As a tourism industry leader, Robert Billington should be concerned about attracting visitors and their dollars to his region in northern Rhode Island. But right now, he’s not worried about it too much.
“Tourism, in my point of view, has to be less about the visitor and more about the place,” the president of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council said last week. “Tourism has to be less about the money the visitor is going to bring and more about how we’re going to enhance the community.”
Billington is part of a growing movement in Rhode Island toward what has been dubbed “geotourism” and its emphasis on creating authentic places that are distinctive and attractive not only to visitors, but to the people who live and work there.
This week, the council is hosting a forum for tourism officials to learn more about “place-making,” where a region’s culture, environment, heritage and aesthetics are preserved and celebrated by its residents.
Advocates of place-making say the concept is essential to creating sustainable tourism – differentiating a destination with character that can’t be copied from an overcrowded tourist trap.
“Tourists are attracted to places where the locals sort of own and love and care for the place,” said Ethan Kent, vice president of the New York City-based nonprofit Project for Public Spaces, one of the scheduled speakers for Thursday’s forum.
The place-making approach also works to avoid a situation in which tourism destroys the character of a region, and where residents are at odds with visitors, advocates say.
Kent’s group has recently completed a study of New York’s Times Square, which Kent said is overrun with tourists to the point that residents largely stay away. “The locals no longer see it as theirs,” Kent said. “There’s no space to walk.”
And even for many tourists, the landmark has become one-dimensional, a place to go and stand, then move on. The Project for Public Spaces made a series of recommendations, including widening sidewalks to allow residents and tourists to flow more easily.
In Rhode Island, the move toward geotourism, or sustainable tourism, got a boost in May when Gov. Donald L. Carcieri signed the National Geographic Society’s Geotourism Charter, formally endorsing its principles.
And last month, several organizations, including Preserve Rhode Island, the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, the R.I. Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission and the Rhode Island Historical Society, met to begin the process of crafting a unified geotourism plan for the state.
Christopher “Kip” Bergstrom, executive director the R.I. Economic Policy Council and a speaker scheduled for Thursday’s forum, said place-making is not solely about developing tourism. If it’s done right, it can make an area attractive to businesses, too, and assist in economic development matters such as job creation.
The policy council defines the goal of place-making as creating a location that is “full of life, diverse and distinctive in their built form, natural environment and social networks; empowering of their residents; transit and digitally connected, water and energy efficient; and disaster resilient.”
“There’s an art and a science to creating places like that,” Bergstrom said. “I don’t know if there’s any place that I can think of that rings every one of those bells.”
A great place is also one with “stories to tell,” he added. “What makes a place interesting to visit is that it has stories to tell, and the locals tell those stories.”
And when it comes to place-making, Rhode Island has a head start, Bergstrom said.
“You can’t instantly create a great place, it takes a while for it to unfold,” Bergstrom said. “If you already have some great places, you have a competitive advantage. And I would argue that Rhode Island has a lot of them.”
He said the Blackstone Valley is just one of them.
The Blackstone Valley Tourism Council has been attracting visitors to northern Rhode Island since 1985 by touting the region as the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution.
Along the way, the council has successfully operated boat tours along the Blackstone River, imported a double-decker bus from England for additional tours and established a bed and breakfast in a canal boat on the river.
But last week, Billington listed some other developments that have assisted in the valley’s place-making, including the Blackstone River Bikeway and the renovation of several old milling buildings.
Ohio-based developer Forest City Enterprises Inc. at the Ashton Mills in Cumberland, for instance, preserved much of the mill’s historic features while building condos inside.
“They didn’t have to go that route,” Billington said. “But we sold that concept that they needed to go that route because on the other side of the river was a state park and the Kelly House museum. One side of the river needed to be sympathetic to the other.”
“Those are place-making things,” he added. “That helps enhance the place, and that helps us tell the story.”
Billington emphasized that sustainable tourism isn’t about attracting hordes of cash-carrying tourists.
“More is not always better,” he said. “Mass tourism isn’t necessarily what every community should have. But we’re groomed to feel that more money means more success, and that isn’t true for tourism development.” •
