The Woonasquatucket River Greenway Project (WRGP) is trying to achieve the traditionally difficult task of simultaneously achieving social and ecological improvements in the urban environment. Through the construction of a greenway around the Lower Woonasquatucket River in Providence, the project intends to create benefits to both human society and the non-human environment. The history and current state of the WRGP's social and ecological goals are documented in Chapter One.

The WRGP has proposed a set of development goals which identify how potential greenway sites along the river could be developed to satisfy the project's social and ecological goals. The development goals identify specific ecological, recreational, and economic goals for the development of sites. Chapter Two is a theoretical application of the development goals to a potential greenway site called Riverside Mills. This 'planning study'of Riverside Mills identifies all the physical and social obstacles to achieving each of the development goals at the site. It sketches out options for overcoming those obstacles and assesses the feasibility of each. Overall, it finds that ecological goals, such as improvements in water quality and plant/wildlife habitat, face more intractable obstacles than do social goals, such as recreational and economic development.

Chapter Three identifies two key obstacles to the alignment of social and ecological goals at Riverside Mills. The first is the limited opportunities for creating ecological improvements at the site. The second is the tendency for ecological, recreational, and economic improvements to conflict. To overcome these obstacles, the WRGP will have to capitalize on the few opportunities for ecological improvements which do exist. Social improvements should then be determined by the degree to which they are compatible with ecological improvements. By taking an efficiency approach and learning lessons from similar projects, the WRGP will be more likely to succeed at achieving its goals.