Ryan Bonassar Wins Prominent Student Project Award at Roger Williams University

2014 Dec 29

The Rhode Island chapter of the American Planning Association (APA) awarded Ryan Bonassar, a Roger Williams University student from Cheshire, CT and 30 fellow students for their success in creating a comprehensive redevelopment plan for an abandoned manufacturing property, the former site of The Conant Thread Company and Coats & Clark Mill Complex located on the border of Pawtucket and Central Falls in Rhode Island. Through the Community Partnerships Center, business, architecture and historic preservation students worked together with Commerce RI, the Pawtucket Foundation and the two cities to produce a plan aimed at preserving and revitalizing the mill site, an area that has been vacant since 1964.

The student/faculty team was awarded the Student Project Award on Dec. 11 at the APA Rhode Island annual awards ceremony, which recognizes local projects, plans and individual leaders in the planning profession. The award is granted to an individual student or team of students for academic or applied research, studio projects, community service or other works related to community development or planning in Rhode Island. The project was selected as the winning entry by an awards committee that judged nominations based on innovation, collaboration and inclusiveness, among other factors.

Jeff Davis, leader of the APA Rhode Island awards committee, says the panel of judges was impressed with the level of collaboration and quality of work of the students' mill site redevelopment plan. "The work of the RWU team was both holistic and actionable and would be impressive coming from seasoned professionals, let alone a team of students. We commend the Roger Williams students for their exceptional degree of collaboration on this project."

The property at the mill complex includes two million square feet across more than a dozen buildings that were once used for residential, manufacturing, wholesale distribution and storage purposes. Recognizing its potential for economic revitalization and community development, Commerce RI partnered with the RWU faculty and students to evaluate the space and assess a wide scope of redevelopment factors, from historical and socioeconomic context to conservation priorities and economic development incentives.

The student faculty team produced a comprehensive redevelopment plan with historic preservation recommendations, potential reuse ideas and urban design plans as well as tactics for incentivizing business development. The plan proposes using the mill properties for educational, recreational, residential, artistic and commercial facilities, all while maintaining the historic fabric of the buildings and incorporating lower development costs through the use of tax credit incentives.

Working with three faculty members - Joel Cooper from the Mario J. Gabelli School of Business, Jeremy Wells from historic preservation and Edgar Adams from architecture - the 30 students researched and developed the revitalization plan for the Conant Thread Company and Coats & Clark Mill Complex.

About RWU: Roger Williams University, located in Bristol, R.I., is a leading independent, coeducational university with programs in the liberal arts and the professions, where students become community- and globally-minded citizens through project-based, experiential learning. Offering 43 majors and a plethora of co-curricular activities as well as study abroad options, RWU is dedicated to the success of students, commitment to a set of core values, the pursuit of affordable excellence and to providing a relevant, world-class education above all else. In the last decade, the University has achieved unprecedented successes including recognition as one of the best colleges in the nation by Forbes, a College of Distinction by Student Horizons, Inc. and as both a best college in the Northeast and one of the nation's greenest universities by The Princeton Review.