We, as we expect all Kingstonians will be, are enthused at the seeming definitive plan by FirstCaribbean International Bank to spearhead, and provide the major portion of the financing for a $70 million project to rehabilitate and beautify a section of the capital's waterfront district.

For as Milton Brady, the CEO of FirstCaribbean's Jamaican operations, has been pointing out, it is few cities with the fortune to have a waterfront where that area is not the hub of social and cultural life, and the preferred place for people to live.

What's more, there are very few cities with a waterfront with the quality of natural beauty and potential for development as Kingston's. Indeed, the Jamaican capital sits on the world's seventh largest natural harbour.

Unfortunately, we have allowed much of the area around this wonderful asset, Kingston's older downtown section, to go to ruin. Overcome by urban blight it is now, to a significant degree, a community of tenements, overrun by crime.

Indeed, by the 1960s the trek by the well-to-do and middle class citizens out of downtown to suburbia was well under way. Firms were soon part of the stampede to the New Kingston business district.

Over the past four decades or so there have been many plans to recapture and rehabilitate downtown, including the waterfront district. Things have happened. But none of these initiatives have been sustained, not least because of narrow political considerations. If it was initiated by one party it was halted by the other.

An emerging political maturity, however, gives us confidence that this project, being undertaken by FirstCaribbean, in conjunction with the government's Urban Development Corporation, will be sustained. It helps that FirstCaribbean will be responsible for upkeep and maintenance at least for the first three years.

Nonetheless, this FirstCaribbean/UDC project, which they expect to complete in time for the Cricket World Cup next March, seems to raise some pertinent questions about other projects that were planned for downtown to coincide with the tournament.

Late in 2003 after the many stalled efforts of redevelopment, former Prime Minister P. J. Patterson announced the launch of the Kingston City Centre Improvement Company (KCCIC), a 50:50 public/private sector operation that was to have been capitalised with $500 million. Among its projects was to have been the establishment of a transport centre, which should have been completed in July last year. The redevelopment of the St. William Grant Park and the areas around Parade and the Ward Theatre should have been completed this past July. None of these projects have started.

The FirstCaribbean/UDC effort seems to be part of what was planned for the waterfront, but no one has explained how it fits in with the KCCIC programme. Is it separate? Someone needs to say.

While such projects are to be welcomed, we wish to stress, however, that cities have greater vibrancy when people live in them. Any project for the redevelopment has to take into account decent homes for people; that is, not only a gentrification that pushes existing inhabitants to create slums elsewhere.