PROVIDENCE — Grow Smart Rhode Island yesterday called for a “major shift” in the state’s economic development model, arguing that high-technology companies are most likely to be built in “historic, funky and vibrant neighborhoods.”

In releasing its recommendations, Grow Smart, a nonprofit, anti-sprawl advocacy group, said there are models for that strategy that are thriving even during the recession — the restoration of the former American Locomotive Works in Providence and the growth of the Hope Artiste Village in Pawtucket, home of the Wintertime Farmers Market.

The state’s “large collection of recently rehabbed historic mill and factory buildings and the sizable collection of still-vacant, underutilized or unrehabbed mill buildings,” Grow Smart said, is a “critical, largely untapped and efficient resource for economic development.”

Among its recommendations, the group is calling for the restoration of the Historic Investment Tax Credit and increased use of the state’s ports. Those moves, the organization argues, would help strengthen the small- and medium-sized businesses that dominate the Rhode Island economy.

“We may not fully appreciate this resource because historically we have been so heavily focused on the largely futile pursuit of out-of-state companies interested in big, one-story installations in greenfield locations,” Grow Smart’s executive director, Scott Wolf, said in a statement. “This is a segment of the economic development arena where we have arguably insurmountable disadvantages being a smaller urbanized state in relation to the many larger and more rural states such as North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Virginia and the like.”

bgedan@projo.com