PAWTUCKET — Policymakers, city planners and tourism officials from Rhode Island and neighboring Connecticut and Massachusetts gathered downtown yesterday for a forum on “place-making” sponsored by the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council.

“Place-making is taking a place that you can’t wait to get out of and making it into one that you never want to leave,” explained guest presenter Ethan Kent, vice president of the Project for Public Spaces, a consulting and design firm based in New York.

The half-day of presentations and small-group discussions was geared toward those interested in sustainable tourism, which the tourism council describes as development that enhances a place by using its cultural, natural, historical, human, educational and built resources to differentiate it from other destinations.

Blackstone Valley Tourism Council Director Robert Billington said the forum was a way for the regional tourism industry to hear from and interact with some of the most highly regarded in the field.

“For us to succeed, we need the whole region to change. It’s not just about the Blackstone Valley for us,” Billington said.

Yesterday’s was the fifth sustainable-tourism-related forum offered in the past two years by the tourism council’s Sustainable Tourism Planning and Development Laboratory, a project that focuses on “supporting communities through creative and innovative sustainable geo-tourism practices,” according to its promotional material.

The main presenters of the day gave an overview of their work and ways their ideas could be applied locally. They elaborated on what the tourism council called the “art and science of place-making” and highlighted some of the basic ingredients that make a place attractive to work, live and visit.

Daniel R. Fesenmaier, Temple University professor of management information systems, showed how tourism bureaus use creative Web site design to create more engaging Web sites, the sort that could become the most authoritative sources of information on tourism in a given state.

Patty West, of the Ecological Monitoring and Assessment Program of the Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, showed how local culinary flavors were incorporated into walking tours, festivals, and fairs in her region.

She suggested how those in the Blackstone Valley draw from its industrial and factory heritage and how Southern New England states could draw on its fishing heritage to make food-related events.

Kent, of the Project for Public Spaces, praised the “small, personal places” that define much of New England. “We don’t know how to make them anymore,” he said.

He criticized modern city planning’s tendency to make awkward, uninviting public spaces because too often, they are unadventurous and narrow in vision. Kent proposed a simple solution: “If our goal is to create a place where groups of people can gather on a corner sidewalk, then all the other things will fall into place.”

pmarcelo@projo.com / (401) 277-7493