PROVIDENCE — The new Providence that is created when Route 195 is stripped away will look much like the old Providence: the 1937 version.

Once the highway is gone, the city plans to re-create the near-exact road network that existed before the highway plowed through the city’s Jewelry District. Streets that are chopped up, such as Chestnut and Clifford streets, will be made whole, and some that barely exist now, such as Claverick Street, will be reborn into a pedestrian-friendly grid of city blocks.

“One of the earliest decisions made was that in reconnecting the city we were going to re-create the historic street patterns,” said Providence Planning Director Thomas E. Deller, showing a 1937 map that the city will emulate.

In place of the old mills that dominated the pre-highway Jewelry District, city and state leaders hope the post-highway district will be filled with modern office buildings bursting with high-wage jobs in the biotech, health and financial services industries.

With the announcement yesterday morning that the city would gain an official role in determining the fate of the land, and will now partner with the state to market it, developers may view this moment as the time to start readying plans to acquire some of the valuable property.

“Certainly the local people have a very dramatic eye on what’s going on over there. The major developers, I’m sure, have all had their eye on it,” said Charles Francis, president of the Rhode Island office of real-estate marketing company CB Richard Ellis New England.

When the project to move Route 195 south of the hurricane barrier is complete in 2012, roughly 35 acres in downtown Providence are expected to be available, with 8 acres set aside for public parkland, 19.2 acres available for development, and the rest used to re-create the roads. The state will seek bids to hire a consultant to write a redevelopment and marketing plan within two weeks.

Francis said that the announcement of the partnership — and a committee created to oversee the sale plan — is a relief to the development community, which may see this as assurance that the sale of the land won’t be worked out in backrooms.

“The people who are in the business have all had their eye on this land, and are glad that it won’t be [sold by] the old methodology where one guy says, ‘well I need that piece, I’m sure I can work a deal for it,’ ” Francis said.

The state has already come up with preliminary values for the land.

In a 2007 financial report on the $610-million Route 195 relocation project, assessments commissioned by the Department of Transportation listed the expected sale value of the Route 195 land at $92 million.

The eight acres of valuable waterfront parkland was included in that total, and valued at $28.5 million. With that land removed from the equation, the state expects to recoup $63.4 million from the sale of the 19 developable acres, according to the DOT.

State and city leaders officially signed the partnership agreement yesterday morning, at the Chestnut Street offices of architecture firm Durkee, Brown, Viveiros & Werenfels, which looks directly onto some of the more dilapidated sections of Route 195.

“It’s exciting to me — I want to see what’s behind us come down. I look forward to the day, as do all of you, when what’s behind us is gone,” said Governor Carcieri, looking out on the highway behind him.

Trucks rumbled by as Carcieri and several other speakers imagined the possibilities for Providence when the highway no longer bisects downtown.

“What’s really exciting is that we’re moving now from the idea of moving dirt and taking down highways to how we use this opportunity to grow the knowledge-based economy. I think we’ll see, as the governor mentioned, that many years from now we’ll look back on this day and this development and see that this was really one of the most important times in our city’s history,” Mayor David N. Cicilline said.

But the most interesting projection may have come from new Department of Transportation Director Michael S. Lewis, who once ran the Massachusetts agency that oversaw the Big Dig.

When the elevated highways that clogged Boston were finally removed, and traffic channeled into the Big Dig tunnels, Lewis and his staff were shocked by what they experienced when they walked where the divisive, noisy, highways had recently been: silence.

“The silence that existed in downtown Boston [was immediate], just because the traffic wasn’t running on the elevated highway anymore, the silence — that’s the promise this brings,” Lewis said, noting that the silence meant that long-dead neighborhoods paved over by the highway could return and flourish.

But city and state leaders don’t want silence — at least not right away. They want the clatter of jackhammers, and the yells of construction workers, as the highway is immediately replaced by a vibrant, mixed-use office district packed with high-wage jobs. Kaplan has said that the state is focusing on making the area a haven for biotechnology, health-and-science, digital media, and information technology jobs.

Those hopes rely heavily on the possibility that Brown University will build its new medical school campus in the Jewelry District. In 2005, Brown purchased seven buildings in the Jewelry District, several of which border the highway. But Brown is also considering building the campus next to Rhode Island Hospital in South Providence.

Richard Spies, Brown’s executive vice president for planning, said that the university has not drafted any plans that involve buying Route 195 land.

“We’ve been careful not to develop very specific plans or initiatives that require any particular piece of property, in the Jewelry District or elsewhere,” he said. “As we talk about the options, at a broad level, we have focused primarily on properties we or our partners own. We’ve not spent a lot of time speculating about properties that we don’t have.”

But that doesn’t mean the school isn’t interested in how it unfolds, and how it can be a part. Studies commissioned by the state and by the Jewelry District Association are now imagining the future of the area, and what role Brown can play. Brown is awaiting the results of those studies, and is open to the idea that placing its medical school in the Jewelry District might spur biotech job development next door, on the former Route 195 land.

“It is true that in other cities, that’s happened around medical schools or other academic research enterprises, where they’ve been the catalyst for that. One of the key questions is can we do that here?” Spies said.

Johnson & Wales University has also expressed interest in the Route 195 land.

dbarbari@projo.com