SEPTEMBER 18, 12-2PM
This program is a part of DesignWeek 2026. Registration Information Coming Soon.
Providence Place Mall sits at the heart of our city — 1.4 million square feet, $259 million in debt, straddling railway tracks in the shadow of the State House, and newly listed on Providence’s Most Endangered Properties List. It is not going anywhere. But it could become something extraordinary.
This building needs bold thinkers: urban designers, artists, and visionaries ready to imagine its next chapter. Could it help solve our housing crisis? Become a hub for artists and makers? A space where community truly gathers? Grow Smart RI is bringing people together to find out.
Our walking design charette will be led by Emily Bryant and Caroline Stevens, both seasoned guides in public humanities and urban dialogue, alongside artist Michael Townsend, who once built a hidden apartment inside the mall itself. Now is the time to dream out loud. The city is listening.
Your Guides:
Emily Bryant
Emily is a career educator, both inside and outside the classroom. She began as a high-school teacher, teaching English and French in Greater New Orleans. She then shifted her educational practice to museums, where she delights in making history relevant and accessible to the public. She has also been a park ranger at several national park sites, and holds a master’s degree in Public Humanities from Brown University.
Michael Townsend
Michael Townsend sees the built environment as a playground. He uses abandoned urban spaces as the backdrop for film adventures and the site for art installations both sanctioned and unsanctioned. He also draws on walls with adhesive tape. Professionally he is known as the first practicing tape artist. He has made over 500 temporary tape murals and thousands of smaller tape drawings on buildings around the world and worked with hundreds of communities to make art on their architecture.
He and his collaborators became an international curiosity when it was discovered that they were building a fully-functioning apartment space inside the Providence Place Mall that they had occupied, undiscovered, for four years. The footage Michael filmed during that period became the basis of the award-winning documentary Secret Mall Apartment.
Caroline Nye Stevens
Over the past two decades, Caroline’s work has evolved from leading architectural tours and writing a Chicago-based building blog, to creating innovative place-based public programs in cities across the US. In Rhode Island she’s best known for her leadership behind Doors Open RI which took people behind-the-scenes of the unique places within our neighborhoods, in an effort to bridge communities and inspire new perspectives on our cities. Today, she’s Grow Smart RI’s Director of Communications and Events.