R.I. urged to embrace ‘place-making’ as its priority

PATTY WEST, from the Ecological Monitoring & Assessment Program and Foundation of Northern Arizona University, speaks at the Sustainable Tourism Development Forum. /
PATTY WEST, from the Ecological Monitoring & Assessment Program and Foundation of Northern Arizona University, speaks at the Sustainable Tourism Development Forum. /

When it comes to place-making, Bob Billington thinks the United States could learn a lot from the way European and Far Eastern countries create places, whether they put any planning into it or not.
He recalls visiting markets in the town squares of small English towns and the nighttime markets in Taiwan, places that have evolved naturally from the locals’ desires and needs. Those places have subsequently become destinations for tourists, as well.
Billington, president of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council, said he thinks this concept of creating a whole place that residents and visitors can share eludes the United States because here we focus on creating destinations that make lots of money but don’t necessarily contribute to the wholeness of the place.
Often, those tourist destinations attract hordes of visitors that overrun a location and take away from the experience because they crowd the locals out. Similarly, when locals crowd out the visitors, it can take away from the experience. This is not sustainable tourism.
“We’re trying to create a new revolution in thinking about tourism development,” Billington said at a Sustainable Tourism Planning and Development Laboratory event hosted by the council on Oct. 25.
That new thinking is based on a model in which the goal of tourism development is not so much about increasing tourism dollars as it is finding a balance between what is good for the residents and what is good for the visitors. It’s also about taking the tax revenue generated from tourism and investing it in improving amenities for residents and visitors.
“I think we’re currently milking tourism in an unsustainable way to support other activities without investing sufficiently in place amenities,” said Christopher “Kip” Bergstrom, executive director of the R.I. Economic Policy Council and a presenter at the event.
But in order to change the spending of tourism revenue, there has to be a change in the mindset about tourism development in the state. And part of that is understanding that “sustainable tourism is about place-making,” Bergstrom said.
And place-making is about supporting local restaurants that support local farms and fishermen by buying their products. Place-making is about highlighting the vineyards, value-added products, the history and ethnic neighborhoods that make a region unique, Bergstrom said.
But it could also be as simple as adding a trash can, a bench, a decorative lamp post and hanging flowers to a street corner in front of a busy convenience store. That small corner of a town can become a defining place, said Ethan Kent, vice president of New-York-City-based Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit focusing on planning, design, education and research about place-making.
One key principle of place-making is that “people attract people attract people,” he said. But there does have to be enough activity to not just attract people, but keep them.
Kent said a great place, whether it’s a district of a city or a small town or a region of the state, must have 10 points of interest, attractions or activities to keep visitors engaged.
Billington said he thinks Rhode Island is ready for the success of this type of tourism, also becoming known as geotourism – a concept the state has embraced as its official policy.
But Bergstrom also noted that for place-making to succeed, it has to involve a collaboration between state and local government and the private sector. Zoning is an important part of that, he said, but there’s also a need to rethink development, working with the developers to avoid “cookie-cutter” projects. And it has to happen on a bigger scale, not just town by town.
“I think in Rhode Island the capacity to foster whole-place development at the local level is very limited,” he said. “We don’t have the resources to build that capacity in 39 cities and towns. What we need to do instead is build regional pools of capability that can then be shared by the towns.” •

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