Can affordable housing harmoniously coexist with the aesthetic values of small towns and rural areas? Must safeguarding the environment and creating economically vital urban waterfronts always be mutually exclusive values? RISD launched City State, The Urban Design Lab during the spring 2005 to discover answers to these questions and other quandaries facing cities and towns today. The Urban Design Lab at RISD collaborates with city and state government, local NGOs, community groups and other higher education institutions to tackle real-life issues surrounding sustainable city planning, economic development and environmental stewardship. The Lab enables RISD to contribute academic expertise to complex urban conditions and use open meetings, workshops, symposia, publications and media coverage to stimulate public discussions, empower community residents, inspire developers and offer guidance to local officials.

The director of the Lab is Professor of Architecture Anne Tate, who has worked with dozens of local communities, regional authorities and private developers on sustainable master plans from Maine to Florida. In 2003-2004 Tate served as Special Advisor on Sustainable Development to the Office for Commonwealth Development, State of Massachusetts where she authored the pioneering Sustainable Development Principles and created the state’s Transit Oriented Development Initiative in partnership with the MBTA.

In the spring of 2005 the Lab at RISD undertook its first project — in collaboration with the Housing Network and Grow Smart — to produce illustrative plans for integrating affordable housing into smaller towns and rural areas. The Lab’s current project, the creation of models of urban and high density village design that can form the nuclei of an ecologically and economically healthy, beautiful public realm along the Blackstone Valley corridor, is already underway. In a fall 2005 Innovation Studio (sponsored by a RISD Academic Enrichment Grant), RISD students and Tate, Charlie Cannon (Industrial Design) and Colgate Searle (Landscape Architecture), conducted phase one analyses of existing land-use, infrastructure, planning documents, law, water quality and other indicators of environmental health. Over the next two years experts from the private sector and public officials will collaborate with students on problem solving through design to create relevant standards and practices for the Blackstone Valley that can be disseminated nationwide as a guidebook for other waterfront communities.

The Lab builds on research (funded by a Rhode Island Foundation planning grant) that was conducted by architecture faculty member Brian Goldberg in 2003. The City State Board of advisors includes Kip Bergstrom, Director, The Rhode Island Economic Policy Council; Kenneth Payne, Senior Policy Advisor, Rhode Island State Senate; Curtis Spalding, Executive Director, Save the Bay; Hillary Brown, Founder of New Civic Works; Harriet Tregoning, Executive Director, Smart Growth; and other professionals committed to the Lab’s mission.