If you've stepped out in downtown Fayetteville or Bentonville this week, you might have noticed several hundred people in lanyards walking around. These aren't your usual conference goers, though. This group of urban planners are here specifically to get a taste of Northwest Arkansas's infrastructure, transportation, housing and general design. Ozarks at Large's Daniel Caruth explains.
“Registration is up one level. It's over by all the books.”
In the lobby of the Graduate Hotel in downtown Bentonville, Josh Boehm stands behind a fold-out table with maps and pamphlets while directing a guest to a conference room. Boehm is a volunteer for the Congress for the New Urbanism, which is holding its 34th annual meeting in our region this week. And though he's directing other guests today, he's not a local. The design and development consultant from Fargo, N.D., says he's thrilled to be in Northwest Arkansas for what he's calling a different kind of Congress.
"Yeah, definitely. Like, first day, but it feels different. Like, Providence was very walkable. It was definitely like an old East Coast city, whereas here, it actually kind of feels like where I'm from in North Dakota, more so, but way prettier. Like, don't get me wrong, way prettier here. But much more car-centric, but changing for the better. I can see the evolution happening. It kind of makes it fascinating as a place of change versus what it probably was in the past. Whereas like Providence and the East Coast and even Cincinnati was like, this place was already like this and we're returning it. This place feels like less of a return and more of a progression, if that makes sense."
The Congress for the New Urbanism, or CNU, which brings together urban planners from across the U.S., is usually held in major metropolitan centers. Previous sites have included Providence, Cincinnati, Charlotte and Oklahoma City. CNU President Mallory Baches says this Congress, which takes place between Fayetteville and Bentonville, is definitely unique.
"We have been referring to it as a multi-city Congress. This is a place where there's, you know, four larger cities and 30-some smaller towns all around the region. And for us, that's part of why we want to come to this place. We really want to understand how Northwest Arkansas is doing that, and how our ideas about walkability and sustainability and equity, and how the design of the built environment affects all of those — we want to see how those ideas apply here in Northwest Arkansas."
She says participants, which range from city planners to architects, engineers and even local government officials, are excited to come to the region because in many ways it's more representative of issues that other communities across the U.S. are facing today. But it's also what she calls a fascinating case study on rapid development.
"Certainly, y'all know that the region is on a lot of lists and a lot of publications, and it gets talked about a fair bit in the urbanist world. Folks that are interested in cities and how they grow and evolve — they want to know about a region that's growing as quickly as Northwest Arkansas is, but they also probably have some hesitation on whether that growth is happening successfully for everybody in the community. And I think that is the sort of discernment that Congress goers bring. If we can leave a lasting impact on the region where the walkability improves, the quality of life improves, the connectivity between communities improves, then we've really done our job."
One issue that the Congress is hoping to highlight is one that participant Braden McBroom, a planner with the City of Bentonville, thinks about a lot: public transportation.
"This week, they have a couple of buses running on a schedule. The buses are running from Bentonville Square to Fayetteville Square and then also to some of the events. And one of the first things that my boss, the planning director, said was, 'Why don't we just have that all the time?' So like doing a trial run of a regional bus route. I mean, I'm sure the bus route could be optimized, but just even doing it for this event, and it being a bunch of urbanists — I hope that would kind of spark the conversation a little."
To move all of the nearly 1,300 participants, Baches says CNU has employed several charter buses that run scheduled routes connecting Fayetteville to Bentonville each day.
"We know that you already have transit with Ozark and that the university moves students around and that there's the Razorback Greenway, which is a way to move between communities. We recognize that, but we also need to get people from square to square. And what we see is that there's this incredible, walkable, historic fabric in each one of these communities that allows people to get off transit and move around those communities by foot. What we are trying to replicate is how a transit system would move you between those nodes and give you the opportunity to experience multiple cities in the same day. That's the sort of privilege that we get to have because we're a weeklong event, and we recognize that. But what we hope is that we're modeling what the region could accomplish with a lot of hard work and a lot of intention and some investment — a lot of investment — that it would take to get that sort of system in place."
Baches' hope is that this Congress will be more than a professional development conference for those attending, and actually help to address the growing pains Northwest Arkansas residents are feeling. Residents like Isaac Stevens, who works for an architecture and engineering firm in Rogers and serves on that city's planning commission. He says he's hoping to take away solutions for big issues like infrastructure and affordable housing.
"What are the policy decisions that can be made to ensure that more housing can be built in the places that we want it to be built, that allow for existing infrastructure to serve those homes, so that we are setting ourselves up not for just a future where we have housing abundance in our region, but also that that infrastructure can be paid for with the tax base that we've built, instead of overextending ourselves and sprawling out into the Natural State."
And Baches says you don't have to be an urban planner to take part in CNU this year. The organization is hosting a first-ever public engagement day for anyone to learn more about the New Urbanism movement. It's an all-day drop-in event happening at Fayetteville Town Center.
"We're hoping that a lot of folks that come by the farmers market might want to take a walk in and see what's going on. What will happen there is over the course of the day, we're going to have speakers both from the region who are talking about their work here and what they're proud of, and we're also going to have speakers from all over the country who are talking about the big ideas that CNU advocates for. We're going to have folks talking about just why New Urbanist ideas and urban design in general matters to people's quality of life. We're going to have a speaker talking about growth and how municipalities can manage growth in a way that's fiscally responsible. But we're also going to have folks from here in the region talking about things like pre-approved plans in planning departments. That's a way that we're giving back — we hope — to the community, just sharing, understanding and learning with the community. One of my favorite things about an open house is that no matter what I'm there to talk about, I always come away learning something from the folks who have joined the room."
The 34th Congress for the New Urbanism continues through Saturday and concludes with that free community open house at the Town Center in Fayetteville, beginning at 8:30 a.m.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
