We at The Journal note with special regret the passing, at age 81, of Chester Smolski on June 22. Professor Smolski, a geographer, contributed erudite essays to the Commentary pages for years, before and after his retirement in 1994 from the faculty of Rhode Island College, where he taught about cities for 41 years. Nobody could match his detailed knowledge of cities, and his analysis of metropolitan trends helped form the thinking behind Providence’s revival.

Professor Smolski’s essays overflowed with citations of studies of American cities that he used to put Providence into a national context. His advice to city and state planning officials was strengthened by his wide experience in the great metropolises of Europe. Providence’s status today as a lovely city saved from the decline common to urban America, and now emulated by other cities seeking their own revival, is in part the legacy of Chet Smolski.

“Providence’s time has come to recognize,” he wrote for these pages, “that adding incongruous buildings . . . to an attractive Georgian and Victorian-based capital city is just as harmful as destroying old historic buildings.”

That essay ran on Nov. 26, 1982. The good professor was usually ahead of his time. His chief insight was that cities are for people, which was not obvious to the auto-centric urban thinking that remains powerful, alas, to this day.