The Comprehensive Planning process for the City has reached its final stages — and for months, Providence residents, elected officials, and organizations (including PPS) have been focused on advocating for as strong a Plan as possible. 

As the draft Comp Plan goes to a City Council vote, PPS decided to sit down with Joe Mulligan, the City’s director of planning and development. Mulligan was appointed by Mayor Brett Smiley in March 2023. About a year and a half into the job, here’s what Mulligan had to say about his past career and current vision for Providence.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your path to Providence. How’d you get your start in urban planning, and what has your career path been?

I was trained as an architect, and have progressed through my career into projects of increased complexity and increased scope and the natural iteration of that from architectural detailing to thinking about municipal and regional strategies. That has been the arc of that career over time.

I started out in a traditional architectural environment, and many of my career changes are a result of not only the progression or advancement or ambitions of doing more on a larger scale but also the vagaries of the economy and the political landscape. 

I started in the private sector, working in a traditional architecture firm, and then during a recession in which there were lots of layoffs and attrition in the industry, made a jump over to the public sector, where at a very young age, I was entrusted with lots of responsibility and lots of resources. I was [with] a group called the Economic Development Industrial Corporation, and my task was effectively military-based conversion in what is now downtown Boston, in a lot of maritime and industrial and environmental remediation. It included utility work, rail lines, ship repair facilities, berthing facilities and manufacturing and production facilities and tenant coordination. 

Then [I] advanced through that into the Boston Redevelopment Agency, which further increased my scope of responsibility citywide for primarily industrial and commercial and development activities, including remediation — site prep for contaminated properties, including where the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center sits, and coincidentally, areas in Roxbury with sites similar to what you’ll find here in Providence, [like] electroplating manufacturing sites, which would later be the location of projects that I was responsible for later in my career in a very different capacity. I moved to New York for a while and then came back, got a Master’s at the Kennedy School in Public Administration, and then actually ran for City Council in Boston in 1999, which didn’t pan out — probably mercifully. 

So I went back to the Redevelopment Agency, [but] took another leave of absence, where I worked for a friend who was a state representative. He was deployed under NATO peacekeeping, and he was a Jag [Judge Advocate General’s Corps] in the army… So [during my] leave from the City, [I] helped manage the 18th Suffolk district in his absence during his deployment, and then ran his reelection campaign, which was successful.

Then returned to the BRA, then left and went to a boutique development entity that focused on nonprofit and institutional users. We did a lot with the Archdiocese of Boston, as they were closing many of their parishes, and we would help fulfill the social mission of the disposition of their property — if they closed the parochial school, we put in a charter school. If they closed the parish hall, we’d put in a community center or senior center. And if they closed a rectory, we’d look for a group home or some type of transitional housing. 

We also had private sector clients, including one or two who were in the music industry. We were very niche real estate development and real estate consultants, so we could find [temporary locations and prominent locations for things] like Big Apple Circus and Cirque du Soleil. We had access to City Hall. We were kind of a cohort of the Redevelopment Agency in the city just based on relationships, and that parlayed into working with a group that put on weekend music festivals. They were the third largest promoter in the country — [they were responsible for] Austin City Limits and … Lollapalooza in Chicago — and we were trying to help find them locations in Boston. We also had another client who was Warren Buffett’s son… He was in the music business, and we helped him find a location for his performance.

Then I got an offer from [then Boston Mayor] Tom Menino to come back to city government. I was a bit reluctant to do that, but he would put me in charge of all the design and construction of the city’s facilities. [That included] every police station, fire station, school community center, administrative building — I think we had buildings from the earliest days of the United States, like Faneuil Hall. 

I managed the largest public works project in the city since the development of City Hall and City Hall Plaza in the ’70s, which was the Bruce Bolling building, now Nubian Square in Roxbury, which incorporated two historic structures. It was a pretty innovative incorporation of long-abandoned but prominent and important buildings into a larger composition that now houses the Boston Public School Department headquarters. 

We [created] a very innovative, collaborative, open workspace environment on the first floor for public use, retail and restaurant use, and open spaces in which the community could convene — kind of an interior public square, if you will, for part of the neighborhood of Boston that had been disenfranchised over the years and had a lot of socioeconomic headwinds against it. 

We also renovated the [Boston Central Library in Copley Square]… We also repositioned the Philip Johnson Building, which was historically protected, and found a way to adapt it for current and future uses in a very significant way. Both of those projects got lots of awards and accolades and national recognition, but [as did projects for] community branch libraries. 

Boston Society of Architects has the Halston Parker Medal and Award for the most beautiful building of structure built in the Boston area within a period of 10 years. In six and a half years, I got about five nominations for individual projects [for that award], I think four of which we won. So in a very short period of time, [I was involved in creating] some of the most beautiful structures in Boston. 

And then [came a] regime change — a new administration, new priorities, [so I] transitioned out of the capital construction division and went to work for an organization called MassDevelopment, which is a statewide public finance agency for the Commonwealth. I was selected in the first cohort of Transformative Development Initiative fellows. [There were] three of us, and I went to a city called Lynn, which is on the North Shore, on the waterfront, and spent four years there working on trying to reposition them through any means that we could, whether it was real estate, economic development, arts and culture, storefront improvements, transportation improvements, coordination with different state agencies. I also won a Rudy Bruner Award for urban excellence there — the work was primarily with a group called Beyond Walls that came in with an international mural festival that is now, I think, getting close to 10 years. I think over 60 murals [were done] in that area, and we did a lot of work on decorative and enhanced lighting and illumination, some of which is going to be a seed for some of the work we’re going to try to do here in Providence, in our arts and cultural improvement for offerings for the city.

After that [I did] a quick stint at the MBTA in their transit-oriented development group, and my focus area was in the seaport district — Kendall Square in Cambridge and along the Mass Pike and Allston Brighton. And in two years, I had a portfolio of $4 billion worth of development, much of it in life science and biotech of buildings that were on, adjacent, or straddled MBTA infrastructure, including a role as a project manager for two subway stations in Kendall MIT, both of which were very innovative and highly successful. So having a wide range of exposure to all elements of the built environment, but not only working to do it effectively, but to bring beauty and excellence into all aspects of the built environment.

So with all of this Boston and Massachusetts-specific expertise, why Providence? Why did you decide to take this job as the City’s Director of Planning and Development? 

If you took a culmination of all those experiences and then being in Boston, realizing that [my] skill set was really now being applied to polishing the apple for very wealthy entities — I felt I had reached a level of achievement after 30 years in Boston, in the area. If you ask most planners what a dream job would be if they had to create it from scratch, the answer they’d come up with would be being responsible for planning and development for a city the size of —  and with all the amenities and benefits and opportunities of — a place like Providence, wherever that might be. I think if you delve even further, most people in my industry would jump at the opportunity to be in a position like this, in this particular place — the city of Providence.

What’s your vision for the city?

My vision is to engage and work with the community in the business world and hear from them on where they think the city needs to be. To observe its practices in the past, to embrace and accentuate what has been positive, and to move away from what has been negative or inactive, and to help the city move forward at a very critical time — not only in Providence’s history but in all cities around the world in a post-Covid environment in which people work and live in fundamentally different ways than they had a very short period of time ago. And to confront larger global forces including economic costs and housing shortages and innovations in retail and street activation and consideration of what’s happening in our commercial centers, and find a way to quickly determine a path in which we can pivot from the trajectory we had been on maybe just a few years ago, and have been waiting and watching to see how this was all going to play out. But at this point, making a determination and projection of where cities are going and how Providence can differentiate itself and lean into its strengths, lean into its history, lean into its creativity, and make this a model for cities of this size into how they confront the challenges of the future while reaping the benefits of their prior development [is a major goal].

PPS: What do you make of Providence so far? And do you have a favorite place in the city?

My favorite place is where we’re sitting right now [at 444 Westminster], where we come in to work with a very talented group of professionals and colleagues who are all committed to making Providence the best-run city in America and supporting the leadership in their vision and the Mayor and working with the community to find that common ground — even if they might not be aware of it entirely right now, but to help provide that vision. And to work collaboratively to move people forward in a direction that would benefit all of us, and bring all along for the journey and the prosperity and the opportunity that lies ahead of us.

Any other favorite places?

That would be the equivalent of asking me which of my children I love the most! There are so many. I am continually impressed by the quality of so many things that I see, including the culture, the cuisine, the architecture, the historic fabric, the neighborhoods, the people, and the location of the city in terms of its proximity to so many other wonderful adjacencies. And I think another element that the city has become somewhat detached from over the decades is our relationship to Narragansett Bay.

I’m afraid if I say it [to avoid driving people there]…but if you want to ask me, you can find me at Nick-A-Nees in the Jewelry District. Wonderful on any given night.

How do you think about balancing economic growth and development with maintaining culture, history, and affordability for a long time for residents in Providence?

That’s a delicate balance — some of that we can affect and other aspects of that we have little to no control of. But the most important thing is engagement with the community, which I think a good model of that has been the Comprehensive Plan process in which the staff has had over 80 community engagement activities, in which we are listening to getting feedback, and hearing from residents and business owners and even visitors about what they like the most about Providence, what they’d like to see happen, what they fear could happen. 

The way and the attention and the level of detail and effort that we put into this Comprehensive Plan in order to position this city effectively for managed growth over the next decade while respecting our past and respecting what’s good and great about Providence is, I think, a manifestation of the approach in which you are clear with your objectives and are communicative to as many people as you can [be] about the direction we’re going on, and then encouraging people to determine their position in that path in bringing the resources that are needed in order to ensure that we minimize displacement. And if you are aware of where we have set the compass points on this voyage, you can begin to plan accordingly for our collective futures in which we all are able to enjoy the benefits of that, minimize the downside, and share in a hopeful prosperity.

Speaking of which — what’s your philosophy on community engagement throughout the planning process?

In the arc of my career, there has never been an instance in which an initiative or project has not benefited through intense and regular interaction and engagement with the community. And I’ve worked in places where some would argue there’s too much public input. And I think what we have in Providence is a wonderful balance of engagement and advancement of projects, and we have made commitments to improve our design review, to work on our internal mechanisms and capacities, and to strengthen the membership and the coordination of our boards and committees.

By Katy Pickens / Planning & Preservation Writer / kpickens@ppsri.org