Southside Providence Documentary To Be Featured On PBS

So far this blog has been all sports and hip-hop, but I do plan on touching on other areas that relate to the city of Providence and Urban Rhode Island. A documentary about Southside Providence will be featured on PBS this Saturday, via Brown University and for your viewing pleasure I added some homemade video of South Providence that I found on YouTube:

Brown University sociologist Hilary Silver’s documentary about Providence’s Southside neighborhood, which has rebuilt and reimagined itself after sustaining urban disinvestment and white flight, will premiere on Rhode Island Public Broadcasting Service this week. Southside: The Fall and Rise of an Inner-City Neighborhood airs on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2009, at 7 p.m. on Channel 36.

The feature-length (55-minute) documentary recounts the history of South Providence from its white ethnic and African-American origins through a period of depopulation and disinvestment, arson and abandonment, and the subsequent efforts of new and longtime residents and community organizations to revitalize the neighborhood, build new housing, and create new jobs.

Silver’s film is based on almost two decades of teaching urban studies courses on community-based development and affordable housing. The research seminars involved students in South Providence organizations, and their papers provided useful information designed to “give something back” to the community under study. Three Brown alumni — Robbie Corey-Boulet, Stephanie Breakstone, and Julia Liu — assisted in production as undergraduate students. The film was made with the support of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities and Brown’s Urban Studies Program.

“For two decades, this neighborhood embraced my urban studies students, and I wanted to share some of the things we have learned with the residents and local organizations that helped us,” said Silver, associate professor of sociology. “The story of neighborhood redevelopment is compelling, and telling it through film allows us to reach a broad audience.”