Plural Communities: A Cultural Mapping Project + A Framework Plan for Cherokee Village, Arkansas

Authors

Community Design Center

Files

Abstract

What do urban designers do with culture? How might we redevelop a mid-century modern planned community through the mapping of cultural influences that shaped it? We explored memory and heritage central to cultural mapping and its participatory-based forms of public inquiry. 54 drawings integrate maps, folklore materials, archived media, photographs, and new drawings into five synchronic cultural frameworks that shaped Cherokee Village—Native American heritage, Ozark pioneer and folk heritage, camping and scouting, midcentury planned communities, and regional modernism in design and planning.

Cherokee Village was developed within a mid-twentieth century planning ethos that valued uniformity and the universal, where a master plan fixed a singular development strategy to create market demand for homesites. To re-energize the Village’s development potential, stagnated for decades, the proposed Framework Plan introduces the pluriversal: development conceived through multiple economic and social narratives. Or to use the well-known Zapatistas phrase: “A world where many worlds fit.” Within the future development scenarios proposed for Cherokee Village, the Framework Plan simply asks: What are the various ways in which we might want to live within the vision of Cherokee Village?

Description

Cultural Mapping Project

What happens when a city’s relationship to its history, one shaped by settler culture and mostly forgotten, is introduced into the planning process? Cultural mappings support a separate framework plan commissioned by Cherokee Village (population: 4,900), a 23-square-mile rural planned community developed in 1955. The research describes the interconnectedness of landscapes, histories, and social geographies of the Arkansas Ozarks surrounding one of America’s first planned retirement‐based recreational communities. The series of 54 digital drawings (25 shown) integrates maps, folklore materials, archival sources, and photographs, with new drawings, outlining five diachronic cultural frameworks that shaped Cherokee Village—Native American heritage, Ozark pioneer and folk heritage, camping and scouting, midcentury planned communities, and regional modernism in design and planning. Content development was a collaborative inquiry among residents, community organizations, folklorists, historians, with artists and urban designers as mapping facilitators. This critical cartography raises controversial issues like cultural appropriation of Native American heritage and the absence of social diversity in midcentury communities—otherwise unapproachable in conventional planning processes.

Mapping cut across dominant histories (developer economics, middle-to-upper-class homeowners, modernism) and minor hidden histories (Native American ontologies, folk/settler culture, camping and youth scouting), showing how advantage/disadvantage is generationally reproduced in both physical and add to the Village’s existing assets. Yet, in line with John Cooper’s original vision, the Framework Plan upholds the order of the natural environment including conservation of drainage and retention sheds (and other hydrological functions) and forest canopies, and integration with hillside topographies. Also, ecological principles are incorporated into the design of transportation systems including streets and greenway networks.

ISBN

978-1-7350990-3-3

Publication Date

2023

Document Type

Report

City

Cherokee Village, AR

Keywords

planned community; hospitality; camp meetings; urbanism; pattern languages; Ozarks regional modernism

Disciplines

Architecture | Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis | Demography, Population, and Ecology | Environmental Design | Environmental Engineering | Landscape Architecture

Awards

2024 American Architecture Award
2023 LIV Hospitality Design Award—Landscape Design
2023 The Plan Awards: Urban Planning Future Finalist
2023 The Plan Awards: Sports and Leisure Future Finalist
2023 Block, Street & Building Design Competition: Honorable Mention
2022 AN Best of Design Awards Winner: Unbuilt—Landscape, Urban Design & Master Plan

Comments

Sponsor
National Endowment for the Arts

Client
City of Cherokee Village, Arkansas

Project Team:
University of Arkansas Community Design Center (UACDC)
Stephen Luoni, Director and Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies
Claude M. Terral III, Project Architect
Elizabeth Wehr, AIA, Project Architect
Tarun Kumar Potluri, Project Designer
Isabelle Kay Troutman, Project Designer
Kayla Ho, Project Designer
Lauren Lamker, Project Designer
Victor Hugo Cardozo Hernandez, Project Designer
Shail Patel, Project Designer
Linda Komlos, Administrative Analyst

UACDC Students
Mary Beth Barr
Rachel Cruzan
Carlos De La Torre
Cody Denton
Riley Jackson
Cathleen Lee Gomez
Harriet Morrison
Cecellia Musgrove
Saba Rostami-Shirazi
Reagan Wiggins
Leopoldo Zepeda

American Land Company
Jonathan Rhodes, Community Developer

Northeast Arkansas Regional Intermodal Authority
Graycen Bigger, Director

Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts, University of Arkansas Libraries
Virginia Siegel, Arkansas Folk Arts Professor of Practice

Cherokee Village Visitor & Welcome Center
Betty Stokes, Director

Ozarka Community College
Angela Phipps, Campus Director

Cherokee Village Historical Society
Mary DeWitt, Museum Curator

Cherokee Village Suburban Improvement District
Joe Waggoner, Commissioner
David Webb, General Manager

Old Kia Kima Preservation Association

Arkansas Arts Council

Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism

Citation

Community Design Center. (2023). Plural Communities: A Cultural Mapping Project + A Framework Plan for Cherokee Village, Arkansas. Community Design Center Project Reports. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cdcpr/14