BY ZACH MORTICE
Reinventing Vilonia uses a network of public green spaces to link disaster shelters. Image courtesy of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center.
Plans for the small town of Vilonia, Arkansas, by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center (UACDC) assert the primacy of public green space as the center of traditional urbanism: town squares on formerly abandoned lots, generous boulevard streetscapes on what had been pedestrian no-man?s-land, and new neighborhoods with pocket parks. But in doing so, the director of the UACDC, Stephen Luoni, and his team learned how to use this network of outdoor civic space to meet a far more pressing need.
In 2014 a tornado flattened much of the town of 4,000, destroying or damaging hundreds of structures and killing 16 people in the area. And Luoni?s plan uses these urban green spaces as links in a chain of disaster shelters. The UACDC?s plan, Reinventing Vilonia, calls for a system of buried shipping containers that act as tornado shelters, installed into public green spaces near the town?s center. It?s the latest UACDC proposal to win an AIA Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design, and it?s the prolific UACDC?s 13th such honor. Here and elsewhere, Luoni?s design center has built a celebrated body of urban research by asking critical questions of little-studied places, namely the rural and exurban South. By meeting client communities on their own terms, the UACDC has become a master at revealing demand for...