The stories echo one another: A riverfront city once bustling with industry and commerce falls into hard times as the world economy shifts. The downtown is abandoned, its buildings vacant and derelict. Then there’s a renaissance, built on arts, culture, innovation at local universities, and renewed interest in the city’s historic buildings and waterfront.
Providence and Liverpool may be an ocean apart, but the lessons they offer about urban regeneration – and the questions they raise about its long-term viability – are remarkably similar, the trustees of the Royal Society for the Arts found.
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So last week, for three days, the RSA brought together people from both cities, along with artists, civic planners, preservationists and other professionals from the United States, England and beyond, to look in-depth at both cities’ experiences.
The event, hosted by the Rhode Island School of Design, was a broad, conceptual discussion meant to stimulate debate, not devise a blueprint for the “right” path to urban renewal.
But Christopher L. Bergstrom, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council, which promoted the symposium, also described it as an opportunity for state and city leaders to make sure “we’re asking the right questions” as they plan for Providence’s future, and to identify potential pitfalls they need to avoid.
“One of the keys to success is to keep learning – never stop learning,” he said.
For attendees from each city, the event offered a crash course on the other’s history.
Liverpool has more than twice Providence’s population, and its successes are bigger and higher-profile: chosen as Europe’s Capital of Culture for 2008, designated a World Heritage City by UNESCO, and site of a pending £750-million, 2 million-square-foot project that is Europe’s largest regeneration scheme.
But many of the concerns the Liverpool crew described had a familiar ring: Downtown housing is exploding, for example, but it’s mostly luxury apartments, far too pricey for artists, young people and low-paid workers.
In Providence, architect Steve Durkee noted in one session, there are as many as 2,000 luxury apartments being built or planned to be built within 18 months, and no one’s quite sure for whom – presumably for Boston commuters for whom the prices aren’t excessive.
“And yet we also know that a half a mile away, there’s a dire need for affordable housing,” Durkee added. “There’s a real disparity there.”
Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline, however, said luxury and affordable development “are not necessarily opposed; we actually can and need to do both.” The key is to provide more money for local community development corporations, he said, and to ensure that when luxury developers get a break from the city, they contribute to an affordable housing trust.
Eddie Berg, artistic director of the British Film Institute Southbank, in London, and a Liverpool native who founded a major art and technology business there, asked the Providence group “who do you think you’re making the city for”: the residents? Tourists?
Berg noted that Northern England, where tourism is growing rapidly, is increasingly focusing development efforts on meeting that market’s needs, and that doesn’t necessarily coincide with the needs of local residents.
RISD President Roger Mandle said “in an idealistic way,” he would like to see the city developed for an 11-year-old child who has just arrived from a foreign land, and whose immigrant parents are “wondering what they’re going to do in this community.”
If Providence is properly developed, Mandle said, there will be jobs and economic opportunity for all. “If the rest of the city is working, that child too will be cared for.”
Berg also asked what, if anything, local leaders would change about Providence.
Cicilline said he’d like “a good, safe, easy-to-use transportation system,” so people could move through the city more efficiently, because “it’s becoming increasingly unpleasant to get through the city.” He said Providence is looking to develop a metropolitan transportation plan, and he mentioned a streetcar or light rail system as potential solutions.
Bert Crenca, founder and director of AS220 and now a member of the Providence School Board, said his priority would be to change the school funding system to be “better and more equitable,” yet what he sees is the state actually moving away from previous years’ commitment to boosting education aid to the city.
Durkee agreed that the schools are key, and that they’re now a weakness of the city. “My friends keep moving away” because of the schools, he said.
One topic that caused great controversy all through the event was the role of modern architecture. Will Alsop, a prominent British architect and artist, said Providence has “some wonderful heritage,” but it falls woefully short when it comes to newer buildings.
Cicilline had said great buildings are not a priority for him – “buildings by themselves are buildings; you need great neighborhoods; cities are people,” he said – and Alsop found this absurd.
Mandle, who has faced criticism for famed architect Jose Rafael Moneo’s design for RISD’s Chace Center – derided by a critic as “a glass cube on a brick box” – said Providence has lacked a comprehensive vision into which to fit modern architecture.
“If we had simply plunked down great buildings without thinking of the context, I think that would’ve been a great mistake,” Mandle said.
But Alsop disagreed: “The danger is the vision itself,” he said, “because the vision is always changing.”
