Framework Plan for a Riverine Commons and Institute | Fayetteville - Arkansas | 2023

Architects: University of Arkansas Community Design Center
Lead Architect: Stephen Luoni
Client: Watershed Conservation Resource Center
Photographers: University of Arkansas Community Design Center

The Watershed Conservation Resource Center (WCRC) is restoring a 98-acre riparian wetland landscape near downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas. The WCRC and the city co-own and manage the site as a commons under a permanent conservation easement. The WCRC will integrate riverine ecology with culture, heritage, and science in an inclusive and accessible environment that promotes public education and stewardship. Heritage landscapes with outdoor exhibitions will interpret the riparian lifeways of Native American, African American, and Euro-American settler populations who foraged and cultivated food and fiber along the region’s waterways. A collaboration of urban designers, architectural educators, ecologists specializing in stream restoration, and state archeologists have developed content for interpretive exhibits, habitat structure, and edible landscapes highlighting regenerative resource management technologies among indigenous and settler lifeways.

The Framework Plan operates at the intersection of anthropology, ecology, and design in developing a lasting and robust riverine knowledge fund across space and time. The commons is a shared management structure for collective benefit and entails horizontal cooperation among non-governmental, grassroot, and public-sector actors alike. Specific to cultural and natural resource systems, the commons flattens and socializes governance, in this case facilitating watershed stewardship through equitable and resilient community decision-making.

The Framework Plan combines watershed restoration with architecture and urban design to house a river education center, a visitor interpretive center, walking trails, passive recreation facilities including bird watching and canoeing, an inter-city water trail, and outdoor heritage exhibitions. Taking cues from indigenous knowledge systems, the emergent appreciation of urban riparian ecologies is inspiring the development of such river institutes globally. River institutes raise historical awareness of the various civilizing processes harnessing riparian landscapes across different eras of human occupation.

The architects still lack development vocabularies for this new typology, despite that river institutes are akin to museums in cultural and educational importance. River institutes model best practices in urban-water interfaces, two systems usually in conflict. Watershed urbanism is critical in reversing urban stream syndrome‚ and common dysfunctions related to flooding, erosion, and the general depletion of ecosystems. A key objective is to restore the 17 life-affirming ecosystem services delivered by healthy ecosystems. Three principles guide the development of the Riverine Commons and Institute, and its unique visitor experience. The commons facilitates professional and volunteer restoration of riparian functioning in the river and its associated wetlands. Reclamation of ecosystem services is occurring through the restoration of rivercane patches and Ozark meadows, removal of competitive invasive plants, rebuilding of healthy spoils, and reconstruction of stream banks.

Native American, African American, and subsistence Euro-American settler populations in the Ozarks were riparian cultures. Outdoor exhibits recall indigenous lifeways where the primitive is reconceived as innovative, technologically sophisticated, and environmentally regenerative. Foods are technologies cutting across social, ecological, and economic spheres. Demonstration gardens curate indigenous plant assemblages and growing strategies, recalling their various levels of symbiosis with nature.