New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village Prototype | Fayetteville, Arkansas | 2018

Architects: University of Arkansas Community Design Center
Associate Architects: WER Architects/Planners
Client: Serve Northwest Arkansas
General Contractor: The Marshall Group of NWA
Photographers: University of Arkansas Community Design Center

Reconciling the Informal and the Formal Amidst a national housing crisis, an estimated three million Americans'—one percent of the population'—experience homelessness annually, and more than 850,000 are sheltered nightly. Since emergency shelter capacity is limited, informal housing has become the sole adaptational action for obtaining shelter despite non-conformance to city codes. Unfortunately, most informal solutions have resulted in objectionable tent cities and squatter campgrounds where the local response has simply been to disband homeless populations and move the problem around. While many tent cities pop-up in unincorporated areas to escape city regulation, their distance from transportation, employment, housing, and social services creates access hardships. How might informal settlements be reconciled with formal regulation to create a permittable solution under most city codes?

'New Beginnings' is a new prototype homeless transition village based on the awareness that transitioning out of homelessness requires both shelter and wraparound social services. Re-building independence is a communal, holistic endeavor focused on achieving equilibrium in social and mental health. 'New Beginnings' is the first settlement to prototype a shelter-first solution using a kit-of-parts that is replicable and permittable in other communities. The temporary village design was granted a five-year building permit by the City of Fayetteville (after 1.5 years of workshopping solutions with City staff, the planning commission, and fire marshal) to test the village's performance in health, life safety, and transitioning among the homeless populations.

Not unlike Uber and Airbnb, this project highlights 'informality as a mode' for effecting urban solutions within stubborn regulatory environments. Indeed, the informal has emerged as an important design epistemology in advanced market economies given economic polarization and the need for distributive justice. The informal pioneers' holistic design approaches that push the formal to address new socio-economic challenges.

Since the transition village will eventually be dismantled, the low-impact village is designed as if it were a carnival, here today and gone tomorrow with minimal site disruption and quick set-up elsewhere. Construction processes eliminate the concept of waste through a flexible kit-of-parts, component subassemblies, and "dry" reversible joinery made for disassembly and adaptive reuse by other communities.

The three village component systems, "Secure Perimeter," "Sleeping Units," and a "Community Porch," are prefabricated off-site by volunteer organizations and flat-packed for transport and assembly. Thirty insulated and heated sleeping units are supported by the Community Porch aggregating shared sanitation, waste, cooking, and social services.

The company has documented and published the code obstacles and village prototyping methods in an open-source manual format for use by communities nationwide struggling with the same issues and obstacles. The transition village is part of a new habitology, an emergent class of socially-directed permanent real estate products known as "pocket neighborhoods," "co-housing," and "tiny home villages." They offer new forms of cooperative living, understanding that well-being is local, shared, place-based, and determined primarily by surrounding social and ecological capital. We cannot be healthy alone.