Kip (Christopher) Bergstrom, Executive Director, Rhode Island Economic Policy Council

I think one needs to make a market for city, town, and village centers — for authentic places. Fortunately, I think the market is there to be made; there are people now who are tired of working and living in these kinds of empty places — an office building on an interstate surrounded by tract housing. I think creative people, who make up an increasing percentage of the workforce, don't want to live in that kind of place; they want to be where there's life, a street, diversity, and a sense of place.

Rhode Island is fortunate in some ways to have missed out to a large extent on development in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, because the prevailing architecture and urban design of those decades was pretty awful. It destroyed great places and made these kinds of non-places.

What we have of quality of place is in part a consequence of decades of good historic preservation and good land conservation. Now, we can build on that and use it to enhance our economic prosperity without losing what makes us distinctive.

It doesn't just happen; it takes leadership. The public sector must use its development powers to show the way and to unleash the resources and energy of the private sector. In the past, the state's approach to partnering with the localities has been very fragmented. There's no one place that has as its focus and mission supporting a development of place. We are now trying to bring all those pieces together.

There's also a role for academic institutions, particularly the Rhode Island School of Design, which is stepping up to the plate to be a design resource for our localities and their efforts to nurture authenticity of place.

The Providence renaissance is a classic example of this. Providence is emerging as the hub of the creative economy, and we want to fan that flame. In Providence, we have a group of folks who have come together in an initiative to make the city one of the key hubs of the creative economy nationally.

The habitat for this is the city's richly textured buildings of scale with streets that connect and that are filled with places where people gather spontaneously to interact.

The idea is to define a geography that links the city's neighborhoods — the Jewelry District, the South Side, the West Side, Smith Hill — to create a multifaceted, unified place animated by a vibrant economy of science and the arts.

For a place to be authentic, it also needs to be diverse. Places where everyone has the same income, the same occupation, the same race or ethnicity, become unreal. Mixed places are real places, and affordable housing needs to be a dimension of this. Affordable housing gives mixed-use places vitality and life; it makes them whole and vital and authentic.

Affordable housing needs to be repositioned as a pillar of place rather than as something done strictly for social equity or other reasons. Taking this approach will give people a more compelling reason for supporting it.