NEA Grant Allows UA’s Community Design Center to Explore Pedestrian-Oriented Planning in Farmington

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A modified, more pedestrian-oriented Farmington could serve as a planning model for other small towns in the state and beyond.

That model will come by way of a $20,000 grant the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded the University of Arkansas Community Design Center for its project, “Townscaping an Automobile-Oriented Fabric.” The grant, announced Dec. 5, provides support during calendar year 2010. The UACDC is an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

With this project, the UACDC plans to offer an altered landscape for Farmington, a bedroom community that has grown up to the west of Fayetteville along U.S. Highway 62. The town of about 4,800 people is organized along the five-lane highway that serves as its de facto main street — “although it certainly doesn’t have any of the kind of social benefits or social capital that a main street has,” said Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center.

Farmington is a place that many people drive through on their way to Prairie Grove, Lincoln and other rural communities in western Washington County. While Farmington has churches, schools and some businesses, its residents often head to Fayetteville for work, shopping and cultural entertainment options.

“It’s an interesting landscape,” Luoni said. “It’s a community that’s growing, but it doesn’t really have a legible structure for how that growth may happen. I thought we could offer some design assistance in that regard.”

Farmington, originally a farming community, has followed sprawling land-use patterns, becoming “auto-dominated.” The UACDC will explore bringing a pedestrian-oriented culture to city planning at that scale.

“Instead of trying to change their land-use code, we’ll look at the public space fabric as a way of enabling a pedestrian culture in the town,” he said.

Luoni decided to involve the UACDC after reading a local newspaper article last year about Farmington officials’ desire to use planning to cultivate economic development in the community. “Always wanting to work around home, I thought this would be a great opportunity to see if they were interested in UACDC being involved with the planning,” Luoni said.

Farmington is one of the 96 percent of towns and cities in Arkansas with fewer than 15,000 residents. Planning for “creative communities” amplifies the latent assets of a place. Building a sense of place encourages economic development and is a more plausible option than reliance on high-tech industry development. “Prosperity becomes tied to livability and quality of life, which I think is a huge untapped potential in Arkansas,” he said.

A sense of place has been attempted in residential developments like Har-Ber Meadows in Springdale, and in retail projects like Pinnacle Hills Promenade, the outdoor shopping center in Rogers. But those are only part of the “fabric-making” elements of a complete community. “We want to bring that sensibility back into organic and ordinary towns that actually would greatly benefit from such integrative thinking,” Luoni said.

For the pedestrian-oriented townscaping plan, designers will apply “context-sensitive highway design” to U.S. 62. Luoni described this as “a street design template that tries to recapture the traditional social spaces typically found in streets,” supported by parking, landscape, building frontage, street furniture and sidewalks. That’s a change from how highway department traffic engineers have regarded streets for the past several decades, where the amount of traffic moved has become “the sole level of service by which the street is judged,” Luoni said.

Designers will also take ordinary things in the environment — like commercial signs, ATM machines, benches, street lighting — “and closely look at those in an artistic way” to create a sense of place. “You can change the context in which they’re deployed, you can rescale them, and you can play with their materiality and combinations with other elements,” Luoni said, such as a freestanding ATM machine that also serves as a giant light box and landmark.

Designers will look at developing public passages with edible landscapes such as fruits and nuts, recalling the area’s farming roots. These “productive landscapes” will address disconnected land uses including parks, fields, recreational assets, floodplains and creeks. Once connected, they provide additional services related to improved aesthetics, wildlife corridors, water management, additional shading and landscape. “Such a landscape rewards walking over driving, and becomes a place that you want to be in,” Luoni said.

The UACDC applied last March for the grant, which is administered under the National Endowment for the Art’s Access to Artistic Excellence program. Luoni said the National Endowment for the Arts likely selected this project for its model potential. “Everything we do is not just about solving for Farmington, but about becoming a model for other places, which the NEA is interested in.”

Project work products will be placed on the UACDC Web site. A project pamphlet will also be produced.

Founded in 1995, the University of Arkansas Community Design Center has provided design and planning services to more than 30 communities and organizations across Arkansas. The planning has helped Arkansas sponsors to secure nearly $62 million in grant funding to enact suggested improvements.