Community Design Center Project Shortlisted for 2019 World Architecture News Awards

Rendering courtesy of U of A Community Design Center

The Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff project features residential squares or lawns in each neighborhood, which provide family-oriented recreation while adding value to housing.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A project by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center has been shortlisted for the 2019 World Architecture News Awards in Future Projects–Urban Design.

Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff proposes redeveloping select neighborhoods with multi-family units to provide attainable workforce housing and catalyze investment throughout the downtown area.

The project uses "acupunctural logic" to develop start-up neighborhoods around seven downtown centers of strength to stimulate a pioneer phase of re-investment, said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. The center is an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

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

"The framework plan targets, bundles and sequences public-sector led development in a designated core to stimulate subsequent market investment throughout the larger downtown," Luoni said.

Once a place of cultural and economic prosperity, Pine Bluff is now a rapidly shrinking city. Many residents have moved away from the downtown area, leaving a vacuum that the plan seeks to reverse.

The plan's triage approach focuses on seven catalytic nodes for community building — a shared street, a lakefront wharf, an ArtWalk celebrating the city's musical legacy of blues and jazz, along with hillocks and residential greens. Neighborhoods will be developed around these community spaces, adding value to housing and further distinguishing the gridiron plan.

The plan features more than 400 units of affordable multifamily housing, with micro-apartments, multigenerational neighborhoods, shared living and congregate housing in the mix. The 28 contemporary walk-up prototypes are compatible with the Pine Bluff tradition of building with brick.

"For every gentrifying downtown in America, 10 are shrinking," Luoni said. "Shrinking downtowns and the cascading resilience deficits that result are significant design challenges in America. It is encouraging to see that our regenerative urban design efforts for small towns can stand side by side with glamorous mega-city development in framing key discussions on urbanism internationally."

Now in its 11th year, the international WAN Awards program recognizes "the outstanding works of innovative, visionary and imaginative architects worldwide," according to the organization's website.

Winners of each category will be announced at an Oct. 24 ceremony in London, England. The other finalists for this category represent projects in Brooklyn, New York; Toronto, Canada; Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province in China; and Fushun County in China.