ Institute on Regional Design, is being created to teach governors and other key state officials about the social, environmental, and economic costs of unplanned growth and the benefits of regional design. Like the Mayors' Institute, it is focused primarily on inspiring leadership, but it will also provide hard advice on regional planning issues. The Endowment anticipates that this work will be completed primarily on a state-by-state basis – although events involving several states may also be planned – and center upon retreat-type workshops in which governors and their staff are brought into contact with experts in the field.

The nature of these events will vary in response to the needs of each state. They will typically include some preparatory and follow-up work, but the principal activity will be the workshops themselves. These are imagined as intimate events including perhaps twenty participants, without media presence or public audience.

Just as the Mayors’ Institute on City Design and Your Town: Designing its Future are administered through cooperative agreements, the Governors’ Institute on Regional Design will be managed by the successful recipient of the Cooperative Agreement (Cooperator) resulting from this Program Solicitation.

The receipt deadline for proposals: 4:00 p.m. on October 27, 2004.

The complete program solicitation is available as a PDF document.

PDF Program Solicitation: Governors' Institute on Regional Design

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