Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons^™

Housing At Markham Square, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

A former scrap metal yard located four blocks north of Conway’s main commercial street was re-imagined as a new square surrounded by a mixed-use residential district. The new square features “wilded” landscapes for stormwater runoff management and flood control. Proposed multifamily housing with distinct frontages— two-story screened porches, balconies, terraces, patios, and courtyards—will line the edge of “green” streets incorporating stormwater treatment landscapes.

Walkability Of Suburban Retrofits Of The Washington Dc Area: Immersion Into Qualitative Constructs, David Sweere

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

The majority of the United States population is living in the suburbs, and yet the suburban built fabric has developed with spatial conditions that have failed to prove their efficacy on environmental, social or economic terms. Most contemporary architectural and urban theorists agree that the suburban condition is inherently problematic. In a 2010 Ted Talk, architect and urban designer Ellen Dunham-Jones discusses the problematic state of the suburban built condition, citing dependence on the vehicle, sparseness of built form, environmental costs, transportation costs, and even increased obesity rates (Dunham-Jones 2010). Because the suburbs comprise the majority of our “urbanized” areas …

The Yamanote Loop: Unifying Rail Transportation And Disaster Resilience In Tokyo, Mackenzie Wade

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

As climate change and population growth persist, and as the world rapidly urbanizes, major cities across the globe will face unprecedented strains. The risk of devastating impact from natural disasters increases in areas with a growing concentration of people. Megacities in Asia are the most at-risk of natural disasters, given their geographic location and high population density. With the highest projected population growth in the world, Asian cities must quickly expand and adapt their existing infrastructure to accommodate the transforming global conditions.

A remarkable anomaly amongst Asian megacities, Tokyo, Japan is effectively adapting to its earthquake-prone environment. Within the last …

A Functional Escape, Zachary Spero

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Over the past two decades, the tree house has outgrown its more recent traditional role as a child’s place to play and has served many new functions. I intend to conduct research that questions how the tree house has evolved over the last twenty years based upon changes in program, technology, and relation to the tree itself. As a result of this research, I will deliver a clear understanding of tree house design best practices in the form of a manual.

The Social Lot: Reimagining The Future Of Surface Parking Lots In Kansas City, Missouri, Lauren Davis

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Currently, the world is experiencing a resurgence of the urban lifestyle as humanity undergoes its third great wave of human history, the metropolitan tide. Humanity’s advancement in the past few decades has made cities the largest technology possible. In 1952, only thirty percent of the population lived in cities, and by the end of the twenty-first century, eighty-five percent of the world’s population will be urban. With this influx of population in the urban landscape, it is pertinent now more than ever for cities to redesign the city for the pedestrian.

In the 1950s, there was a predominant reorganization of …

A Second Life: The Adaptation Of Dying Italian Towns To Accommodate Immigrants And Refugees, Rachel Rubis

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Despite its efforts in historic preservation, there is an abundance of culturally significant Italian vernacular towns dying due to dilapidation and depopulation. Simultaneously, Italy has faced an ongoing stream of immigrants and refugees seeking work, housing, and asylum within its borders—a crisis that has resulted in Italian fear and animosity aside immigrant maltreatment and hardship. My research, which is supplemented by first-hand experience in Italy, qualitative analysis, and text sources, proposes interventions into dying Italian towns to aid in the resettlement of immigrants and refugees—an effort meant to be mutually beneficial to both the town and the immigrant. In my …

The Effects Of Urban Development And The Incidence Of Flooding And Discharge Changes From 1956-2016: A Case Study From Juan Diaz Township, Republic Of Panama, Virgilio De Jesus Quintero Rodriguez

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The increase in flood occurrences in the Township of Juan Diaz has affected thousands of families and hundreds of businesses and has negatively impacted the lives of thousands of residents, who expect the worse every time there is a prolonged period of rain. Some of the residents lose their appliances, cars, furniture and houses every year. This study examines the relationship between urban development and flooding. Also, it addresses the influences of topography, green cover, population changes, runoff changes, and social dynamics on this relationship. This study implemented the use of thematic cartography, geographic information systems (GIS), personal interviews and …

Suitability Assessment For Integrated Urban Development In Makkah City Of Saudi Arabia, Mislat Alotaibi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Makkah – the third most populated city in Saudi Arabia with a population of 1,684,408 according to the 2010 demographic survey conducted by the Saudi General Authority for Statistics – is experiencing urban sprawl, which can be defined as an unplanned urban expansion that might degrade the environment and diminish the aesthetic view. This is a persisting problem in Makkah driven by multitude of processes involving the random expansion in its undeveloped land and the removal of its historic mountains surrounding Al-Masjid Al-Haram (the Holy Mosque) in an attempt to push the city limit of urban capacity within its administrative …

Permitting A Homeless Transition Village: Transactions Between The Informal And The Formal, Stephen Luoni

Community Design Center Faculty Publications and Presentations

More than three million Americans experience homelessness annually. Emergency shelter capacity is limited while local governments are unable to provide even temporary housing. Informal housing involving interim self-help solutions are now popular adaptive actions for obtaining shelter, despite nonconformance with city codes. Unfortunately, most informal solutions have resulted in objectionable tent cities and squatter campgrounds where the local response has simply been to move the problem around. Our homeless transition village plan prototypes a shelter-first solution using a kit-of-parts that can be replicated in other communities. Village design reconciles key gaps between informal building practices and formal sector regulations, creating …

Decoding Third Places, Caleb Bertels

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Urban open spaces should give back to the public, creating vital and valuable places within a city. People should want to seek out these spaces to occupy, seeing them not as useless gaps between buildings but areas with their own value and identity. To create this public demand, successful open spaces contain qualities of third places. Third places, a term coined by Ray Oldenburg, describes somewhere familiar that people choose to spend their time outside their first places (their homes) and their second places (their work). Third places bring communities closer together and are open to the public, but not …

Paolo Soleri And Arcology: An Analytical Comparison To Frank Lloyd Wright And Louis Kahn, Henry Millard

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

The city proposals of Paolo Soleri, he called them arcologies, are monumental and complex geometric megastructures intended to project great heights above desert horizons. These proposals purposefully abandon conventional notions of the city.

Soleri was physically isolated in his remote Arizona urban laboratory, Arcosanti, and philosophically detached from the professional urban design community. His proposals were often too easily understood as foreign and radical dystopian architectural metaphors meant to provoke thought more than to project an actual future. There is limited discourse on Soleri and this tends to isolate him in a vacuum, ignoring possible connections or parallels in his …

Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

Once a prosperous cultural urban center in the Mississippi River delta, but now the nation’s second fastest shrinking city, Pine Bluff (population: 42,700) is Arkansas’ Detroit. Indeed, a study of black wealth conducted by famed sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1899 found that Pine Bluff had the fourth highest rate of black wealth in the nation behind Charleston, Richmond, and New York City. The school’s community design center prepared a downtown revitalization plan, Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, a housing-first initiative focused on building neighborhoods around downtown “centers of strength”. While the revitalization approach is triaged around a …

Center For Farm And Food System Entrepreneurship, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

The average age of the American farmer is 58. Since communities are not reproducing the next generation of farmers, universities are establishing training centers to model new concepts and technologies in farming. The Farmers Training Center is both an immersive program in the rhythms of farm life and a public facility for hosting gatherings that celebrate value-added food products. Part of the University of Arkansas’ farm operations near campus, the center is the public face of agriculture where farmers and the public meet. Student farmers learn by farming, from organic vegetable production in fields and greenhouses, to machine repair, marketing, …

New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

More than three million Americans experience homelessness annually. Emergency shelter capacity is limited while local governments are unable to provide even temporary housing. Informal housing involving interim self-help solutions are now popular adaptive actions for obtaining shelter despite nonconformance with city codes. Unfortunately, most informal solutions have resulted in objectionable tent cities and squatter campgrounds where the local response has simply been to move the problem around. Our homeless transition village plan prototypes a shelter-first solution using a kit-of-parts that can be replicated in other communities. Village design reconciles key gaps between informal building practices and formal sector regulations, creating …

Willow Heights Livability Improvement Plan, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

Willow Heights is a 43-year old public housing complex owned by the Fayetteville Housing Authority (FHA) within the federal public housing portfolio administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The school’s design center was commissioned by a local foundation to study an alternative to the FHA’s plan to sell the downtown Willow Heights complex to a developer of high-income housing, necessitating relocation of low-income residents to another complex outside of downtown. Using equity as a driver of decision making, the studio introduced scenario planning to organize reluctant stakeholders in considering transformations to the five-acre complex.

Malaysian Shophouses: Creating Cities Of Character, Ashley Wagner

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

As a developing country, the urban landscape of Malaysia faces the same trends as many other cities worldwide: modernization at a rapid and unchecked pace. Due to the demand for new infrastructure and buildings, many vernacular building types are rapidly disappearing from the urban fabric, among them the Malaysian Shophouse. The shophouse was a common building style for over a century from 1840-1960s and is perhaps a typology of a previous era. Yet it offers many lessons on creating a city that embodies the character of the culture, the antithesis of the anonymous modern city. At its most basic program …

Adaptive Reuse Of Warehouses In Relation To Neighborhood Cohesion And Identity: A Case Study Of New Orleans, Oklahoma City, And Minneapolis, Sarah Tappe

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Historical industrial warehouse districts in American cities have a unique and interesting history because of their rapid development and, in most cases, a subsequent neglect. However, because of its historical significance, its usual central location within the city, and architectural features, the warehouse district has become a focus for revitalization. Warehouse districts already have a historic identity and a cohesiveness in urban fabric and building typologies, but what are the effects of adaptive reuse in relation to the identity of the buildings and the district? In this thesis, three cities (New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Oklahoma City) with established and revitalized …

The Delamination Of Manhattan: Living In The Layers Of A Post-Land Society, Dylan Hursley

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Rising water levels threaten the existence of many coastal cities throughout the world, including Lower Manhattan, which is in danger of sea level rise by as much as six feet by the end of the century! Higher sea levels mean that larger storms will occur with greater frequency. Assuming that humanity does not reverse its current ecological contribution, barriers to stop rising waters will not be adequate.

Manhattan is covered by 50 feet of water, transforming New York into a new Venice. The substantial bedrock of the city provides a hefty foundation capable of supporting Manhattan’s structures for many years …

Genealogy Of Theories Of The City: Spatial Components As An Index Of Socioeconomic Capitalism, Zachary Grewe

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Starting after the industrial revolution, the city has increasingly represented the spatial components of capitalism and has increasingly been conceived of as a built form of capital. To understand the lineage of ideas that has led to the current understanding of the city, this study creates a genealogy of theories that cites six significant projects starting with the Garden City in 1898 and concluding with the Yokohama International Passenger Terminal in 2002. The spatial components of capitalism; production, consumption, and housing are used as an index to better understand the socioeconomic influence of capitalism on the city as well as …

Eulogy To Architecture: The Three-Dimensional Collage City Of Nostalgia, Molly A. Evans

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

In our time of existence on the Earth, human beings have designed and realized beautiful things. As we face the challenges that confront us today, we begin to understand the fragility of humankind’s creations. Many of the world’s cities and buildings lie in ruins, gazed at by tourists, studied by scholars, while more lie buried in the ground for hundreds of years, some never to be rediscovered. Everything around us is an accumulation of knowledge and ideas built upon for centuries, now facing questionable circumstances. Of course, the more recent Aleppo and other Middle Eastern cities have fallen subject to …

The Freeman Performing Arts Center, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

The Freeman Performing Arts Center marks the threshold between prairie and civic life. This small agricultural community of 1,300 has an outsized Anabaptist music tradition recognized nationally. The 37,000 sf hall-type building unifies a miscellaneous collection of public buildings and landscapes at the southwest corner of the town’s one-mile grid. The center’s massing projects an ascending system of familiar gable roofs, which absorb the fly tower into a composition reflective of pragmatic building forms. The principal face of the building is a translucent curtain wall that illuminates interior massing—a beacon on the prairie. A thru-Porch celebrates transitions between the prairie’s …

Impromptu Domesticity: Housing Adaptations By The Marshallese In Springdale, Ar, Kera Lathan

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study analyzes the relationship between people and their spatial environment through the lens of cultural practices and experiences. By using theories of cultural identity and activity patterns to compare spatial usage in two differing circumstances, this study will help to better understand the spatial needs of Marshallese living in Springdale, Arkansas.

The analysis uses two in-depth interviews to establish a base of qualitative data to understand the unique needs of this specific population. Through constructs such as spatial fluidity, sharing culture, and ability to adapt to new spatial practices, the two cases are compared to one another in order …

Tax Increment Financing: A Tool For Growth In Grapevine, Texas, Nathaniel C. Chadwick

Political Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Tax Increment Financing (TIF) has become an increasingly popular tool for economic development used by state and local governments. The legislation enabling TIF and its consequences vary greatly between states, causing some controversy. Through a case study based in the City of Grapevine, Texas, this research analyzes factors influencing TIF districts and their effectiveness in achieving their respective goals.

Transitional Urban Voids In Austin, Texas, Courtney A. Tarver

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

A city’s urban fabric is constantly evolving through development and decay under the fluctuating rates of habitation. Cities are growing rapidly as populations climb higher, with new demands for the incoming waves of people seeking employment and a place to call home. Austin, Texas is the fastest growing American city today, with a population growth rate of three percent per year. With this growth and its demands for open space, open spaces in the form of urban voids and temporary use spaces become an interest to designers as spaces with flexibility. The approach of this thesis is to understand these …

Cultivating Dreams: Examining Community Involvement And Satisfaction In Fayetteville Farms, Donna J. Freeman

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Agriculture has a great, often untapped potential to be integrated in to the urban landscape as part of a green infrastructure and food production network. Urban agriculture is often piecemeal and opportunistic, rarely part of a city-wide master plan or with a comprehensive site plan. Because of this, farms are less likely to be considered as public space like parks and plazas or be studied as part of the human environment. This study utilizes data triangulation from site analysis, policy analysis and surveys to attempt to determine how urban farms might be improved in specific categories such as visibility and …

Emergent Landscape: Urban Shadow Space, Illuminated, Hannah L. Hefner

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

This study defines a new approach to the transformation of unmaintained land within cities, or urban shadow space. Although urban shadow space can offer a place of free expression for the community and spontaneous vegetative growth within a city, it is often dismissed as blighted land by public authority. This study maximizes existing opportunities of these spaces, illuminating a realm of the city that is currently dark to the public eye. A proposed set of guidelines is utilized in the creation of three alternative designs that illustrate the emergent landscape, a sensitively designed, evolving landscape that encourages user interaction with …

The Urban Ecotone: A Connecting District In Downtown Memphis, Richard Stowe

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Memphis is a shrinking city. As more people move out to the suburbs, the downtown area falls into a greater decline. With fewer people to support the businesses and attractions of downtown Memphis, more and more vacant lots start to show up. Breaks in what was once a vibrant city fabric have led to the decay of the downtown area. While the downtown area offers amenities that cannot be found in the suburbs such as attractions like Fed Ex Forum, Beale Street, and the Orpheum Theater, as well as specialty shops, and a riverfront. The suburbs offer a quality of …

(In)Formal Distinction In Urban Istanbul: Evaluating Spatial Performance, Hannah Breshears

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

As globalization continues to draw the cities of the world into closer economic and intellectual dependence, Istanbul stands as bridge between two continents and a city poised for urban transformation. Massive tracts of informally designed communities are being cleared to accommodate the structure of the modern, tourism driven city. The attempt to purge the city of its squatter heritage is startling and raises questions of cultural and architectural integrity in urban development. Istanbul’s desire for expanded global investment and tourism is particularly apparent in the industrial district of Kartal, whose blended development is the subject of this study. Jane Jacobs …

(In)Formal Distinction In Urban Istanbul: Evaluating Spatial Performance, Hannah A. Breshears

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

As globalization continues to draw the world into closer economic and intellectual dependence, massive tracts of informally designed communities in Istanbul are being cleared to accommodate the growing infrastructure of the modern, tourism-driven city This attempt to purge the city of its ‘squatter’ heritage is startling and raises questions of cultural integrity in urban development. Istanbul’s desire for expanded global investment is particularly apparent in the object of this study, the blended district of Kartal. This study measures, compares, and evaluates spatial performance of formal and informal neighborhood spaces, but makes no formal attempt to draw normative prescriptive conclusions. The …

Northwest Arkansas Comprehensive Environmental Analysis And Regional Smart Growth Plan, Nick Cerra, Zac Prange

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

For the past two decades, Northwest Arkansas has experienced rapid growth and increased urban development; population projections see the continuation of these trends (Wiley, 2010). Environmental conditions in the study area make it particularly sensitive to the effects of urban development, while existing landscape hazards and nuisance land uses jeopardize the quality of the urban form. Despite these phenomena, there is no comprehensive land use analysis or development management plan for Northwest Arkansas. This study presents a comprehensive environmental analysis of three sub-watersheds within the Illinois River watershed in Northwest Arkansas. Based on this analysis, the authors recommend planning overlays …