Sunlight pours through sliding glass doors, pooling across the leaves of a fiddle-leaf fig and the gentle curves of a midcentury modern chair. On days like these, the doors are left open so that the sprawl of RealReal-scouring students, artists, and professionals can sip their lattes out on the sidewalk and take in the view: an entire neighborhood of similarly decorated, similarly inhabited cafés, coworking spaces, and bookstores.
In recent years, gathering spaces like these have emerged in nearly every city, becoming key sites for in-person community-building in our isolated digital age.
College Hill has no shortage of these spaces. Ceremony and Madrid Bakery’s soaring glass walls dissolve the boundary between interior and street, flooding the space with natural light and autumnal hues.
Pass by India Point Park, 195 District Park, or even the Michael Van Leesten Pedestrian Bridge on a summer weekend, and you will find crowds practicing outdoor yoga in full view of passersby. These bodies, stretched in a downward dog backlit by Narragansett Bay, are a living tableau of wellness and leisure.
These public parks are what urban scholars call “third places,” meant to be freely occupied when not at home (the “first place”) or work (the “second place”). But in urban planning, nothing really comes free. Their occupants are those who can afford to live nearby. They have the aspirational lives that park and urban architecture are designed to center.
In philosopher Michel Foucault’s conception of the panopticon, visibility is a tool of control. The prison guard’s tower commands a view of every cell; the inmates, never sure when they are being watched, internalize this surveillance and discipline themselves.
But the design of College Hill’s gathering spaces inverts this logic entirely. Passersby do not monitor the people inside sipping matcha lattes and typing on MacBooks—they desire to join them. The glass walls are oversized vitrines, flaunting the café as a breathing exhibition of yuppie intellectualism. To be seen is the whole point. To be visible in these spaces is to signal that you belong to a particular class of people. You are creative, leisurely, and culturally fluent.
Not every community gets to be visible without consequence. In fact, many of today’s third places sit on land once home to Black and brown neighborhoods later erased through midcentury urban renewal due to implicit, heavily racialized understandings of spatial capital.
In 1946, Rhode Island passed the Community Redevelopment Act, forming the Providence Redevelopment Agency (PRA), one of the first of its kind in America. Four years later, the Slum Clearance and Redevelopment Act gave the PRA the right to acquire private homes through eminent domain in “blighted areas.” Many of College Hill’s most popular spaces were built on this displacement. India Point Park and the 195 District Park were the direct outputs of the “traumatic” I-195 relocation project, which displaced over 80 businesses and six residences.
Coffee Exchange was established after a huge community made up of primarily Cape Verdean immigrant families were displaced from their homes along Wickenden Street. Brown Bee’s mahogany-paneled walls warm Benefit Street only after government-accelerated gentrification. While the dominant narrative is that these communities were priced out by student housing, the upcharge on Fox Point homes actually began as a direct response to the threat of the PRA razing down the neighborhood for urban redevelopment. Affluent College Hill residents formed the Providence Preservation Society (PPS) to designate Fox Point as “historic.” This designation piqued the interest of private and public buyers, who bought out the neighborhood and reintroduced it to the market at unprecedented high prices.
Even the lesser-known Oak Bakeshop, about a 25-minute walk past Andrews Commons, is a testament to the racial undercurrents dictating which neighborhoods are considered “blighted.” The bakery, popular for Jewish pastries served on antique china, sits in the former Lippitt Hill area where residents were vacated following a 1962 development proposal.
To the then-residents, Lippitt Hill felt vibrant and livable. In a 2017 community oral history, former resident Deborah Tunstall reminisced, “We had a fish man, oil man, rag man, fruit man, and an ice cream man…We were poor but we didn’t know we were poor,” to the agreement of her former neighbors. It housed the rare sense of community that 20-somethings flock to Manhattan’s East Village in search of. The entire neighborhood was a third place.
So where did the residents of Lippitt Hill go? In St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, and even our comparably pint-sized Providence, residents were forcibly relocated into public housing projects—colloquially known as “the projects.”
Armed with new construction technologies, 1950s urban architects constructed brick high-rises with the intention of shielding occupants from the sight of passersby. Fluorescent lights, flickering from chronic disinvestment, replaced bay windows. The towering design isolated residents vertically, stacking families to make spontaneous sidewalk conversations and front-porch socializing impossible. Access was funneled through limited entry points, each checkpoint a potential surveillance site, while police circled the perimeter. Public housing residents become transparent to the state while simultaneously opaque to the public.
According to American University professor Derek Hyra’s Slow and Sudden Violence, architectural concealment of Black residents was an explicit strategy to combat white suburban flight and incentivize downtown business investment. The logic is painfully simple: White people perceive Black people gathered together as a threat. Lippitt Hill’s amenities would have been celebrated as walkable, diverse, and vibrant if occupied by white bodies. As it was, 650 homes were destroyed for not being “wholesome.”
Their residents were moved into public housing projects like Hartford Park. Featuring four 10-story high-rises, Hartford Park was a public marvel when it opened in 1953 as America’s first public housing project with an elevator. However, due to neglect and disinvestment, conditions grew unlivable by the 1970s. Other public housing around the city, like Manton Heights, the Chad Brown Apartments, Admiral Terrace, Codding Court, and Sunset Village, suffered the same fate.
Gradually, the harms of this architectural strategy were recognized. In 1968, Congress prohibited the construction of new high-rise public housing. An applaudable initiative began: to renovate the projects into liveable, centralized communities.
In Providence, the neighboring Chad Brown and Admiral Terrace apartments underwent a $16.5 million renovation from 1986 to 1989, constructing a park between the two apartments for its residents’ use. Complete with picnic tables, lawns, and two recently installed playgrounds, the complex seemingly lives up to its self-proclaimed title of “A Family Community.”
While the restructuring of low-income housing from vertically stacked to suburban and walkable is a definite improvement, a closer examination of Chad Brown’s layout reveals the limits of its liberatory promise.
The renovated courtyard design realizes Foucault’s panopticon even more literally than earlier high-rises. The apartments are arranged around a central gathering space, creating the exact architectural formation Foucault describes. Residents gathering in the courtyard are observable from surrounding management windows and security stations positioned to overlook the space. Visibility flows inward.
Unlike Ceremony’s glass walls, these courtyard gathering spaces remain architecturally opaque to passersby. They are sandwiched between public housing buildings, visible only to other tenants. The renovations created spaces for the congregation, yes, but only for those already contained within the project boundaries.
Geographical location reinforces architectural containment. Chad Brown, Codding Court, Hartford Park, and Manton Heights remain tucked away from College Hill life. They are spatially segregated from the city’s most aspirational, trafficked areas.
The PRA cannot erase the haunts of 1950s-era displacement. Photos plastered on its website of Hartford Park feature all the iconography of suburbia; mature trees, quaint green signage, two-story buildings, and even a silver SUV. But the original, ten-story Hartford Park still stands. It towers over its 1980s successors as a reminder that our government hid congregation done by Black and brown bodies. Back on College Hill, the highly visible architecture of our most beloved gathering spaces highlights the paradox that we, unlike College Hill’s displaced residents, get to be seen.