Egyptian Scholars Visit University of Arkansas Community Design Center, Plan Little Rock Park

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Two visiting scholars, Eman Abdel-Sabour and Hamoda Youssef, have come from Cairo via graduate studies in Italy to the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, where they have jumped right into a master planning study for Little Rock’s historic McArthur Park.

Their goal? Absorb – and bring home to Egypt – the Community Design Center’s award-winning ideas on sustainable planning and development.

“Currently Egypt is booming,” said Eman Abdel-Sabour. “There are lots of projects, but we don’t have the new thinking in sustainability.”

“We want to go back and offer something new to our community,” added Hamoda Youssef, who met and married Abdel-Sabour when the two were pursuing post-graduate studies in environmental planning and design at Cairo University. Currently both are pursuing master’s degrees in landscape and environmental planning at the Scuola Superiore di Catania, Italy, which is funding their studies at the University of Arkansas.

A Web search introduced the couple to the Community Design Center’s work: “We checked the ASLA site, and saw that the design center had won an award for Porchscapes,” Youssef said.

Porchscapes, the design center’s “green” neighborhood for the Washington County chapter of Habitat for Humanity, won a 2008 ASLA Honor Award in Planning and Analysis from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

“This kind of sustainable development is a trend that has to be pursued,” he added. “It benefits not only Arkansas but all of the world.”

Following a flurry of e-mails and a lot of paperwork, the couple arrived in Fayetteville and immediately immersed themselves in master planning for McArthur Park, a large project led by Conway+Schulte Architects of Minneapolis. Other collaborators are Tom Oslund, a Minneapolis-based landscape architect; the urban studies and design department of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; McClelland Consulting Engineers Inc.; and the University of Arkansas Community Design Center.

After just two weeks on campus, Hamoda Youssef is well into master planning a sustainable neighborhood centered on a series of green courtyards, which link to create a green corridor to the western edge of McArthur Park.

“This planning is continuous with the design center’s previous work for Habitat for Humanity and their transit studies. It’s very nice to have a chance to contribute,” he said.

Abdel-Sabour is working on a completely new idea, initially proposed by George Wittenberg at UALR, to design a 50-foot-wide, 1,250-foot-long garden bridge that will span Interstate 630, linking the SOMA (South Main) neighborhood to McArthur Park.

“The idea is to stitch the two parts of the park back together that were divided by I-630 some time ago,” she said. “You will be able to experience the landscape from the car and on the pedestrian path above.”

Steve Luoni, director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, is delighted to have visiting scholars who bring fresh ideas to the design process. He cites landscape as one area where the visitors bring something new to the drafting table: “Hamoda and Eman are from a dense city in the Arab world; to them, green is precious, while we take it for granted,” he said. “We subtract green to make a city; they humanize cities by introducing green.”

Though perspectives may differ, the design tools and rituals are familiar. At the close of their interview, both Abdel-Sabour and Youssef were back at their computers, their desks littered with flimsy paper sketches and Berol Prismacolor pencils, racing to meet their first deadline: a pin up review on Friday.