After years of finagling behind the scenes, a cooperative way for officials in Rhode Island and its capital has been forged to guide development of the new Old Harbor District once the old Route 195 bridge has been removed.

That’s four years from now, which seems like forever but is a mere speck on the planning clock. So let’s get going.

For now, plans that are already settled envision parks on either side of the Providence River, possibly connected by a pedestrian bridge using the piers of the 50-year-old bridge, and old streets after the barrier between the Jewelry District and downtown is removed.

What sort of urbanity emerges on the 19 acres of buildable land will be decided by the new development committee that emerged from the recent agreement.

Governor Carcieri and Mayor Cicilline deserve applause for setting aside what might have been a debilitating struggle for political control. Both recognize the opportunity for the city and the state — and all of southeastern New England, for that matter. (Let’s not forget that the Providence metro area is a two-state region.)

Saul Kaplan, director of the state Economic Development Corporation, noted that “you’re not going to find anywhere up and down the Northeastern Seaboard with the kind of potential that this opens up.”

Developers eyeing the 26 acres of newly available land on Manhattan’s West Side, overlooking the Hudson River, or the 10 acres to be developed on the 27-acre Rose Kennedy Greenway (part of the interminable Big Dig project), in Boston, might disagree, but the point remains valid. Still, don’t forget that Rhode Island must compete for who occupies much of what gets built in the new district. The economic condition of the state four years hence, including its tax structure, will play a role, but so will decisions made by the new committee.

One important decision will be whether to divide the land into bigger or smaller parcels. Experience with the Capital Center District, which has large parcels, argues for smaller parcels.

Reducing the scale of development would open the district to a greater range of developers and a more interesting variety of uses, creating a higher density of population and a finer grain of buildings and streetscapes. It need not preclude the assembling of parcels for bigger projects, or taller buildings, but larger parcels do tend to inhibit smaller projects that take less money to finance and less time to plan and build. Overreliance on big corporations and big institutions to build big projects could slow development, resulting in a vast parking lot instead of buildings and neighborhoods. Rather than being starkly different — i.e. modernist — the new part of downtown should flow organically from the old part of downtown.

This may fly in the face of the sort of gigantism that has afflicted American development practices in recent decades. But thinking small might be more lucrative than thinking large, especially for a metro area that sits between the vaster metro areas of Boston and New York. Providence should be an alternative, not more of the same, and that might be just as enticing as the usual packages of tax incentives. I hope that the planners will consider that.

— David Brussat