Grant Funds 'Green' Design

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A neighborhood planned for south Fayetteville will set new standards for “green” development in the state — and funding is in place to make it happen. The UA School of Architecture’s Community Design Center, in collaboration with Professor Marty Matlock of the Ecological Engineering Group in the UA Division of Agriculture's department of biological and agricultural engineering, has been awarded a $464,000 grant by the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission. The grant is funded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The monies will support planning and design of a sustainable neighborhood for Habitat for Humanity of Washington County. McClelland Consulting Engineers and the city of Fayetteville also will partner on the project. The eight-acre parcel is located on Huntsville Road, adjacent to land set aside for transitional housing for Seven Hills Homeless Center and Sage House.

Shared streets, high-density housing, rain gardens and other sustainable storm water management systems will be designed, built and studied. The goal is to implement low-impact development that will reduce non-point source pollution — toxins that can’t be traced to a factory or other single source.

“Sediment is our big concern,” said Marty Matlock. “The run off from this site hits a tributary that drains directly into the West Fork of the White River, which has been highly impacted by sediment from urban stream alteration.” Sediment loading erodes streams and compromises their ability to treat and remove pollutants from the urban watershed. Pesticides, herbicides and contaminants such as oil and heavy metals that wash off of parked cars compound the problem.

“Just go out to a parking lot and scrape up a little bit of sludge on top of the asphalt — it’s just loaded with stuff,” Matlock said, adding, “Our little project won’t solve the problem. It’s an illustration of how we could implement a citywide solution to watershed pollution.”

Matlock will work with McClelland Engineers and seven engineering students to design, model, and measure low-impact storm water management strategies that are distributed across the site. Technologies such as bioswales and riparian greenways are not new, but their integration into a fully engineered and tested system is, Matlock said.

Steve Luoni, director of the community design center, has developed an extensive toolkit of green design strategies that he is eager to use in this project.

“We want to be the first in the U.S. to build the shared street,” he said. Common in the Netherlands, the shared street meanders to slow cars and incorporates pedestrian courts, on-street parking, rain gardens and tree bosques.

“Essentially, we’re designing the street as a public garden,” Luoni said.

To cut costs and reduce the development footprint, design center staff and seven architecture students will design both single-family homes and attached housing types such as mews, which are built along garden walkways.

The Fayetteville project builds on the success of an earlier Habitat neighborhood in Rogers that won five regional and national design awards. With infrastructure 90 percent complete and one home built and inhabited, the Rogers project presented real-world challenges for UA planners.

“We’ll have to use a fire truck template for this project,” Luoni said with a grin, referring to the need to accommodate 80,000-pound trucks on the narrow, pedestrian-friendly streets that they envision.

Design center staff and architecture students already have begun planning the neighborhood, and the project team expects to break ground on the development sometime in 2008.

“We’re excited about this project,” said Patsy Brewer, executive director of the Washington County chapter of Habitat for Humanity. “To have someone with expertise come in and do land planning and new design for houses — that is a double blessing. This neighborhood will meet our needs for quite a while.”

Mayor Dan Coody, for his part, believes that the project will be an exemplar for other cities across the nation: "Fayetteville is developing a reputation nationwide as a city that has made sustainable growth and development a top priority. The city is very pleased to work with the university and Habitat on this project. It's the way we like to see business done in Fayetteville, and I hope this is the first of many sustainable, affordable, low-impact residential developments in our community."

The project team also will produce a low-impact development manual for use by planners, developers and designers across the state of Arkansas.

This project is one of many sustainable initiatives spearheaded by the University of Arkansas. To learn more about green research and project development at the university, visit http://sustainability.uark.edu.