The Blackstone Valley Tourism Council and the mayors of Central Falls, Cumberland and Pawtucket plan this month to announce a Broad Street Regeneration Initiative aimed at enhancing the street aesthetically, while making it function better as a destination.
“We’re going to make a whole place,” said Robert Billington, executive director of the tourism council. “We’re going to use civic tourism, geotourism and whole-place thinking and bring it to the best implementation along Broad Street.”
That means they will be asking business owners questions such as: how could the street be improved for businesses there? Do they need different parking alternatives? Do the restaurants need different zoning laws so that they can invite guests to dine al fresco in the summer months?
The initiative also will support the redevelopment of the Ann & Hope Mill into residential units for up to 600 people, Billington said. And all of it will revolve around the hope that within two years there will be trains stopping on Broad Street at the former Pawtucket/Central Falls train station.
The train service creates an opportunity for Broad Street to become a destination as opposed to the hodgepodge eyesore critics claim the street has become, he said. The initiative has received $30,000 from the three cities and a $50,000 Preserve America grant from the federal government to get started.
Billington said it will be a good example of the kind of place-based tourism the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council has been touting over the past three years through its Sustainable Tourism Planning and Development Laboratory, which recently announced a new conference called “Civic Tourism II” that will be held Oct. 15 – 18 in the Blackstone River Valley.
Civic tourism is about inviting the citizens of a community to help decide if, how and for what purpose tourism is developed in their community, said Dan Shilling, director of the federally funded Civic Tourism Project. He’s a teacher at Arizona State University, coordinator of the first civic tourism conference in Prescott, Ariz., in 2006, and a speaker at the recent BVTC event.
The mission of civic tourism is to reframe tourism’s purpose from an economic goal to a tool that can help the public enhance what they love about their place.
Like the concept of geotourism, which touts sustaining the geographical character of a place, civic tourism is “not about attracting more visitors,” Billington said. “It’s about stepping back and looking at what the community wants, making it a great place to live and work … then the visitors are going to come.”
A good example of the opposite of civic tourism is a place such as Tombstone, Ariz., Shilling said. About 600,000 people visit the town of about 1,100 residents each year. Visitors basically go to the town to walk around for two hours and spend an average of $8 per person.
Though it might benefit the town economically, Shilling said, that kind of tourism model takes away from the quality of life of the residents living there, thus creating a form of tourism that isn’t sustainable in the long run.
A good example of civic tourism would be the work of an organization such as HandMade in America, which supports craftsmen and craftswomen in western North Carolina as a means to introduce visitors to the culture, history and natural environment of the state, while creating a strong sense of place.
Similar efforts have been made in the Blackstone Valley, Billington said. Wanting to create a strong sense of place was the driving force behind the tourism council’s purchase of tour boats for travel along the Blackstone River and the creation of the Samuel Slater Canal Boat Bed and Breakfast.
Shilling encouraged the attendees at the civic tourism event to “talk about community planning with tourism as the tool to get there.”
That is what’s going on in Blackstone Valley, further evidenced by the planned Broad Street Regeneration Initiative, Billington echoed. •
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