Image credit: Google Earth Pro, 2026
Northwest Arkansas is hosting CNU 34 this year, and it is not an accidental choice. This is one of the fastest growing regions in the country, and one of the few still deciding what that growth should look like.
For planners, designers, and local officials asking whether CNU 34 is worth the trip, Northwest Arkansas offers something rare: a fast-growing region where the outcome is still unsettled. Within a short distance, you can see downtown reinvestment, greenway infrastructure, corporate urbanism, and rural land pressure all playing out at once.
Northwest Arkansas is not one long growth corridor. It is a polycentric region—cities, towns, and rural edges trying to grow together without growing alike. Highways are good at moving people and terrible at explaining places. From the window of a rental car on I-49, it can look like a single success story repeated at different exits, a sequence of new buildings, tidy interchanges, and just enough branding to suggest coherence. Step off the highway, though, and the illusion breaks quickly. Each place starts to argue for itself. It is a family of centers—Bentonville and Fayetteville, yes, but also Rogers and Springdale, and smaller towns beyond the corridor whose main streets, downtowns, campuses, and job centers still shape the region in distinct ways. Last year in Providence, CNU asked what it takes to make a metropolitan region coherent. This year, in Northwest Arkansas, the question gets sharper: can a fast-growing region stay connected without growing generic? That is the story I'm interested in.
Regionalism can get mushy in a hurry. It can mean shared infrastructure, shared markets, shared headaches, or just a polite agreement that neighboring towns should stop pretending they have nothing to do with one another. The polycentric region is more demanding. It asks whether a place can function as a whole without asking every part of it to grow the same way. Distinct centers. Clear edges. Real connections. Country left open between them. CNU gave that question a whole Congress in Pasadena in 2005, when “the Polycentric City” still sounded slightly theoretical, and Léon Krier spent decades sketching versions of the same argument with more clarity than many zoning ordinances ever manage. His death last year made those drawings feel newly elegiac. But Northwest Arkansas is not compelling because it illustrates an old idea. It is compelling because the idea has escaped the seminar room. Here the polycentric region is not a diagram. It is a land-use problem, a mobility problem, an economic problem, and, increasingly, an infrastructure bill.
Image source: Leon Krier, 1988
The corridor tells part of the story, but not of the whole region of Northwest Arkansas
Begin with the obvious places. The obvious places deserve it. I suggest following the Congress route—south to north with side trips.
Fayetteville
Fayetteville still works like a real college town rather than a campus with spillover. Dickson Street runs straight into the daily theater of the city, while the University of Arkansas and the Square remain close enough to argue productively with one another. If you have even a passing interest in classical architecture, make time to see the Michael G. Imber Phi Mu sorority house. If you are thinking like a planner, spend some time with the Dover Kohl downtown Fayetteville plan before you arrive. It will change how you read the place. On paper that sounds ordinary. In practice it is rarer than it should be.
College towns across America have spent decades perfecting the art of separating the institution, the nightlife district, and the civic center. Fayetteville still lets them support each other. Go late in the afternoon and watch Dickson Street fill up, then slip off a few blocks where the noise drops and the cottage courts, side streets, coffee shops, and neighborhood pubs do the quieter work of making urban life feel normal rather than curated.
Springdale
Springdale, long treated as the city the highway passes through on the way to somewhere shinier, has been doing the harder thing: making a downtown again. The Downtown Springdale Master Plan has not remained a document on a shelf. It has already produced Emma Avenue streetscape work, Walter Turnbow Park at Shiloh Square, mixed-use infill, and the renovation of Tyson’s original headquarters building, now joined by the Tyson Foods Emma Avenue office, which put 400 IT employees into a revived downtown landmark on the Razorback Greenway. That is a better story than “Springdale is improving.” It is a city reconnecting a working economy to an actual center. Walk Emma Avenue and you can see the shift in real time, older storefronts holding their ground while new uses quietly move in. It does not feel finished. That is the point.
Side note—go to Onyx at 100 E Emma Ave for a coffee and make your way to the fabulous chocolate lab in the basement for samples and gifts to make your family happy you were away. Tell them Hazel sent you.
Rogers
Farther north, Rogers and Bentonville show two different versions of urban confidence. Rogers is the urban repair story. Railyard Park sits at the edge of historic downtown, but its real trick is refusing to behave like an edge. The design uses the rail corridor to celebrate its history as a railroad town and to turn what could have been leftover territory into civic space. Add the bike culture around the Railyard Bikepark and the Railyard Loop Trail, and downtown Rogers starts to feel less like a preserved district and more like a city still adding rooms to itself.
John McCurdy, Community Development Director for Rogers and CNU Local Host Committee co-chair shared this about the park: Its five acres in downtown Rogers, was designed by Ross Barney Architects with Walton Family Foundation funding. It won the 2023 AIA Regional and Urban Design Award, the 2022 Fast Company Innovation by Design Award, and a 2025 ULI Americas Award for Excellence Special Mention. It drew 15,000 people to the Butterfield Stage in its first concert season alone. It connects to mile zero of the Razorback Greenway. It should be an exceptional opening party.
Insider tip: The opening party is across the street from The 1907. The adaptive reuse of this building is amazing. Check it out when you're at the party: if you can score a table at Heirloom – that's worth the trip; this building is home to the Onyx mothership, a 2026 James Beard winner – go in to make your nose happy; and stop for a nightcap at Yeyo's Mezcalería Y Taqueria. Or dinner. Or both.
Bentonville
Bentonville is a unique and instructive case: a small-town square growing up in public. Rarely do we see a city develop from small town to city within a generation or two. The Quilt of Parks is literally rewiring downtown by connecting six public spaces through the A Street Promenade, while just beyond the square the new Walmart Home Office has been designed not as a sealed corporate compound (I’m looking at you, Apple) but as urban fabric, with trails, public streets, mixed-use frontages, and the Razorback Greenway running through it. Plenty of fast-growing places talk about downtown. Far fewer keep expanding it.
I'm particularly impressed that the City just unanimously adopted their new Community Code–a transect-based unified development code. We were fortunate to be on the DPZ team that built the public process, the Land Use Plan, and the code; but the most impressive part is how staff took ownership of it, engaging with anyone who had questions or concerns, and collaborating with other city departments to make it their own.
I don’t know where to start with all my favorite haunts in town. Preacher’s Son for dinner if you remember to reserve in advance. It’s an impressive adaptive reuse, with a perfect location, and an excellent menu. In the basement is one of the regional New Urbanist drinks and debates spots - The Undercroft. Another semi-subterranean cocktail and tasty grazing location is Lady Slipper with an amazing Kehinde Wiley on the wall.
All of that is exciting. But none of it is the whole region.
Stop at the corridor and Northwest Arkansas starts to read like a very successful strip. It is more interesting than that, and more useful. The Regional Strategy prepared by DPZ CoDesign, PlaceMakers, and Crafton Tull for the Northwest Arkansas Council makes the point plainly: Northwest Arkansas is defined as much by its small towns and open landscapes as by its recent growth, and the region already contains more than twenty existing or emerging centers, plus another twenty potential future ones. That wider map is the one worth exploring.
The Northwest Arkansas centers you miss if you stay on the highway
Siloam Springs
West of I-49, the region changes. Siloam Springs is the clearest example. It is not simply “out there,” a pleasant place people mention once Bentonville and Fayetteville have taken all the oxygen. It is a center in its own right. Main Street Siloam Springs notes that more than 20 buildings were renovated, more than 25 businesses opened, nearly 100 net new jobs were added, and roughly $11 million was reinvested in downtown over an eight-year stretch. The city’s Downtown & Connectivity Master Plan by Dover Kohl, explicitly ties downtown to surrounding neighborhoods, Sager Creek, John Brown University, and regional assets. And the jobs are not imaginary. Siloam’s major employers include Simmons Foods, Cobb-Vantress, McKee Foods, and John Brown University. That is not a scenic detour. That is a functioning small city.
Prairie Grove
Prairie Grove makes the same argument at a smaller pitch. The downtown improvement project on Buchanan Street is the sort of work that never makes anyone book a flight on its own: drainage, water lines, sidewalks, streetscaping, road improvements. Then, a few years later, everybody enjoys the street and thinks charm was always inevitable. Lincoln, named in the Regional Strategy’s map of centers, extends the lesson again. Not every center needs metropolitan intensity. Some need only enough civic confidence, enough public realm, and enough daily life to remain recognizably themselves. That is the real hierarchy of centers in Northwest Arkansas. Not a classroom taxonomy, but a working regional structure: downtowns and city centers, main streets, neighborhood centers, campuses, rural crossroads, and the working lands between them, each doing a different job and keeping the others from dissolving into sameness.
That last part matters more than the region’s branding suggests. The Regional Strategy calls the alternative “growth without community,” which is one of those polite planning phrases that deserves to be much franker. What it means is familiar enough: more rooftops, more lanes, more square footage, more land consumed, and somehow less civic life in the process. Northwest Arkansas still has enough real downtowns, small towns, and rural edges for a different outcome to remain possible. That is precisely what makes the region interesting right now.
Growth pressure in Northwest Arkansas is no longer theoretical
All of this would be a pleasant theory exercise if Northwest Arkansas were not growing fast enough to turn ideas into consequences. But the metro now has 622,177 residents and is projected to pass 1 million by 2050. Residents already identify the shortage of affordable housing, traffic congestion, and destruction of green space as the region’s biggest challenges. The Walton Family Foundation’s 2025 housing update adds the numbers behind the mood: since 2019, median multifamily rent has risen by nearly 50% and home prices by 70.9%. The region is not merely growing. It is being tested.
The infrastructure has started making the same argument with less charm. Bentonville’s wastewater development fee exists because growth-related sewer investments are no longer hypothetical. At the same time, Bentonville is moving forward with a Razorback Greenway reconnection project between Bentonville and Bella Vista after years of closures, because hundreds of daily users have been cut off from a route that functioned as real regional infrastructure. That pairing is useful. The sewer system is saying growth must pay for itself. The Greenway reconnection project is saying growth must connect to something better than another arterial.
That is also why smaller housing types belong in this story. They are not side quests for architects and housing nerds. They are practical ways to add homes in places that already have streets, utilities, civic memory, and some chance at walkability. In a region worried about losing both affordability and character, that matters. The best new housing will not all come from greenfield expansion, and the best way to keep older centers relevant is to let more people live in and around them.
Why CNU 34 belongs in Northwest Arkansas
This is what makes CNU 34 unusually well placed. CNU’s annual Congress now draws 1,500-plus attendees, and the audience cuts across precisely the fields that tend to collide in fast-growing regions: planning, architecture, urban design, engineering, development, real estate, and research. CNU 34 is also structured to match the lesson. It is explicitly multi-locational across Bentonville and Fayetteville, while the Congress focus calls for applying the Transect across a region in a way that supports “multiple centers and clear edges” and preserves the distinction between urban and rural environments. That is not just event logistics. It is the thesis.
There are not many Congresses where the case study is a whole regional condition unfolding in real time. Within a short distance, CNU 34 can offer the classic college town, the reassembling downtown, the rail-town repair story, the small-town square under metropolitan pressure, the downtown main street with a serious jobs base, the Greenway as regional infrastructure, the global headquarters embedded in urban fabric, and the still-unfinished argument over where growth should land and what should remain rural. CNU says attendees will even be able to tour the new Walmart Home Office, which is not a bad way to study how a global corporation can either detach from a city or, in this case, help thicken it. Seen that way, the region is not just the host. It is the workshop.
Your assignment, should you choose to accept
The useful way to approach CNU 34 is to treat the hotel as a base camp, not a boundary. The obvious places deserve their due. They are obvious for a reason. The sessions and tours will cover much of the curriculum. The elective begins after that: an hour on a square, a walk down a main street, a meal in a neighborhood center that will never make a cover slide, an Emma Avenue block, discovery of Johnson Square with Ward Davis, a westward detour, a look at where jobs cluster, where the Greenway truly works as infrastructure, where suburbia falls into Anywhere USA habits, and where rural land still does the quiet work of keeping one community distinct from the next.
Northwest Arkansas is not interesting because it is booming. Plenty of places are booming, and most of them end up looking more alike with every passing year. The difference here is that the outcome is still unsettled.
The region has enough intact centers, enough working landscapes, and just enough discipline to decide what growth reinforces and what it erases. That decision is not abstract. It is showing up in sewer fees, housing costs, street networks, and whether the next project connects to a place or just occupies land.
That is what makes this Congress worth the trip. Not the tours, not the sessions, not even the setting, though all of those will deliver. It is the chance to watch a region make choices that other places have already made, often poorly, and to see whether a different outcome is possible.
Come for the Congress. Pay attention to the region. The more interesting question is not what Northwest Arkansas is. It is what it decides to become while you are here. If you are paying attention, you can watch that decision happening on the ground, one block at a time.