Community Design Center's Greenway Urbanism Project Wins LIV Hospitality Design Award

This view of the festival grounds shows the festival center, plaza and bowl amphitheater beyond.

The festival grounds include these vacation porch cabins on the promenade.

This view of the botanical garden features the entrance to the hanging gardens and a zipline.

An equestrian village features an arena with stables and a semi-circular trailer camp beyond.

The glamping (glamour + camping) village combines cultural experiences in nature with full-service accommodations.

The glamping village offers tents and RV facilities, as well as cabins, villas and a hotel.

All renderings courtesy U of A Community Design Center

"Greenway Urbanism: Revitalization of Cherokee Village, Arkansas" has won an LIV Hospitality Design Award in the Landscape Architecture Design Professional category. The project was designed by the U of A Community Design Center, an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

A U of A Community Design Center project has won an LIV Hospitality Design Award in the Landscape Architecture Design Professional category. "Greenway Urbanism: Revitalization of Cherokee Village, Arkansas" is one of six urban strategies proposed under the Framework Plan for Cherokee Village, a project that received funding through an Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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. 

The LIV Hospitality Design Awards recognize excellence in hospitality architecture, interior design and guest experience on a global scale. This international design program is sponsored by the Three C Group GmbH in Switzerland.

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.

"Greenway urbanism proposes new forms of urban development organized around town walks, cycling trails and equestrian trails, rather than conventional street networks," Luoni said. "Development for Cherokee Village is reset around hospitality and living cooperatively beyond midcentury's commitment to the nuclear family and the isolated single-family residence. We envision a city in the woods, inspired by a subaltern tradition of camp meetings, revival grounds, artsy resort culture, health retreats, scouting camps and countercultural recreation and performance spaces in the Ozark Highlands — powerful but forgotten urban forms that civilized the Ozarks."

"These communal forms share a common orientation toward hospitality: moving beyond the self and the sovereign toward being a guest as the ultimate form of citizenship," he added. "Hospitality permits a level of informality that evolves mature urbanism over time — think Uber, food trucks, Airbnb and the classic, camp hubs that eventually became cities like Branson or Martha's Vineyard."

Three principles guide the overall Framework 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.

The Framework Plan has received several recognitions since its conception. It received an American Architecture Award in 2023 and The Architect's Newspaper Best of Design Award in 2022 in the Unbuilt—Landscape, Urban Design & Master Plan category. The project was also a finalist in two categories for the 2023 Plan Awards.

Winning projects can be found on the LIV Hospitality Design Awards website.