Community Design Center Leads Interdisciplinary UA Campus Team for ‘Food City Scenario’

Project receives Honorable Mention in Progressive Architecture Awards

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center led an interdisciplinary team whose project, Fayetteville 2030: Food City Scenario, speculates on what Fayetteville would look like if its growth integrated local urban food production substantial enough to create self-sufficiency.

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The project was one of 10 entries, out of more than 150 submitted, recognized in the 61st Progressive Architecture Awards program, a highly coveted industry program that honors trending work by North American architecture and urban design practices. It received an Honorable Mention award for its potential and holistic approach to design. The awards were announced Feb. 20 at a gala in New York, and will be featured in the March issue of Architect magazine, the official magazine of the American Institute of Architects.

Fayetteville currently has a population of 75,000, which is expected to double over the next 20 years. Although the region is the most prosperous in the state, it also has one of the state’s highest child hunger rates.

Food City Scenario is an urban agricultural project that aims to weave agricultural urbanism back into the city environment, with the prospect of helping Fayetteville achieve greater food security and resiliency, said Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. Since most cities stock a three-day supply of food mostly from global supply chains, Luoni recalled the adage in planning and political circles that “we are only nine meals away from anarchy.”

This scenario devises a middle-scale urban food production model between the scale of the industrial farm and the individual garden. This “missing middle” foodshed functions as an ecological municipal utility, featuring green infrastructure; public growscapes, such as edible forest farms, orchard-lined streets, fruit and nut boulevards; food hubs; organic waste recycling districts; and various other agrarian initiatives.

Food City Scenario devises a new planning tool that outlines an ecology of five urban growing guilds. Each guild is associated with a niche function like pollution remediation, through low-impact storm water management landscapes and carbon sinks that support safe growing, as well as waste-to-energy districts for recycling of waste streams toward effective nutrient management and rebuilding of healthy soils. Incorporating agriculture back into the city environment will benefit economic development, add value to food products, provide community-wide ecosystem enhancement, and promote healthy lifestyles by expanding access to nutritious foods, Luoni said.

“While there is much discussion about climate change and its impacts on water levels and weather, other looming sustainability challenges include food security and the ability to steward the natural resources and ecosystems on which healthy food production depends,” Luoni said. “Through almost complete reliance on industrial logics, we are systematically undermining our ability to sustain biological functioning in our landscapes as well as universal access to food. Since food policy and production is absent from American planning, Food City is an indispensible platform for asking how design and policy can affect the food system at the local scale of government.”

The interdisciplinary team at the University of Arkansas worked with local nonprofit groups dedicated to fighting hunger and poverty. This collaborative plan involved the Fay Jones School of Architecture, the department of biological and agricultural engineering, the Center for Agricultural and Rural Sustainability, the School of Law and its master of laws program in agricultural and food law, the department of food science, and the city of Fayetteville.

“Food City cannot be accomplished without the interdisciplinary collaboration shown by the Arkansas team,” Luoni said. “Besides food production, local foodsheds will require infrastructure for processing, distribution, water harvesting, and waste and nutrient management in a portfolio of water, soil, and conservation strategies. The positive multiplier benefits are huge in terms of economic development, ecosystem conservation, and the creation of healthy communities.”

Marty Matlock, professor of biological and agricultural engineering in the College of Engineering, and executive director for the University of Arkansas office for sustainability, led a class that worked with the Community Design Center’s team to evaluate soil, climate, and topography characteristics for this project.

“Sustainability begins with understanding our connection to and dependency on the land,” Matlock said. “This project created a template for cities to understand how they can design for the most essential ecosystem services such as provisioning food, recycling of nutrients, treatment of water, and creation of corridors for wildlife habitat. The genius of the approach the Community Design Center takes is that they design systems for people first. Luoni’s team focuses on human habitat ecological optimization, creating visions of a place where people want to live.”

“We were proud to contribute to Food City Scenario and impressed with the innovation and creativity that the Community Design Center brought to the task,” said Susan Schneider, director of the master of laws program in agricultural and food law and professor in the School of Law. “Interdisciplinary projects like this enhance our work and remind us of the need to work together as a community to solve urban and food system problems.” Schneider is also the co-author of a forthcoming book on urban agriculture that includes a section on Food City.

The Community Design Center was founded in 1995 as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture. The center advances creative development in Arkansas through education, research and design solutions that enhance the physical environment. It has provided design and planning services to more than 45 communities and organizations across Arkansas, helping them to secure nearly $65 million in grant funding to enact suggested improvements. In addition to revitalizing historic downtowns, the center addresses new challenges in affordable housing, urban sprawl, environmental planning, and management of regional growth or decline. The center’s professional staff members are nationally recognized for their expertise in urban and public-interest design, and their work has received more than 90 design awards.

Creative Corridor Project in Little Rock Wins National AIA Honor Award

Community Design Center, Blackwell firm collaborate on arts district

A plan to transform four neglected blocks of Main Street in downtown Little Rock into an arts district has earned a national 2014 Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects. Faculty and staff members of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas designed this award-winning work.

The Creative Corridor, designed by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and Marlon Blackwell Architect, won an Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design, one of six awarded. This is the center’s 11th national AIA Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design, and this is Blackwell’s third AIA Honor Award.

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The Creative Corridor plan retrofits a four-block segment of Main Street, between 3rd and 7th streets, by using economic development catalyzed by the cultural arts rather than a traditional retail base. The goal is to structure an identity for the Creative Corridor rooted in a mixed-use, work-live environment that is also sensitive to the historical context of Main Street in Little Rock, which has a metropolitan area population of about 700,000.

The incremental approach employs three developmental phases to transform the corridor space into a downtown hub that supports a greater level of pedestrian activity, sociability, recreation and aesthetics. To ensure continuity between new and old, the project team devised a townscaping strategy that recombines special architectural frontages with urban landscapes, public art, and shared street geometries to serve this new aggregated arts economy.

An increasing number of public, private and non-profit groups have already invested in Main Street in recent years, including developers Scott Reed and Moses Tucker Real Estate, and that trend is continuing. Orbea, a Spanish bicycle manufacturer, relocated its North American headquarters to Main Street; the Arkansas Venture Center soon will open on the same block; and the Little Rock Technology Park Authority Board recently voted to build the park downtown along Main Street. Arts and culture mainstays like Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Ballet Arkansas and Arkansas Repertory Theatre will occupy rehearsal and creative space alongside Kent Walker Artisan Cheese and artist Matt McLeod. Residential installations and dining, along with several other projects not yet announced, will round out the live/work/play concept that surrounds the Creative Corridor.

“Little Rock has taken the first steps in reclaiming its Main Street as a great public space once again by restoring non-traffic social functions to the street,” said, Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center and a Distinguished Professor of architecture in the Fay Jones School. “Though downtown living everywhere has enjoyed a comeback, cities like Little Rock in particular teach us that the urban street can be an indispensible tool for creating value. The Creative Corridor connects the dots between arts, economy and ecology towards synthetic models of livability and placemaking that only cities can offer. We feel fortunate to have been part of a five-year-plus effort that has involved federal, state and many local participants with great leadership from the city.”

For this project, the Community Design Center partnered with Blackwell’s Fayetteville-based firm. Blackwell is also a Distinguished Professor and head of the Fay Jones School’s architecture department.

Planning and design for the Creative Corridor was funded by a 2011 Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Based on the Creative Corridor plan, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency committed $1.2 million to implement the plan’s low-impact development streetscapes, and construction is slated to begin early in 2014. Renovations totaling more than $60 million are underway, including more than 200 residential units.

“Little Rock’s Main Street renaissance is the kind of exciting, sustainable revitalization that public-private investment can produce,” said Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola. “We are proud that Main Street is becoming a leading example for other communities to follow, and we will continue to encourage more sustainable development in downtown Little Rock.”

“We are indebted to the U of A Community Design Center and Marlon Blackwell Architect, who helped create the vision for what our Main Street will become,” Stodola added.

Attention was focused on the area during a recent visit by senior officials from four major federal agencies, who sought ways to promote sustainability and leverage support for investment projects in Little Rock and North Little Rock. Officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Department of Transportation and the Delta Regional Authority, along with the mayors of Little Rock and North Little Rock, toured those central Arkansas cities as part of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities.

The AIA awards are considered the highest national professional honors to be given to design projects in architecture, urban design and interior design. Twenty-six awards were made this year in the categories of architecture, interior architecture, and regional and urban design from over 700 submissions.

The Regional and Urban Design Honor Awards “recognize distinguished achievements that involve the expanding role of the architect in urban design, regional and city planning, and community development,” according to the AIA website. “The awards identify projects and programs that contribute to the quality of these environments.”

The Creative Corridor features elements such as marquees, stormwater management landscapes, new public rail transit, and an art installation made from street lamps of different eras from city neighborhoods.

Jury members said the Creative Corridor plan “proposes to create a Main Street that is to America what the piazza was to Italy.”

“This project recognizes that a well-designed street provides valuable social functions, and it provides thoughtful solutions to address needs far beyond the simple movement of traffic,” the jury noted. “In small gestures like the recycled street lamps, and in grand ones like restoring the vitality of Main Street, this plan shows an appreciation for history. In features like streetscapes that provide ecosystem services, the plan demonstrates an understanding of what it takes to build a thriving city for the 21st century.”

The Creative Corridor has also received other honors, including a 2013 American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies. It also won a Charter Award in the Neighborhood, District and Corridor category in the 2013 Charter Awards, sponsored by the Congress for the New Urbanism, and it was short-listed for the 2013 World Architecture Festival Awards in the Future Projects – Masterplanning category.

The winning projects in this year’s AIA awards program will be exhibited at the annual convention in Chicago in June and published in Architectmagazine, the official magazine of the AIA.

Luoni Places Public-Interest Design as Center’s Focus

Combining urban design with methods of thinking

This fall, Steve Luoni marked 10 years as director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center. When he arrived there, he recalls, urban design was viewed as beautification or an illustration of policy rather than a method used to rethink how places are made.

The center’s work had not yet examined the structural issues of place and the role of urban design in creating the “triple bottom line” – advancing economic, environmental and social measures simultaneously.

The center is located off campus, a block from the downtown Fayetteville square. It is an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture, where Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies.

Back then, the center’s staff was housed in cubicles, with the director in his own office. As the new director in 2003, Luoni instilled a horizontal organization in which everyone shares a similar sensibility about design, teaching and advocacy. Plus, they all work at the same long table in a room with an open floor plan.

With a team approach, each person brings his or her own talents to bear. “The work and the cognitive demands of project approaches drive things rather than job classifications,” Luoni said. “It’s a very fluid, nimble process where what you’re doing from day to day can change dependent upon what the process requires.”

Because the projects primarily address urban scales, many remain as designs that spark and inform public conversation and advocacy for policy change.

“We don’t pursue things for innovation’s sake,” he said. “We take on the difficult, unglamorous problems, and we try to find design’s role in solving for complex issues within the built environment.”

They are actually better known outside the state by public officials and design colleagues who inquire about their ideas and how those can be used in other places.

They recombine issues otherwise examined separately into nine areas of design inquiry – such as low-impact development, transit-oriented development, context-sensitive street design, pocket neighborhoods, watershed urbanism and agricultural urbanism. They’ve even published an award-winning book in one area, called Low Impact Development: a design manual for urban areas.

In the pocket neighborhood concept, housing is clustered around shared space, such as a community lawn and playground, community gardens, a shared street and a low-impact development stormwater management system. The approach invites community revitalization and employs low-impact development concepts, in a housing template that delivers more services at affordable levels.

The pocket neighborhood concept, which was used for the Habitat Trails, Porchscapes and Pettaway projects, has won a combined 25 awards. However, not all of these affordable housing projects are being built, so the center’s staff is exploring the prospect of becoming a developer.

The second design area, transit-oriented development, involves intercity rail, which ranges from regional light rail for northwest Arkansas, which would connect Fayetteville and Bentonville, to a seven-mile streetcar plan for Fayetteville. When the center started working on this concept eight years ago, no one in the region really understood it.

Now, staff members are seen as consultants and experts on the topic.

“Most people don’t get excited by a transportation project; let’s face it, it’s not very glamorous,” Luoni said. “So, by integrating ordinary infrastructural processes into urban design and making infrastructure work even harder in addressing urban livability, we can craft a robust idea about place.”

Earlier this year, the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Authority undertook a yearlong alternative transportation analysis to determine light rail feasibility.

For the past few years, the center’s focus also has turned to local food production. They’ve done scenario planning to imagine how the issues of food again can be tied to place making and city making. Food production is certainly part of northwest Arkansas’ history and legacy. For that matter, so are rail transit and urban neighborhoods.

“Everything we look at is really just recalling lost intelligence, more than it is any kind of breakthrough innovation,” he said. “It’s more driven by a kind of thinking rooted in the humanities than it is in technology or science.”

For the staff, 50-hour weeks are typical, and 70-hour weeks aren’t uncommon when a deadline approaches. The work requires issues-driven people who possess a combination of passion, design talent and curiosity, and who are willing to put in that time and want to be in the mix of national discussions.

The center’s staff teaches one studio a semester, with a different focus each time. They encourage students to be curious and diligent enough to try many solutions as part of the design process.

Luoni said that, in a perfect world, the center would have plenty of money and sponsorships to do the work that needs doing. “However, a big part of what we do involves making a case for design because neither the public nor the private realms understand how to connect what they do with design and how design could advance their interests.”

And that, he said, is why the awards they consistently win for their design work are so important. Their projects have won 68 national and international awards so far. Though they don’t typically come with a monetary prize, the awards do bring attention and lend legitimacy to the design concepts.

Like the awareness and clout brought to books and movies that win awards, people pay more attention to things that others in positions of authority have noticed. “It creates symbolic capital,” he said. “It focuses public attention, not just on the work, but on the issues of that work.”

For example, a recent project in Rwanda has gained notice in several awards programs. The project and resulting manual provide designs for holistic neighborhoods that would transition the capital city of Kigali from informal to formal settlements. That manual is now informing policymakers in Rwanda, where it’s being vetted by the government.

At its core, the center always will be about design, Luoni said. He sees them focusing even more on affecting policy and decision making, particularly in the form of scenario planning.

“It’s really about creating a more robust decision-making community so that, whatever design direction they do embark upon, there’s a deeper discussion about ramifications and, most importantly, how to allocate resources.”

Community Design Center Project Wins 2013 Unbuilt Architecture and Design Award

Trailhead Complex to be built along Maumelle River

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center’s design proposal for the Trailhead Complex at the Maumelle River Nature Center has won a 2013 Unbuilt Architecture and Design Award from the Boston Society of Architects. This is the sixth project by the center to receive an award from the society in its international awards category over the last 10 years.

The Trailhead Complex project, commissioned by Central Arkansas Water as part of a larger land conservation effort, covers 10,000 square feet and will cost about $3 million. The complex will consist of five basic components – a low-impact development parking garden, visitors hall, outdoor classroom, meadow walkscape and lookout tower – each of them demonstrating features and exhibits that support environmental conservation.

“The Trailhead Complex will be a signature project in Central Arkansas Water’s growing portfolio of watershed protection and education measures, as well as a new direction for the role of design in general reforestation programs,” said Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center and a Distinguished Professor in the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

“The U.S. Forest Service has taken a special interest in the Arkansas project because the proposal recasts generic environmental education as an art park. Hopefully, the national recognition will facilitate a successful capital campaign for Central Arkansas Water to build what could be a trend-setting project,” he said.

Stephanie Liechty, stewardship coordinator for Central Arkansas Water, said the organization purchased the 915 acres that is the Winrock Grass Farm, located on the Maumelle River. The river is the largest tributary to Lake Maumelle, which is the main drinking water supply for central Arkansas, with 400,000 customers in Little Rock, North Little Rock and 15 other communities.

The purchase prevented the land from being developed into a subdivision that would have placed septic tanks in a floodplain that flows into the water supply. The property connects with land already owned by the Central Arkansas Water.

To help fund the purchase, the organization secured a Forest Legacy Program grant from the U.S. Forest Service. The grant requires that 75 percent of the property be in forest – “so we knew we wanted to conserve this property and restore it to what it was historically before the grass farm came along,” Liechty said.

The Community Design Center was part of the team, with the Chicago office of Geosyntec Consultants, creating an overall site plan for the space, which is about 30 minutes from Little Rock near the Pulaski/Perry county line.

“We wanted something different from the typical nature center or walking trail project. We wanted to have sustainable design and something out of the ordinary and something that fits in with the scenery,” Liechty said. “Their design fits in with all of that.”

The Trailhead Complex design is an exhibit landscape intended to create memorable experiences that reenergize visitors’ regard for environmental systems. The design of the components amplifies the educational functions through “strangemaking” approaches that emphasize contrasts between the natural and the artificial. Strangemaking is used by artists and educators to encourage discovery by making something familiar strange.

A Visitors Hall is tucked within the forested hillside of a meadow-forest area, re-creating the effect of a forest canopy and serving as a sheltered, multipurpose gateway between highland and lowland. The Outdoor Classroom is a modified amphitheater that navigates the 30-foot elevation drop to the Meadow Walkscape, a wildflower meadow that contains micro-lawns for lounging and picnicking, children’s play areas and public art displays.

The Lookout Tower marks the limits of the trailhead complex and is used as a landmark to guide visitors throughout the park. The parking garden is a low-impact development stormwater treatment landscape bordered by walls made from river cane and grounded with pervious surfaces of granulated rock, porous pavers and rain gardens.

The Community Design Center’s scheme provides a facility where visitors can gain “more appreciation of where their water comes from, while having a nice outdoor experience,” Liechty said. One of her favorite elements is the lookout tower, which will provide visitors a “bird’s eye view” of the landscape.

“We hope to educate people on overall water quality, but also about paying attention to what’s happening upstream from where you are because that affects everyone downstream,” Liechty said. “And how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together for a healthy landscape.”

Planners will work with conceptual drawings and plans created by the Community Design Center and spend the next two years raising funds to start the project. The grass farm’s lease on the land expires in 2015, which is when the restoration will begin, Liechty said.

Geosyntec Consultants are helping to determine the planting schedule for trees and grasses. Liechty said there are plans to reforest much of the property. They have handwritten notes from when the land was first surveyed in the 1800s, which document the types of trees on the land: bald cypress, cherry bark oak, other oaks and pines. The landscape will be layered, with lower levels of dogwood and persimmon trees.

The native grass restoration will include little blue stem, big blue stem and sideoats grama and will serve populations of quail and neotropical migrant birds. For that, planners are working with native grass experts at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

The jury for the 2013 Unbuilt Architecture and Design awards program received 62 entries, of which five received an award. The winning projects will be displayed and presented at ABX (ArchitectureBoston Expo) at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in November.

The Boston Society of Architects was established in 1867 and is a chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The organization is committed to professional development for its members, advocacy on behalf of great design, and sharing an appreciation for the built environment with the public at large.

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center was founded in 1995 as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture. The center advances creative development in Arkansas through education, research and design solutions that enhance the physical environment. It has provided design and planning services to more than 45 communities and organizations across Arkansas, helping them to secure nearly $65 million in grant funding to enact suggested improvements. In addition to revitalizing historic downtowns, the center addresses new challenges in affordable housing, urban sprawl, environmental planning, and management of regional growth or decline. The center’s professional staff members are nationally recognized for their expertise in urban and public-interest design, and their work has received more than 90 design awards.

‘Townscaping’ Design Wins Honor Award from American Society of Landscape Architects

Farmington project emphasizes pedestrian experience

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center’s project for Farmington, “Townscaping an Automobile-Oriented Fabric,” has won a 2013 Honor Award in the Analysis and Planning category from the American Society of Landscape Architects. It is the center’s fifth ASLA award and the fourth that they have received in this category.

The awards honor the top public places, residential designs, campuses, parks and urban planning projects from across the United States and around the world. Thirty-three award-winning projects were selected from more than 534 entries.

The project will be published in the October issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine. It also will be featured at the 2013 ASLA Annual Conference and Expo in Boston in November.

The Community Design Center’s project involved restoring pedestrian use to Farmington, an automobile-focused town bordering Fayetteville in Washington County, through transformation of its five-lane commercial highway into a multiway boulevard. The boulevard’s right-of-way would feature “urban agricultural” components or edible landscapes, combining a demand for food security with traditions of civic street design to “retrofit suburbia,” said Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center and a Distinguished Professor of architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

The townscape plan proposes a new town green with a year-round farmers market, tree-lined sidewalks that promote outdoor dining, traffic circles, and large-scale public art projects that recall Farmington’s agricultural legacy – all delivering more urban and ecological services along U.S. 62, he said.

In the last 80 years, streets have been engineered exclusively to serve motorists, Luoni said, “when, historically, streets sponsored so many other non-traffic functions.” The goal was to transform this “traffic sewer” – where the only level of service is defined by the number of cars moved per lane per hour – and return important measures of livability through great public space and a sense of place.

Roads are the largest category of public space, though most people consider them a mere utility, he said.

“It’s the public space that determines the health of a community, and precisely what we aimed to restore in this context-sensitive highway design,” he said.

“While our work in Farmington has received recognition from the architecture and urban planning professions, we are especially pleased that the landscape architecture profession has awarded this project since our solutions are interdisciplinary and aim to solve for multiple challenges in the built environment,” Luoni said. “We hope that this kind of affirmation will give the next Farmington administration the confidence to eventually move forward with this model project, which has extensive community support.”

The UACDC received a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to work on this design scenario.

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center was founded in 1995 as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture. The center advances creative development in Arkansas through education, research and design solutions that enhance the physical environment. It has provided design and planning services to more than 45 communities and organizations across Arkansas, helping them to secure nearly $65 million in grant funding to enact suggested improvements.

In addition to revitalizing historic downtowns, the center addresses new challenges in affordable housing, urban sprawl, environmental planning, and management of regional growth or decline. The center’s professional staff members are nationally recognized for their expertise in urban and public-interest design, and their work has received more than 90 design awards.