THE FUTURE OF URBAN PARKS IN PROVIDENCE: STUDENT RESEARCH AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR DOWNTOWN DEVELOPMENT A report by students in ANTH 1236: Anthropology in and of the City (Urban Anthropology) Brown University, Fall 2015 Submitted on February 8, 2016 to Cliff Wood, Executive Director, Downtown Providence Parks Conservancy Participating Students: Gray Brakke, Audrey Chisholm, Zola Doyle, Laura Durand, Greg Garcia, Tim Ittner, Alina Joharjian, Julie Kwon, Nadia Larasati, Cameron Osborn, Paige Parsons, Alexis Rodriguez-Camacho, Sean Scott, Monika Sobieszek, Khanittha Wang, Kayla Weststeyn, Jessica Zambrano Instructor: Rebecca Louise Carter, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies Teaching Assistant: Clayton Kindred Special Acknowledgements and Thanks: Cliff Wood, Executive Director, The Downtown Providence Parks Conservancy Department of Anthropology, Brown University Urban Studies Program, Brown University The Swearer Center for Public Service, Brown University CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 SECTION I - BACKGROUND Relevant History and Context 2 The State of the City 5 The I-195 Recovered Land: History and Development 7 Research Questions and Methods 9 Field Sites 11 SECTION II – RESEARCH FINDINGS Summary of Findings 12 Recreation 14 Aesthetics 15 Place Attachment and Memory 16 The Perception of Downtown 17 On Being Homeless in Kennedy Plaza 18 Participants’ Visions for the Future 21 SECTION III - PROPOSALS Student Ideas for Development of the I-195 Land: Summary of Overarching Themes 22 Student Ideas: Rethinking the Knowledge District and Subsidized Housing 23 Student Ideas: Multi-Purpose Use and Increased Connectivity 25 CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS 25 INTRODUCTION To study the city is a complex endeavor, situated at the intersection of numerous overlapping networks of environments, cultures, and forces. Anthropology, likewise, is a people- based discipline, whose concerns lay in the holistic and comparative study of the past, present, and future of human life. When combined, these two inquiries create the discipline of “urban anthropology.” Much more than simply a subset to anthropology, urban anthropology seeks to understand the lived experience of the city while simultaneously taking into consideration the complexities of the city as a whole. With ethnographic fieldwork as a primary method, the urban anthropologist moves between the micro and the macro, constantly taking note of the ways in which change patterns and shapes (and is shaped by) lived experience. In the fall semester of 2015, a course on urban anthropology was convened at Brown University. Titled, “Urban Life: Anthropology in and of the City” (ANTH 1236), the course was cross-listed in the Department of Anthropology and the Urban Studies Program. The course was an in-depth exploration of the history, practice, and concepts of urban anthropology, providing students the opportunity to act as urban anthropologists themselves. As part of the “Engaged Scholarship” program at Brown University, run by the Swearer Center, the course had an interactive component in which students were invited to apply their knowledge of urban anthropological methods to the study of the local community. Our partner for this applied work was the Downtown Providence Parks Conservancy (DPPC), directed by Cliff Wood. In visiting the class early in the semester, Wood proposed a project focused on the continued revitalization and development of public space, particularly parkland in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Wood expressed a desire to understand the ways in which local residents could establish and affirm personal relationships with the parks, particularly through knowledge of local cultural history and heritage. The research that students conducted over the course of the semester thus began with Wood’s suggestions as a starting point for exploring the role of Providence’s parkland in the city’s histories and memories, as well as its potential involvement in future memory-making. Before beginning this research, students engaged in an in-depth study of the history of urban anthropology as well as an overview of significant concepts within the discipline. We read important histories written by prominent figures in the field (Hannerz 1980, Mullings 1987), exploring the ways in which the definition and practice of urban anthropology has grown and expanded since its inception. Particular attention was given to understanding the “spatial turn”, a key moment in the discipline’s history, when scholars turned to spatial theories to better understand the political economy of place. The city was thus considered as a “space of flows” (Low 2014, 26). We then moved on to the exploration of key concepts and processes that affect and shape urban life -- issues of race, class, gender, and citizenship (Nonini 2014). This grounding was crucial in sensitizing us to the complexities of urban anthropological work. Donald Nonini writes, for example, that the “constant tensions” that underlie the work of the anthropologist—such as questions of the researcher’s positionality to cultural politics—are at “the heart of the ethnographic work that most urban anthropologists find themselves engaged in today.” As such, “[I]t is time for urban anthropologists to frankly acknowledge such tensions…if, that is, urban anthropology is to survive as a discipline into the twenty-first century” (Nonini 2014, 2-3). The next phase of the class required us to apply the knowledge we had just learned to the study and analysis of key ethnographies and films. Our readings included Ida Susser’s study 1 Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood, which depicts the ways in which New York City’s 1975-1978 fiscal crisis affected the lives of residents in a working class neighborhood of Brooklyn (Susser 2012 [1982]). Accordingly, we also viewed the documentary My Brooklyn, which maps the process of redevelopment, displacement, and gentrification in Downtown Brooklyn (Anderson 2012). These works were helpful examples of urban ethnography, and they served as comparative references for later discussions regarding redevelopment and urban life in Providence. Finally, the last section of the class focused both on conducting fieldwork and reading three recently published ethnographies by urban anthropologists, which took place in different cities around the world. Each book was paired with a fieldwork assignment that directly related to the individual methods featured within the books themselves, allowing us to compare our own research and fieldwork experiences with those that the authors encountered and related in their texts. The first, Dangerous or Endangered?: Race and the Politics of Youth in Urban America, by Jennifer Tilton, focuses on conflicting attitudes towards youth in the neighborhoods of Oakland, California, and how these conflicting attitudes have reshaped politics and the role of the state in contemporary America (Tilton 2010). Our first fieldwork assignment, drawing on Tilton’s use of archival and historical data, focused on the laying out of an essential historical context for our research in Providence, including the demographics of the Downtown area and its surrounding neighborhoods, as well as the history and continued process of urban redevelopment. The second book, In Search of Paradise: Middle Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis by Li Zhang, depicts the way in which an emerging middle-class became increasingly geographically spatialized and socially defined through widespread urban redevelopment and the privatization of housing in Kunming, China (Zhang 2010, 3). Inspired by Zhang’s effective use of field notes, interviews, and descriptive writing, the second fieldwork assignment asked each member of the class to visit a local park within Providence and interview a park visitor, in order to learn from local residents about their experiences within Providence’s parks and their visions for continued development, in the Downtown area and across the city. Our last reading, Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City, by Aseel Sawalha, details the large-scale urban-renewal project that occurred in downtown Beirut in the aftermath of civil war, and the conflicting responses of various groups in the community (Sawalha 2010). Sawalha’s work inspired our third field assignment, which asked us to create our own plan for Providence’s redevelopment based on research that we had gathered. Throughout this last part of the class, in which we concurrently read assignments and conducted our own fieldwork, the class discussed our findings in great detail and compared our own various interpretations of the current state of the Downtown area and the Providence city-scape as a whole. This writing, divided into three sections, is the culmination of all those discussions; a presentation of our findings from research and study throughout the semester. The first section provides a condensed history of the Providence “Renaissance,” an overview of the current state of the city, and a description of our research methodology and sites. The second section summarizes the overarching themes gleaned from our ethnographic fieldwork, and provides an overall sense of some of the concerns and interests of Providence’s park-goers. Finally, the third section is a cumulative description of our recommendations regarding redevelopment in the Downtown area, based on what the class determined to be key issues in need of further attention. 2 The work we have done this past semester would not have been possible