What were your major obstacles?
The scope of the cultural planning component was ambitious; timing was the greatest challenge for the planning team. The City engaged Dreeszen & Associates 6 months into a yearlong funding period. The pace required the cultural planning team to strictly adhere to the project timeline. We will share how the City of Providence integrated transportation, economic development, zoning, and cultural planning; mapped cultural resources; applied creative placemaking strategies; and planned to integrate arts, culture, and heritage into five high-volume transit corridors in mostly working-class and immigrant neighborhoods of Providence, Rhode Island in a relatively short period of time.
Who or what was instrumental in overcoming these obstacles?
Craig Dreeszen is not only a thoughtful cultural planner but a gifted facilitator. He tactfully, and strategically, helped keep the project on schedule.
What top three suggestions would you give to others attempting a similar project?
1. Planners should identify, contact, and collect data from as many existing data sources as possible before beginning the cultural asset inventory. Integrating data from multiple databases can be very time consuming as it can require extensive reformatting and it is important to build this time into the workplan accordingly. It may be more flexible, efficient, and effective to use technology that employs crowdsourcing to gather information about cultural assets, such as the Places Matter database, http://www.placematters.net/. Our observations about the corridors led us to take an expansive approach to defining cultural assets; in retrospect, asking community members to define cultural resources would be an even better way to assess the cultural life of a corridor.
2. Employ multiple assessment instruments -- especially when the project timeline is constrained. In developing the corridor-specific themes, the cultural planning team interviewed experts, worked with the Project Advisory Committee and corridor stakeholder groups, collected input at public meetings, convened focus groups, and solicited responses through an online survey. All assessment tools are flawed but by providing multiple entry points partners have the best chance of capturing the community's voice in a relatively short period of time.
3. The strength of this partnership from the beginning was the partnership between the City's Planning Department, Arts, Culture + Tourism and the state transit agency. The project built upon existing planning documents previously published by each of these lead partners. The project team worked together closely to communicate and align strategies and tasks. We anticipate that the initiatives and decisions about resource allocation that result from this project will similarly be a collaborative effort.
