PROVIDENCE — The outpouring of support for Central Falls, the first city in state history to go through federal bankruptcy, has continued to blossom.
On Tuesday, urban studies and design students from the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University unveiled the “Central Falls Comprehensive Master Plan,” to transform the 1.3-square-mile urban landscape into a picturesque oasis dotted with scores of trees, bikeways and gardens.
The plans are so ambitious it’s hard to imagine that the state’s most densely populated city with 19,400 residents wouldn’t soon become a very different place.
Elizabeth Dean Hermann, a professor of landscape architecture at RISD, said that as many as 100 students from Brown, RISD and Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia, will flood Central Falls this summer with plans to help turn around the city that emerged from bankruptcy less than two years ago.
An influx of Colombians first settled in the city in the 1960s.
Hermann said she decided on Central Falls after speaking to Mike Ritz, executive director of Leadership Rhode Island, and meeting with Mayor James A. Diossa and Steve Larrick, the city’s planning director.
Diossa, at 28, is the youngest mayor in the state, and Larrick is a recent graduate of Brown.
“It’s a very young government that is learning through doing,” Hermann said.
She said that the youthful city leaders, including two female city councilors who are under 30, appeal to her students who feel comfortable working among other young people with innovative ideas.
Emily Maenner and Renata Robles, urban studies students at Brown, kicked off the presentation on Tuesday with RISD’s Design Social Innovation Entrepreneur Shop. They talked about seizing on the city’s small size and diverse population that is more than 60 percent Latino. Their proposals included developing the massive Conant/Coats Clark Thread Mill Complex into an enterprise zone, creating an educational core near Central Falls High School and middle school and expanding the landing enterprise zone in the north end of the city along the banks of the Blackstone River.
The north end of Central Falls borders Cumberland.
Two months ago, Roger Williams University hosted a similar program with its students to find ways to get tenants into the Conant/ Coats Clark mill complex.
Maenner and Robles also discussed beautification efforts on Cross, Summer, Cowden and High streets that run between the city’s two primary corridors: Broad and Dexter streets. Those plans include planting scores of trees, widening sidewalks and building marked bike paths on Roosevelt Avenue near the river.
“We want to create and use these spaces,” Maenner said.
The recent announcement that the Osram-Sylvania light manufacturing firm on Broad Street will soon close presented an opportunity for the city. Maenner and Robles said that they would like to see the building house artists’ studios with greenhouses and urban gardens on the property behind the manufacturing plant.
They also said that it could become a meeting place for local merchants to regularly discuss ideas to improve the local economy.
The students also talked about re-opening a movie theater on Broad Street that is now home to a Christian church and moving the Adams Memorial Library to Coggeshall Tower next to City Hall on Broad Street.
Another RISD student, Andersen Wang, had ambitious plans to turn an urban stretch of Illinois Street, where the police and fire complex are located, into lush green parks with trees and teach local residents about the benefits of horticulture. Those benefits include landscaping front yards to make the curbside view more appealing.
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