MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 29 Mar 2008
NWA: A sprawling wasteland
Join
me in a fantasy: Imagine that
Northwest Arkansas cities had been governed for the past 50 years by the kind
of "new urbanist" city planners who helped guide Fayetteville toward
its Downtown Master Plan and City Plan 2025, and our state had been governed by
the likes of Oregon's former Governor McCall who in the 1970s introduced
Oregon's land use planning system including urban boundaries around the state's
cities. Our cities would have
remained within tight boundaries, built upward not outward, and supported mass
transit, bicycling, and walking instead of new highways. Passenger rail, express buses, and a
tree-lined Highway 71 Boulevard would have connected the cities, while
longer-distance travelers could have enjoyed a beautiful uncongested I-540 that
truly bypassed the cities, leaving a mile of open farmland between the highway
and the cities.
Imagine
that the shops, restaurants, and theaters of the Northwest Arkansas Mall, CMN
Business Park, Pinnacle Hills, the Highway 71 strip, the Highway 62 strip, and
all other automobile-oriented businesses were instead located within the city
centers, leaving only neighborhood-oriented establishments operating outside
those centers. Each city would
have a compact and thriving central business district, compact and walkable
residential areas, and a well-defined edge, with agricultural land, parks, and
trails between the cities. People
who wanted to could do without automobiles and instead devote the $8000 per
year normally spent on each car to other pursuits. Parking lots would be far less numerous. The Fayetteville square would flourish
with a mix of franchised and locally-owned establishments. North College Avenue would still be a
stately boulevard lined with trees and old southern homes.
This
is a fantasy based on real-life models.
Cities like this exist.
They are called Portland, Oregon; Boulder, Colorado; San Luis Obispo,
California; Freiburg, Germany; Copenhagen; Stockholm; and many other cities in
the U.S. and Europe.
Now
confront this fantasy with present reality: Imagine that all the shopping, most of the restaurants, and
most of the theaters were removed from our idealized city centers and scattered
willy-nilly throughout the region.
With most of the commerce sucked out of them, would our city centers
continue to flourish? Would
Northwest Arkansas gain or lose in overall quality of life? Although some might prefer today's
sprawling reality, I think that most would prefer the new urbanist vision.
Last
week I visited Pinnacle Hills Promenade, the outdoor shopping mall on I-540 in
what is still nostalgically called "Rogers." According to its designers, one of the
inspirations behind Promenade was the Plaza shopping area in Kansas City. But Promenade is no Plaza. The Plaza is a place where people
live. It's full of apartments,
condominiums, and hotels that crowd around and over the shops, it's permeated
with parks, waterways, trails, and museums. Cars are stored discretely in camouflaged parking
structures. Ward Parkway, not an
expressway but a beautiful tree-lined boulevard, runs through it and is
integrated into the city by means of stop lights, cross streets, and traffic
circles.
Promenade
on the other hand is part of an interstate highway development strip. I-540 is certainly no tree-lined
boulevard, not integrated into the local shopping scene, and is in fact soon to
expand to eight lanes. You get to
Promenade via an interstate off ramp leading to several acres of flat parking
encircling the shopping complex like an encroaching desert that threatens to
suffocate the buildings within.
Once you make it through the parking lot to Promenade's sidewalks, it
does feel a little like a city center, with a hint of the Plaza's
Spanish-influenced architecture.
But nobody lives here.
Promenade is even more sterile than the centers of the formerly-great
American cities that now stand empty every night and every weekend when the
businesses close and everybody drives back to the suburbs leaving only a few
impoverished street people behind.
The irony is that Promenade is not a formerly-great city. It was actually designed to be sterile
from the beginning.
If
it had been integrated into downtown Rogers, Promenade would have been a
welcome addition to that city. But
that would have required vision, and real planning. The automobile, and conventional suburban thinking, seem to
have destroyed such possibilities in Northwest Arkansas.
Fayetteville
let its own downtown slip from its grasp when its city council approved
development of the Northwest Arkansas Mall and the huge CMN Business Park
extending from the Mall southward to Fulbright Expressway. Soon Penny's, Woolworth's, Lewis
Brothers' Hardware, the Campbell-Bell department store, two movie theaters, a
drugstore, and other establishments deserted the square. Like Promenade, the mall is a sterile
shopping center strangled by highways and acres of parking, but unlike
Promenade it is not even open to the real outdoors.
It's
hard to see what can be done to repair the sprawling wasteland we're making of
Northwest Arkansas. It's James
Kunstler's "Geography of Nowhere" (a classic book, recommended to all
Americans) writ large. With the
entire region a free-for-all for rampant development, the best strategy is to
try to maintain a few zones of sanity in the middle of a few cities such as
Fayetteville.
One ray of hope: the automobile, which is central to this disaster, is due for re-evaluation in the next several years. As easy oil runs out, worldwide gasoline demand increases, and global warming heightens, many people will desert their cars for more rational forms of transportation. Northwest Arkansas might then begin to appreciate the beauties of mass transit, starting with commuter rail. This could reverse the current process of decay and set us on a better path.