National Endowment for the Arts Grant Propels Scenario Planning for Fayetteville

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Community Design Center received a $20,000 grant this year to support preparation of a 2030 Transit Scenario Plan for Fayetteville.

The National Endowment for the Arts funding will drive the center’s plan for a scenario that features an urban streetcar system in Fayetteville.

The Community Design Center, an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture, is one of 22 programs to receive a 2011 design grant from the NEA through its Access to Artistic Excellence Program. The center’s mission is to advance creative development in Arkansas through education, research and design solutions that enhance the physical environment. To date, the center has won more than 60 awards, including two 2011 Honors Awards in Regional and Urban Design from the American Institute of Architects.

This scenario-planning project is based on research the center gathered while compiling the study Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas: Lifestyles and Ecologies. With an earlier grant from the NEA and other contributions, the center published 2,000 copies of that study in 2009 and distributed them to the public and stakeholders.

That study envisioned how a light rail system could impact the region’s development. This scenario plan for Fayetteville scales back the scope to a streetcar system, which typically provides a local service within a two- to six-mile range, said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. Streetcars are an easier way to introduce the rail transit concept to populations that lack familiarity with fixed guideway development, which uses exclusive or controlled rights of way or rails.

Transit-oriented development integrates land use and affordable housing with transportation planning, Luoni said. That will become important because Fayetteville’s population is expected to double by 2030, adding 160 million square feet of built space within the existing boundaries of the city. “What if we incentivized that growth to be transit-oriented development requiring less energy, and to achieve the urbanism that Fayetteville would like to see?” he asked.

Architecture students and Community Design Center staff will collaborate with the city of Fayetteville’s strategic planning and internal consulting department as it prepares the 2030 city plan. The NEA grant provides the center with the opportunity to do this scenario-planning work as a supplement to the city’s 2030 plan. Final scenario plans will be available in December.

These scenario plans will illustrate a future based on development around a streetcar system along College Avenue between downtown and the Northwest Arkansas Mall, about a five-mile distance. A large percentage of the city’s population density lives within a half-mile of College Avenue, the city’s central north-south axis.

Luoni said Fayetteville has an urban landscape ideal for this concept, and this could serve as a starter system for a larger, modulated regional transit system. “It would have the same development impact as the Visioning Rail Transit study,” Luoni said, and send the same message about smart growth and transit viability.

Public transit is a logical next step toward addressing smart growth, congestion and energy-intensive suburban sprawl, Luoni said. “Currently, federal dollars are being shifted from highways to public transit projects, so our thinking about the built environment is changing in large and small cities alike.”

High population density and public transportation have a symbiotic relationship, Luoni said. A higher density is required for a transit system to work effectively since transit and walkable neighborhoods work hand-in-hand. Low-density sprawl is generated by near total reliance on the automobile and highway planning. When sprawl is countered with increased urban density, it increases an area’s livability and attractiveness to the creative class of people and businesses that power economic development. Controlling sprawl with new urban options also preserves natural space and relieves traffic congestion on highways.

“Scenario planning” proposes various drivers to visualize different outcomes, Luoni said. It flips the traditional planning method and, instead, uses radical but plausible ways of thinking to speculate about the future. City planning has traditionally been managed through community participation processes that favor short-term outlooks. Progress is often conservative and incremental, lacking the necessary resilience in adapting to disturbances or new futures. The Community Design Center, however, is known for using unorthodox methods.

“Since being radical is expected, people aren’t as apprehensive,” Luoni said. Looking at a more diverse palette of possibilities will improve how city planners and the community make decisions and allocate resources. The project will employ three-dimensional modeling and video animation — with aerial and eye-level perspectives — to show the changes that could occur along College Avenue.

Karen Minkel, director of strategic planning and internal consulting for Fayetteville, said the 2030 city plan is an update to the 2025 plan, which was adopted in 2006. That plan included making infill and revitalization the highest priorities; discouraging suburban sprawl; growing a livable transportation network; making a traditional town form the standard; and creating attainable housing.

The 2025 plan also aimed to assemble an enduring green network, or a connected system of natural areas throughout the city. Though it was then “more nebulous and less defined,” Minkel said, that could involve hubs connected by corridors, such as the developing trail system.

The 2025 plan included an action plan, so city planners are evaluating what’s been achieved and what needs improving as the city staff creates the 2030 plan. In the last five years, new policies and ideas have been tested, such as the rise of the local food movement. “This is more like taking your car in for a tune-up than buying a new car,” Minkel said of the 2030 city plan.

The city planning staff started researching the 2030 plan within the last year, conducting public participation sessions in October and November, as well as an online survey. Now they’re compiling and reviewing responses and working on the document itself.

The scenario planning from the Community Design Center will be a provocative addition to that 2030 city plan, which will be presented to the Fayetteville City Council this spring. “It’ll give some concrete visual imagery to the product,” Minkel said. “It will also provide some inspiration and probably produce some thought-provoking questions.”