FAYETTEVILLE, ARK. — An award-winning regional-planning project offers Northwest Arkansas a mass transit model that supports economic development and environmental sustainability.

Plans call for a light rail train station at Northwest Arkansas Mall.

Students reimagined Fayetteville’s Drake Field as a gateway to the area, with mixed-use development adjacent to the old airstrip.

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center with Washington University in St. Louis has won an American Institute of Architects Education Honor Award for taking on a thorny regional planning issue: light rail. Studios at both universities explored how light rail and associated transit-oriented development could ease traffic gridlock, spur downtown revitalization and check sprawl in Northwest Arkansas.

“If Northwest Arkansas is still relying on fossil fuels by 2020, that will be the death knell for further economic development. By then, business will go to those areas using renewable energy sources, because ultimately, that will be cheaper,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. Creative, cutting-edge businesses also factor in quality of life in their decision-making: “People want affordable downtown housing, which transit-oriented development would foster. And they’re tired of sitting in traffic,” he said.

Though critics express concern about the estimated cost to build a light rail system, doing nothing could cost more in the long run.

“Seventy-five metro areas are planning or already have built light rail systems,” Luoni said. “To be economically competitive and environmentally sustainable, our region needs to rethink energy and transportation issues.”

The project launched last spring with three UA studios involving 40 School of Architecture students and four professors: Luoni, Aaron Gabriel, Gregory Herman and Tahar Messadi. Visiting professors Eric Kahn, a Los Angeles architect with expertise in scenario planning, and William Conway, a Minneapolis-based architect and urban planner, partnered on the project, as well.

The UA students did not design the light rail system per se. Instead, they focused on regional development and transit-oriented district schemes that would support light rail.

Light rail would support large-scale regional development schemes such as this proposal to host the summer Olympic games.

“We wanted to engage students in a chess game of the world, and bring back a set of possibilities to the studio,” said Kahn, who was the 2006 E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture. The students traveled to Dallas, Minneapolis and Los Angeles to study light rail systems there, researched demographic and economic trends, and explored possibilities for growth with abstract models and mapping exercises. At the final critique last May student teams presented regional development scenarios that ranged from a financial valley with Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt as anchors to a summer Olympic City that utilized University of Arkansas sports facilities and nearby rivers as venues.

Work continued last fall with an urban design studio at Washington University in St. Louis, where Stephen Luoni was the Ruth and Norman Moore Visiting Professor. Nine graduate students built on the theoretical foundation erected by UA students, developing transit-oriented neighborhoods anchored by mixed-use train stations at three key sites in Fayetteville: Drake Field, Dickson Street and the Northwest Arkansas Mall.

This marks the third year in a row that the community design center, an outreach of the UA School of Architecture, has won education honors from the AIA.

Award jurors noted that “this is an effective use of scenario planning with legible, impactful graphics that can be shown to the community.”

Luoni is currently seeking grants to publish a book on the project that he plans to distribute to politicians and planners throughout the state.

“Eighty years ago, Northwest Arkansas was a classic transit-oriented development,” Luoni said, referring to the Arkansas-Missouri railroad that links the four major cities in the region. “The infrastructure is there, let’s reuse it — the benefits would be enormous.”

Founded in 1995, the University of Arkansas Community Design Center has provided design and planning services to more than 30 communities across Arkansas. The center’s planning has helped Arkansas communities and organizations secure nearly $62 million in grant funding to enact suggested improvements. In addition to revitalizing historic downtowns, the center addresses new challenges in affordable housing, urban sprawl, environmental planning, and management of regional growth or decline. The design center also offers hands-on civic design experience to students who work under the direction of design professionals. For more information on the design center, visit the center’s Web site at http://uacdc.uark.edu. The center’s Planning Primer: Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Life Styles & Ecologies may be downloaded at http://uacdc.uark.edu/Transit%20Primer%20Book-small.pdf.

The transit-oriented development study 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.

For more information on the AIA education award, visit http://www.aia.org/.