A federal grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation will help project teams from Go Forward Pine Bluff and the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, with revitalizations of Pine Bluff’s downtown area, according to the university.
The UA has received a $548,492 Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods Grant toward the project. The grant makes Pine Bluff one of 132 communities sharing in a $3.3 billion grant program aimed at improving access to daily needs (such as jobs, education, health care, food and recreation), fostering equitable development and restoration, removing barriers to community connectivity or economic development, and prioritizing disadvantaged communities. Pine Bluff is the only community in Arkansas that will benefit from the grant, with the UA as the grant applicant.
In a news release Tuesday, UA said its Community Design Center and Go Forward Pine Bluff are leading a project team that also includes the city of Pine Bluff, the Southeast Arkansas Regional Planning Commission, Arkansas Department of Transportation, Pine Bluff Urban Renewal Agency and NOB A+D. NOB A+D is the only female minority-owned architecture firm in Arkansas, according to the UA.
The Community Design Center is an outreach of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.
The project is titled “Neighborhood Revitalization through Retrofit of Highway 63B in America’s Fastest Shrinking City: Pine Bluff, Arkansas”. The highway is known in Pine Bluff as South Olive Street.
“This collaborative project demonstrates the school’s commitment to the university’s larger land-grant mission and to serving the citizens of the state through design,” the UA said in its release.
The planning study, according to the university, supports revitalization of a 280-block downtown neighborhood through retrofitting of Olive Street. The university states the oversized corridor and “scale of its auto-centric land uses — now mostly large abandoned dead zones” accelerated economic decline due to what it calls corridor desertification rather than congestion.
Desertification, or the making of fertile land into desert, of more than 95% of the corridor’s area is the result of speeding, urban heat island effect, stormwater pollution, flooding, lack of equitable access and residential property value decline, according to the UA.
“The Reconnecting Communities Grant is a great opportunity to use urban design — driven by an ethos of repair — in creating high-quality living environments for populations that have suffered the downstream impacts of auto-dominated planning,” Community Design Center director Steve Luoni said in the release. “Our partnership with GFPB, the city and neighborhood residents will focus on a context-sensitive street approach that combined pattern language in art, architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. The arterial will be rethought as a place-based destination — like in the ‘tradition of great streets’ — without compromising traffic services.”
One of the project’s plans is to right-size a 1.2-mile segment of the corridor with urban infill land-use improvements between the downtown business district and Jefferson Regional Medical Center.
Planning challenges involve design within the context of rural small-city shrinkage, according to the UA. That would include co-creation of a redevelopment plan with socioeconomically disadvantaged residents.
Plans also include addressing long-term citywide capacity challenges through what the UA calls regional partnerships that emphasize collaborative and distributed leadership beyond the project.
This article was originally published by a www.arkansasonline.com . Read the Original article here. .