Adaptive Reuse as Planning Instrument: Financing, Preservation, and Exceptional Actors in Providence, Rhode Island

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, Providence, Rhode Island, has seen a proliferation of adaptive reuse projects converting historic industrial and commercial structures into housing, institutional space, offices, and mixed-use development. This thesis asks what Providence demonstrates about the capacities and limitations of adaptive reuse as a mechanism for advancing urban planning goals. Drawing on three case studies, South Street Landing, Paragon Mill, and the Peerless Building, it argues that adaptive reuse can produce planning outcomes through redevelopment financing, preservation review, and the act of reuse itself, but only when exceptional actors are able to activate and sustain the process. These actors activate capital stacks that link financing sources to specific public outcomes. Historic tax credits, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, public loans, and institutional leases shape outcomes including preservation, affordability, housing production, institutional growth, environmental remediation, and downtown reinvestment. At the same time, these projects depend on actors capable of navigating regulatory review, coordinating public and private partners, and carrying complex projects through long periods of uncertainty. The Superman Building serves as a limit case, revealing the fragility of a model dependent on a single coordinating actor. Ultimately, this thesis argues that adaptive reuse should be understood as a planning instrument and identifies the redevelopment mechanism through which it advances planning outcomes in Providence, a first step toward making those outcomes more systematic, reproducible, and transferable across post-industrial cities.