Department of Transportation Grant of $548,492 Aims to Revitalize Pine Bluff

Pine Bluff was once the cultural and economic center of the Arkansas Delta before the departure of its manufacturing base in the 1980s. Over a century ago, the city had the fourth highest rate of Black wealth in urban America behind Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; and New York City.  

In 2021, Pine Bluff was designated America’s “fasting shrinking city,” according to U.S. Census data, having experienced a 16% population decline in the previous two years.  

One solution to reversing course in this historically vibrant Arkansas city is to strategically invest in repairing neighborhoods.  

To that end, a project team co-led by the U of A Community Design Center and Go Forward Pine Bluff has been awarded a $548,492 grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2024 Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhood Grant Program. The Pine Bluff project is one of 132 planning or capital projects to be funded through $3.33 billion in grant awards in the 2024 program, and the only one from Arkansas.  

Project partners for “Neighborhood Revitalization through Retrofit of Highway 63B in America's Fastest Shrinking City: Pine Bluff, Arkansas” also include the City of Pine Bluff, the Southeast Arkansas Regional Planning Commission, Arkansas Department of Transportation, the Pine Bluff Urban Renewal Agency and NOB A+D (Architecture + Design), the only female minority-owned architecture firm in Arkansas. 

The U of A Community Design Center is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. This collaborative project demonstrates the school’s commitment to the university’s larger land-grant mission and to serving the citizens of the state through design. 

The planning study supports revitalization of the 280-block historic South-Central downtown neighborhood through the context-sensitive retrofit of Arkansas State Highway 63B, a five-lane arterial road. The oversized corridor and the scale of its auto-centric land uses — now mostly large abandoned dead zones — accelerated economic decline in this African American neighborhood due to corridor desertification rather than congestion. Scenario planning will explore options in right-sizing a 1.2-mile segment of this low-trafficked corridor as an active transportation network spine with urban infill land-use improvements between the downtown business district and the city’s largest employment center to the south, the Jefferson Regional Medical Center. 

Pine Bluff is shrinking while its region is growing and prospering. The city’s population in 2023 was 38,866, down from its peak population of 57,074 in 1990. Over 95% of the Arkansas State Highway 63B corridor’s area (facility and fronting land uses) is impervious surface, a “shade desert” subjecting residents to injurious heat impacts. Harms from speeding, urban heat island effect, stormwater pollution, flooding, lack of equitable access and residential property value decline are due to corridor desertification, not congestion. 

“The Reconnecting Communities Grant is a great opportunity to use urban design — driven by an ethos of repair — in creating high-quality living environments for populations that have suffered the downstream impacts of auto-dominated planning,” said Steve Luoni, director of the U of A Community Design Center. “Our partnership with GFPB, the city and neighborhood residents will focus on a context-sensitive street approach that combines pattern language in art, architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. The arterial will be rethought as a place-based destination — like in ‘the tradition of great streets’ — without compromising traffic services.  

“Pattern languages include ‘Living Streets’ (pedestrian-oriented streets that deliver non-traffic services including art and socializing), ecologically based stormwater management (green infrastructure), streets modulated as rooms (such as plazas and squares) and development of property frontage standards that support good corridor form,” Luoni added. “Eighty percent of all next-generation design commissions for buildings, landscapes and infrastructure will involve rehabilitation. More than ‘smart cities’ and its fetishization of data, this ethos of repair will drive the economic, ecological and social innovation necessary in building prosperous and equitable places.”  

Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies in the Fay Jones School. 

ABOUT THE PINE BLUFF PROJECT 

This planning initiative will align improvements with the interests of South-Central residents and its business community. Planning challenges involve design within the context of rural small-city shrinkage, including co-creation of a redevelopment plan with socio-economically disadvantaged residents.  

The work will also address long-term citywide capacity challenges through regional partnerships emphasizing collaborative and distributed leadership beyond this planning project. This federal grant supports the coalition’s multiple revitalization initiatives underway and led by Go Forward Pine Bluff, a nonprofit of professional community development staff dedicated to revitalizing Pine Bluff in partnership with the city. 

In 2020, Go Forward Pine Bluff and the city, in partnership with two area banks and nonprofits, enacted an equity stabilization and poverty reduction program that offers South-Central neighborhood residents 30-year, 100% mortgage financing to boost homeownership. Known as ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed), this neighborhood investment program assists working households whose earnings exceed the federal poverty level but are less than the area’s cost of living. 

Ryan Watley, CEO of Go Forward Pine Bluff, described the award as inspiring. 

“Our dedicated team has worked hard to establish strategic plans and bring funding to the city of Pine Bluff,” Watley said. “This grant works in tandem with our ALICE homeownership initiative to repair neighborhoods through human and financial investments. Success begets success, and the half-million-dollar award adds to the more than $20 million in private and philanthropic funds raised to complement a 2017 sales tax increase. For Go Forward Pine Bluff, it keeps the fire burning to continue making a difference in Pine Bluff. We look forward to working with NOB A+D, the U of A Community Design Center and the Pine Bluff Urban Renewal Agency.”  

The planning initiative will consist of four areas: Community-based Engagement Program: Stakeholder Sessions and Design Workshops; Highway Frontage Quality Assessment; Context-Sensitive Street Plan for State Highway 63B; and Housing Plan and Urban Design Retrofit of Target Highway Properties.  

Allied initiatives for this plan include implementation of an internationally award-winning downtown revitalization plan: Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff (2018) prepared by Go Forward Pine Bluff and the U of A Community Design Center. The downtown revitalization plan builds upon the Go Forward Pine Bluff Strategic Plan (2016-2017) focused on reimaging the city through four community pillars — education, economic development, government and infrastructure, and quality of life.  

Pine Bluff Mayor Shirley Washington added, “The city of Pine Bluff is realizing public and private investments at a record high. Our ability to submit a competitive application and be included as one of the 132 national awards speaks to the progress we are making in this community. Thank you to all the working partners and the U.S. Department of Transportation for believing in Pine Bluff.”  

ABOUT THE FEDERAL GRANT PROGRAM 

The U.S. Department of Transportation has awarded more than $3.3 billion this year via its Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhood Access and Equity discretionary grant program to 132 infrastructure projects in 41 states and the District of Columbia. 

Grants seek to “reconnect” communities cut off in the past by transportation infrastructure, leaving such neighborhoods in many cases bereft of direct access to schools, jobs, medical offices and places of worship. For more information, visit the program website.  

U of A Community Design Center Receives $40,000 NEA Grant for Cultural Mappings Project

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant to support the development of Cultural Mappings of Black Heritage along Spout Spring in Fayetteville.

The $40,000 award is through the NEA's Grants for Arts Projects program. The grant will support the research of the African American community and the creation of mapping strategies for 15-30 composite drawings using multiple literacies ranging from serial "filmstrip" narratives, to collages, "thick description" drawings that reconstruct lost local Black heritage landscapes, and GIS-based maps of Fayetteville's African American built environment.

In total, the NEA will award 958 Grants for Arts Projects awards totaling more than $27.1 million that were announced last month as part of its first round of fiscal year 2024 grants.

The U of A Community Design Center, directed by Steve Luoni since 2003, is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies at the university.

"Change requires storytelling," Luoni said. "This new descriptive agency involving humanities-based scholars, community organizers, artists, archeologists and architects/urban designers models a new equity-based planning approach beginning with stories that build coalitions, motivate institutional redesign, and construct new urban forms. The project employs design thinking to visualize forgotten histories while providing lessons in how cities work, for better or for worse."

The Cultural Mappings aim to visualize culturally excluded African American heritage and urbanism in Fayetteville, toward the development of content for an exhibition, and for municipal policy and planning.

The U of A Community Design Center and the Northwest Arkansas African American Heritage Association Inc. (NWA Black Heritage) will collaborate with several partners. These include Ngozi Brown, AIA, owner and principal of NOB A+D and assistant professor of practice in the Fay Jones School, and Brandon Bibby (B.Arch. '14), an architect and alumnus, who both specialize in African American cultural preservation and placemaking. Other collaborators are Ernest Banks (B.Arch. '18), an architect and alumnus, and other Black architectural professionals, as well as the U of A African and African American Studies Program. The Arkansas Archeological Survey will assist in developing a set of multimodal drawings that chronicle 20th century African American community patterns formed since emancipation in Fayetteville.

NWA Black Heritage, led by its co-founder and award-winning artist Sharon Killian, with Caree Banton, Ph.D., chair of the Department of History, former director of the African and African American Studies Program, and author on African diaspora history, will lead outreach and acquisition of primary source materials, possibly including material from residents of the Spout Spring neighborhood. The newly designed African and American Studies course, The Historic Northwest Arkansas, will be a part of collecting oral histories for this project.

"The American cultural canon is hobbled for all of us by continuing to defend critical errors in our history producing toxic damage to its fabric," Killian said. "Mapping authentic Black cultural landscape in Fayetteville should lead to more logical practices than we've historically taken here and throughout the country."

Through the research, the team will engage descendant groups and other stakeholders to assemble content from oral histories and personal collections. Jami Lockhart, archeologist, author on Arkansas history, and director of GIS and Archaeogeophysical Research at Arkansas Archeological Survey, will help confirm unmarked burials for NWA Black Heritage using remote sensing in the African American burial grounds on East Mountain overlooking the Spout Spring neighborhood.

The research will be used to create exhibition-ready drawings that narrate three cultural themes: segregation by design from impacts on housing, education and commerce to real estate and banking practices; a subaltern urbanism that unevenly diverged from white residents, including appreciation of Black agency in placemaking; and "thick descriptions" of everyday life that illuminate community structure.

The project aims to consolidate documentation and discover new material in reconstructing a visual record of Fayetteville's historic African American community and to build awareness of the role played by African Americans in Fayetteville's development. The researchers hope the work leads to neighborhood investments for reparative planning in the African American community while improving models of cultural inquiry in planning and design.

Established by Congress in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts is the independent federal agency whose funding and support give Americans the opportunity to participate in the arts, exercise their imaginations, and develop their creative capacities. Through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector, the Arts Endowment supports arts learning, affirms and celebrates America's rich and diverse cultural heritage, and extends its work to promote equal access to the arts in every community across America.

Two U of A Community Design Center Projects Win 2023 American Architecture Awards

Two Arkansas-based projects designed by the U of A Community Design Center have won 2023 American Architecture Awards.

"The ARK: Rural Botanical Garden for Arkansas" in Cherokee Village, Arkansas, and the "Framework Plan for a Riverine Commons and Institute" in Fayetteville each won a 2023 American Architecture Award.

The ARK features a new botanical garden and zipline, part of an eco-tourism initiative, and features woodland-only spaces with botanical rooms in clearings, blending history and community event needs.

The Framework Plan integrates landscape restoration, architecture and urban design to create a river education center, visitor center, fruit grove, food gardens, trails and heritage exhibitions. The Framework Plan has also won two Honorable Mentions in the 2023 Plan Awards.

The U of A Community Design Center, directed by Steve Luoni since 2003, is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. Luoni is also Distinguished Professor of Architecture and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies at the university.

"Over the next several years, every region in Arkansas will experience unprecedented economic development that will challenge capacity in their built environments — all planned in earlier eras," Luoni said. "We are focused on addressing these future needs and the kind of novel scenario thinking needed to pragmatically solve for interconnected community development issues. We are grateful that our work in urban design and planning for constituents statewide continues to attract outside recognition in the design disciplines."

These projects were selected from a shortlist of more than 450 submissions from around the nation. Both The ARK and the Framework Plan were sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

THE ARK: RURAL BOTANICAL GARDEN FOR ARKANSAS

The ARK features a botanical garden and zipline for Cherokee Village, a rural mid-century planned community in the Ozarks. The project is the centerpiece of the new hospitality/eco-tourism landscapes under development. Planting assemblages of legacy woodland-wildflower prairie that once dotted the managed pre-Columbian landscape of the region are recalled in this now woodland-only ecosystem. Clearings at the scale of urban blocks house a series of botanical rooms carved into the dense forest cover. Inverted pyramidical rooms encourage visitors to travel along the steep terrain paralleling the nearby Mississippian Mound Builder earthworks that landmark flatter terrain.

Perceptions of the wood-screened structures are constantly shifting between monumentality and transparency following the visitor's movement. Interactions among screened rooms, organic plant assemblages, steep slopes and forest cover create a parallax that simultaneously upholds and denies the garden's monumental scale. This place-based asset provides informal and formal event space that is currently missing in this community.

FRAMEWORK PLAN FOR A RIVERINE COMMONS AND INSTITUTE

The Framework Plan for a Riverine Commons and Institute focuses on redesigning the 98-acre wetland landscape at Dead Horse Mountain Road, co-owned and managed by the Watershed Conservation Resource Center and the City of Fayetteville. The plan combines the restoration of landscapes and floodplains with architecture and urban designs to house a river education center and offices, a visitor interpretive center, a fruit and nut grove, demonstration food gardens, walking trails, passive recreation facilities, trails and heritage exhibitions. The programming celebrates the riparian-oriented cultures of local Native American, African American and Euro-American subsistence settler populations through displays of reconstructed indigenous shelters and prototyped artifacts, including a polyculture fruit and nut grove with indigenous plant assemblages and growing strategies.

The team developed the plan for a riparian wetlands landscape that operates at the intersection of anthropology, ecology and design in developing a lasting and robust riverine knowledge base. The river institute raises awareness of the civilizing (or anthropogenic) processes harnessing riparian landscapes throughout different eras of local human occupation. The project team combined expertise in the ecological sciences, anthropology/archeology, architecture and landscape architecture/horticulture. This multi-disciplinary collaboration addresses the multiple challenges of design within human-dominant ecosystems.

The Framework Plan also received two honorable mentions in the 2023 Plan Award, one each in the Culture Future category and in the Landscape Future category of this international awards program that recognizes excellence in architecture, interior design and urban planning.

About The American Architecture Awards 2023: The American Heritage Awards, sponsored by the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, are the nation's highest public awards given by a non-commercial, non-trade affiliated, public arts, culture and educational institution.

Now celebrating its 28th year, the American Architectural Awards are the nation's highest and most prestigious distinguished building awards program that honors new and cutting-edge design in the United States. This annual program promotes American architecture and design to public audiences in the United States and abroad. A full list of winning projects for 2023 will be available on the museum's website. All awarded buildings and urban planning projects selected this year are also included in a special issue of Global Design + Urbanism XXIII "New American Architecture" for 2023 published by Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd.

Community Design Center's Housing, Greenhouse Project Wins 2023 Future House Award

GrowLofts, a project combining housing with a greenhouse, won a 2023 Future House Award from the Global Design News and The Chicago Athenaeum.

The project, which won in the category of Affordable, Social, and Community Living Housing, was developed by the U of A Community Design Center as typologically based research.

Future House Awards is a prestigious distinguished global residential awards program that honors new and cutting-edge design worldwide. An international jury composed of several distinguished designers worked remotely and selected 70 submissions from a shortlist as the "Best of the Best" in new residential design. This year's award-winning projects are spread across 40 countries — from Uganda to Taiwan, from Miami to Egypt.

The U of A Community Design Center, directed by Steve Luoni since 2003, is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. Luoni is also Distinguished Professor of architecture and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies at the university.

"What if you put a house in a greenhouse, substituting a stacked garden for a yard?" Luoni asked. "GrowLofts is one of those futuring projects that achieves novel outcomes by solving for multiple challenges simultaneously. Such scenario thinking will become ever more important in advancing community resiliency — the capacity to adapt to volatile futures."

The Tipping Point Challenges

The GrowLofts design shares food, energy and conviviality at its edges without sacrificing household autonomy. The project combines solutions to three structural challenges that will reach tipping points in the future: affordable housing, access to healthy food and renewable energy. This social housing structure sandwiches small urban lofts for short- and long-term stays between a shared "hyperporch" on the street edge and a shared greenhouse on the garden side.

The greenhouse is a four-season operation supporting a food forest and powered by a natural "climate battery." The climate battery is a solar heat storage and air exchange between greenhouse air and its growing soil. Greenhouse soil stores excess heat and humidity pulled from greenhouse air through a network of underground perforated pipes and overhead fans. Roots, trunks and leaves benefit from the distributed moisture, drastically reducing the need for irrigation. During cool periods, warm air underground is drawn from pipes and circulated to heat the greenhouse air. Heat can also be exchanged with the lofts, which are directly open to the greenhouse.

GrowLofts combines solar collection, thermal mass and insulation to capture and circulate energy using the temperature differentials between soil and air. Wild temperature swings that once hampered greenhouse operations can be smoothed out to effectively grow food year-round while harnessing several times the energy than what is possible from solar arrays.

Greenhouse planting is based on permaculture growing principles involving the development of a healthy soil food web, polyculture or companion planting, nutrient recycling, and stacked growing or forest gardening. Unlike the one-dimensional growing space in industrial greenhouses, forest gardening vertically layers growing space from tubers to groundcovers including culinary herbs, understory crops like leafy greens, midstory crops like citrus fruit and beans, growing vines like passionfruit and overstory trees like bananas and papaya. Flower towers of insectary plants invite pollinators and healthy predators to control pests inevitable in greenhouses.

Paralleling the greenhouse, the hyperporch facilitates greater hospitality and communality than what standard housing provides, without sacrificing unit privacy. While GrowLofts is compatible within various contexts and climates, it provides an ark for urbanites, a regenerative socio-biological "living transect" connected to a larger context.

The Future House Awards

Global Design News and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design launched the Future House International Residential Awards for the third year after the great reception of the program in its inaugural year.

Future House International Residential Awards arise from the convergence of residential design and architectural vision to champion and honor novel and inventive residential projects on a worldwide level. The awards program seeks to define the best and most innovative cutting-edge designs for residential architecture.

The vision, "from a shed to a penthouse," is to present architectural projects that are both inclusive and pioneering, ultimately defining the current state, and influencing the future of residential design on a global scale.

In 2023, Future House presents a unique opportunity to showcase new, groundbreaking and cutting-edge private houses, apartments, vacation homes, residential additions, multi-family housing, restoration/renovations, sustainable and affordable housing before a global audience.

An awards ceremony will be held Dec. 8 at the European Centre-Contemporary Space Athens, next to the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. The special exhibition "Future House 2023" also will open Dec. 8 at the newly expanded Contemporary Space Athens and will continue through Jan. 21.

Three U of A Community Design Center Projects Shortlisted in The Plan Award 2023

Three U of A Community Design Center projects have been shortlisted in The Plan Award 2023, an international design awards program recognizing excellence in architecture, interior design and urban planning.

"Framework Plan for a Riverine Commons and Institute, a River Education Center and Offices," is shortlisted in the Culture Future category. The plan integrates landscape restoration, architecture and urban design to create a river education center, visitor center, fruit grove, food gardens, trails and heritage exhibitions.

"Framework Plan for Cherokee Village to Amplify its Nature, Ecosystems, Sense of Place and Heritage," is shortlisted in the Urban Planning Future category. The plan focuses on directing population, housing and tourism growth to areas that enhance the village's nature, ecosystems, heritage and sense of place.

"Greenway Urbanism: Supporting Hospitality, Leisure, and Sports" is shortlisted in the Sport and Leisure Future category. Greenway Urbanism is a sub-plan for Cherokee Village that involves repurposing roads, creating a network of paths, activity nodes and signature projects that combine ecosystem services with tourism, recreation and diverse living environments to accommodate growth and offer context-sensitive, adaptable solutions.

Design for the three projects was led by the U of A Community Design Center, an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the university. Steve Luoni, Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies, is the director of the center.

The National Endowment for the Arts sponsored all three projects.

"We are pleased that these current projects at the center continue to attract international recognition for design and planning. While they are unique design approaches for us, our partners and clients, they are equally driven by pragmatic concerns," Luoni said. "Design and planning for small cities under 200,000 in population offer as much beauty, culture and social novelty as design for large cities, but with far greater potential for touching everyday lives. The kind of learning relationships that we have forged among our project stakeholders, design staff and students shows in the work."

Framework Plan for a Riverine Commons and Institute

The Framework Plan for a Riverine Commons and Institute focuses on redesigning the 98-acre wetland landscape, co-owned and managed by the Watershed Conservation Resource Center and the City of Fayetteville. The Plan combines the restoration of landscapes and floodplains with architecture and urban designs to house a river education center and offices, a visitor interpretive center, a fruit and nut grove, demonstration food gardens, walking trails, passive recreation facilities, trails and heritage exhibitions. The programming celebrates the cultures of local Native American, African American and Euro-American populations through displays of reconstructed indigenous shelters and prototyped artifacts and a polyculture fruit and nut grove with indigenous plant assemblages and growing strategies.

The team developed the plan for a riparian wetlands landscape that operates at the intersection of anthropology, ecology and design in developing a lasting and robust riverine knowledge base. The river institute raises awareness of the civilizing (or anthropogenic) processes harnessing riparian landscapes throughout different eras of human occupation. The project team combined expertise in the ecological sciences, anthropology/archeology, architecture and landscape architecture/horticulture. This multi-disciplinary collaboration addresses the multiple challenges of design within human-dominant ecosystems.

Framework Plan for Cherokee Village

The Framework Plan for Cherokee Village works to direct the growth in population, housing and tourism to areas that amplify the village's nature, ecosystems, sense of place and heritage. Countering the homogeneity of the 1950s-era modern layout, community stakeholders envisioned places with diverse housing types and ownership models that support plural lifestyles.

Three principles guide the plan: adaptability to changing futures, diversifying lifestyle and hospitality environments, and resiliency to market uncertainty. The plan formulates a market-responsive planning vocabulary through the articulation of a set of archetypal places to an otherwise automobile-oriented suburban environment with very low housing density. Modulated place types — dense town centers, village clusters, village highway development, rural festival and recreation spaces, greenways and communal neighborhood formats — address multiple market demands for inclusive living environments distinct from the single-family lot and home around which Cherokee Village was designed.

Greenway Urbanism

Greenway Urbanism employs a continuous network of paths and activity nodes tailored to conditions in this forest community. The plan works to repurpose 80 miles of unimproved roads, retrofit trafficked roads as living streets and develop a secondary independent trail network. The greenway network is a multifunctional infrastructure that bundles ecosystem services with tourism, recreation, festival space, natural resource recycling and living environments.

The greenway network, consisting of new trail networks combined with signature projects, are developed as context-sensitive corridors responsive to place, function and movement modality. As this community grows, an equestrian arena and stables could be added, even supporting an equestrian residential development. Likewise, pedestrian and bicycle trails could link recreation parks, campgrounds, vacation cottage courts and RV parks with a new festival ground. Greenway infrastructure supporting diversification and informality may be a cost-efficient way to prototype the phased development of novel living environments desired by the market.

In its ninth year, The Plan Award program recognizes excellence in architecture, interior design and urban planning through 20 categories. Categories are separated into completed and future projects.

Six hundred projects out of more than 1,300 submissions were shortlisted for 20 categories in this year's program. Winners will be selected by an international jury composed of leading figures in the architecture, design, real estate and academic fields.

Winning projects in the annual awards program will be featured on The Plan's digital platforms and dedicated coverage, including The Plan website. This year's winners will be announced later this fall.