“Portland is a wonderful city and Paddy Tillett’s thoughtful and exhaustive

analysis describes the important contribution that intelligent place making

and urban design has made. This book is surely a must read for any aspiring
politician as while Portland currently benefits from enlightened governance
there is no cause for complacency. Tillet’s fictional epilogue charts a cat-
astrophic, but credible, future that matches any Hollywood block-buster
script, should his warnings be ignored.”
Howard Sheppard DArch, MSc, MA, MRTPI, RIBA

“An insightful and laser-sharp assessment of the successes and shortfalls of

Portland’s innovative and place-based planning and urban design within an
international professional context. The result is a must-read book with hope
and direction for development that sustains a healthy metropolitan life-style
while confronting the realities of climate change, flooding, landslides, and a
major seismic event.”
Don Miles, FAIA, Founding board member of Project for Public
Spaces, Retired principal of ZGF Architects LLP

“Paddy Tillett is a student of urbanism and design, able to articulate well

how each has been exhibited in his adopted home town of Portland, and the
role each has played in the evolution of one of America’s most livable cities.
He has a good grasp of how the implications of our urban design decisions,
whether intentional or not, greatly affect our use and enjoyment of a place,
and its spaces. In Shaping Portland, Tillett communicates this in a manner
accessible to both the professional design practitioner seeking to learn from
the experience of a successful natural and built environment, as well as the
lay person seeking to quench their thirst for knowledge of how this most
successful exhibition of a healthy and livable city came to be. There are
many lessons contained within this book that provide insight into Portland’s
future as a resilient city, and to inform others who may wish to apply them
to help improve the health of communities elsewhere.”
David M. Siegel, FAICP, Former President,
American Planning Association
Shaping Portland

Portland is a young city founded on a riverbank in a virgin forest less than

200 years ago. Shaping Portland: Anatomy of a Healthy City is about the
values engendered by the place, and how those values have influenced
the growing city. It examines how and why the public realm supports or
obstructs the health-forward lifestyles of those who choose to live there.
This book explores the values and dynamics that shaped a healthy city
to enable those things. It is a case study of a recognized success—looking
more closely at a recent urban infill: the Pearl District. The future roles of
the planners and other design professionals in continuing to build healthy
and responsive environments are suggested.
The cities of the future will be those that we already inhabit, but infilled
and adapted to tomorrow’s needs and values. Understanding the dynamics
involved is essential for those in whose hands we entrust the design of cities
and urban places.

Paddy Tillett is an architect, urban designer, and city planner with 40 years
of international professional experience, having worked for consulting
firms and public agencies in many parts of the world before settling in the
Pacific Northwest. He grew up in rural Scotland, completing his formal
education in Oxford and at Liverpool University, where he gained a master’s
degree in civic design. He is a principal with ZGF Architects LLP, focus-
ing on planning and urban design, and is an adjunct professor at Portland
State University. Paddy is an Accredited LEED Professional, a member of the
Royal Institute of British Architects, a Fellow of the Royal Town Planning
Institute, a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners, and a
Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design
Series editor: Peter Ache
Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design is a series of academic

monographs for scholars working in these disciplines and the overlaps
between them. Building on Routledge’s history of academic rigour and
cutting-edge research, the series contributes to the rapidly expanding
literature in all areas of planning and urban design.
www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Planning-and-Urban-Design/
book-series/RRPUD

The Architecture of Phantasmagoria

Specters of the City
Libero Andreotti and Nadir Lahiji

Revolt and Reform in Architecture’s Academy

William Richards

City Branding
The Politics of Representation in Globalising Cities
Alberto Vanolo

Urban Planning’s Philosophical Entanglements

The Rugged, Dialectical Path from Knowledge to Action
Richard S. Bolan

Lost in the Transit Desert

Race, Transit Access and Suburban Form
Diane Jones Allen

University Spatial Development and Urban Transformation in China

Cui Liu

Shaping Portland
Anatomy of a Healthy City
Paddy Tillett
Shaping Portland
Anatomy of a Healthy City

Paddy Tillett
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Paddy Tillett to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
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without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tillett, Paddy, author.
Title: Anatomy of a healthy city / by Paddy Tillett.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. |
Series: Routledge research in planning and urban design | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017007972| ISBN 9781138693449 (hbk) |
ISBN 9781315528496 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Urban health. | City planning—Health aspects. | Urban
ecology (Sociology)—Health aspects.
Classification: LCC RA566.7 .T55 2018 | DDC 362.1/042—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007972

ISBN: 978-1-138-69344-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-52849-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon LT Std

by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK
Contents

List of Illustrations x
Introduction xi

1 Symptoms of Urban Health 1

What Makes a Healthy City? 2
Urban Health 3
Urban–Suburban Divide 5
Public Realm 7

2 A City Cast in Place 10

Place Defines Behavior 10
Gentrification 12
Urban Growth Boundary 14
Ideas That Shaped Early Portland 15
Geography and Climate 17
City Form and Scale 19
Growing Downtown’s Public Realm 22
Planning Law and Urban Growth 28
Transit and Daily Travel 30
Bike Culture 32
Land Use Changes and Mobility 33
Land Use and Transportation 35
Central City Planning 37

3 A City Shaped by Values 40

People Who Shape the City 40
Values: Place-Based Livability 44
Changing Demographics 45
What Is Livability Worth? 46
viii Contents
Health and Diversity 49
Civic Health 51

4 Dimensions of a Healthy City 54

Discrete, Sensible Places 54
What Is the Right Size? 57
Economic Opportunity 59
Streets That Endure 62
Evolution of City Form 65
The Consequences of Street Grid Scale 67
The Evolving Public Realm 69
The Urban Forest and Biophilia 73
Growing Up, Not Out 76
EcoDistricts and Green Streets 77

5 The Pearl District 82

A Vital New Metropolitan Community 82
Timing Is Everything 84
District Identity 85
District Expansion 89
The West End 93
Who Lives and Works in the Pearl? 95

6 Past Errors and Future Options 98

The Costs of Sprawling Suburbs 99
Street Size and Safety 103
Asking the Right Questions 106
Bogus Cities 108
Wealth Through Conservation 110
Green Design 112
Strategy for Smarter Cities 113
Portland’s Natural Heritage 113
Resiliency 115

7 Corrective Measures 118

Transportation Equity 118
Affordable Housing 120
Improving Livable Environments 123
Expecting the Best 125
Regenerative Development 126
 Contents ix
8 Improving the Health of the City 128
Development Regulation 128
Performance-Based Zoning 129
Design Review 131
Corrective Measures 133
Urban Design Quotient 137
Vocabulary for the Public Realm 137
Sensory Urbanism 138
Unselfish Choices 141
Evading Natural Disasters 143
Addressing the Sensuous Environment 145
Updating Livability Expectations 148
A Grammar of Place 150

9 Look Back in Anguish 152

A Backward Glance from 2050 152
Advance Precautions to Be Taken Now 156
Before the Event 159
Aftermath 161

Index 166
Illustrations

Figures
1.1 Map of Central Portland 4
2.1 Ira Keller Fountain 24
2.2 The Transit Mall on SW 5th and 6th Avenues 26
2.3 The Green Loop 27
2.4 The 2040 Plan 29
4.1 Elks Temple 55
4.2 Chicago Ripple Tower 56
4.3 Bell curve of density, distance from core 59
4.4 Plan of Savannah, Georgia 67
4.5 and Giambattista Nolli, Pianta Grande di Roma, 1748 72
4.6
4.7 The Transit Mall 75
4.8 NORM, the Natural Organic Recycling Machine 79
5.1 Drawing of River District rail yards redevelopment 87
5.2 Brewery Blocks 91
6.1 Diagram of road areas and crosswalk distances 105
6.2 Cirencester 109
8.1 Pedestrians behind Hyatt in Houston 136
9.1 Seismic event chronology 153

Table
6.1 Street users 104
Introduction

Portland is a young city founded on a riverbank in a virgin forest less than

200 years ago. Unlike ancient towns and cities that were isolated from all
but local influences, Portland was born into a world of international trade
in ideas as well as goods. In plotting both its past and its potential, this
book ranges far and wide for relevant ideas and influences. There is an
ever-present dialogue between the natural landscape within which the city
has grown, and its fabric and population. Trees and mountains are omni-
present, as is the terrifying power of the subduction process that formed
the Cascade Mountains and the slumbering volcanoes that mark Oregon’s
rocky backbone. The very real risk of natural disaster places a great moral
burden on planners entrusted with the welfare of those affected by land use
and development decisions. There are better ways to manage our resources
and enhance our livability, and this book begins to explore some of them—
in a world in which many profess to welcome change, but most resist it.
A central thesis of this book is that in Portland, purposeful initiatives have
created a physical environment around values that underlie the consensus on
lifestyles and aspirations of those who choose to live here. The task before us
is to continue to enhance the physical and sensuous environment, attuning
it more closely to the objectives of the healthy city. To do so, we need to be
clear about what those objectives are, and we need to correlate them with
priorities among daily activities of those who live and work in the city. If one
could watch decades of household moves in a few minutes, the city would
appear as a twitching organic thing, always making and remaking parts of
itself. Each movement is initiated by an investment of time and money to
make a better place—whether for a household or a district, or something in
between. We are actually quite successful at making life better for ourselves
and building better places to inhabit.
It is the anatomy of this physical city that this book analyzes from a broadly
drawn perspective of planning and urban design. But this is a snapshot taken
in 2016. What are the critical steps to ensure that positive progress to date will
continue into the future? That is a vital question for everyone who cares about
this unusual place, and especially to planners, urban designers, and others whose
work will influence the outcomes in Portland and other forward-thinking cities.

Paddy Tillett, December 2016

1 Symptoms of Urban Health

To many, livability is a suspect term because it defies universal definition.

It is a portmanteau for all the positive things that contribute to a desired
and achievable lifestyle—all that we hold valuable and worthwhile in our
lives. What we have described as “the healthy city” is a physical manifesta-
tion of this, not modeled on everybody’s values, but on those of active, civic
minded, often early-adopter members of Portland’s population. The city is
not without its faults in architecture, urban design, social equity, and a host
of other things. However, there is a cohesion among the physical features
of central Portland and the inner neighborhoods that is unmistakably rec-
ognizable by visitors and residents alike. It is the anatomy of this physical
city that this book analyzes from a broadly drawn perspective of planning
and urban design.
Portland, with a population of 632,0001 in the city itself and 2.3 million
in the whole metro area, is Oregon’s largest city. It is 650 miles north of San
Francisco and 300 miles south of Vancouver, BC—in the heart of “Cascadia,”
as the long crescent of land west of the Cascade Mountain Range is known.
Portland came into being as a seaport in the mid-nineteenth century, being as
far inland as ocean-going shipping could safely navigate: 100 miles (160 km)
from the Pacific Ocean. Portland is on the Willamette River, a tributary of the
largest river flowing into the Pacific from the Americas: the Columbia River.
Planning documents reference Portland’s Central City, an area larger
than the central business district. The Central City includes parts of
the inner neighborhoods on both sides of the Willamette (pronounced
will-lamb-et). The Central City holds Oregon’s densest concentration of
people and jobs. Currently, about 24,000 people reside in, and 125,000
people work in, those five square miles: about 3 percent of the total city
area. Portland’s population is expected to grow by 30 percent over the
next 20 years, much of it expected to occur in the Central City.
Greater Portland includes 23 municipalities and unincorporated areas of
three counties, in addition to the City of Portland. Many of those munici-
palities have grown from century-old settlements organized around a
fine-grained orthogonal grid of streets that includes a commercial center.
2 Symptoms of Urban Health
Growth beyond those centers has generally been shaped by zoning codes
that segregate land uses and by the dominance of the automobile, so they
share much with the dispersed suburbs that have spilled across so much of
America in the years since the Second World War.

What Makes a Healthy City?

What follows is a particular investigation of how a consensus on livability
has shaped a city. The place, so recently a frontier in the remote West, is still
young enough to accept people for what they can do, regardless of who they
are or where they came from. Of course, there are hierarchies, but on the
whole it remains a meritocracy. That, coupled with a natural environment
around Portland that is both spectacular and accessible, attracted people
who hold such things dear. Heroes emerged from among them, such as
Governor Tom McCall, who engraved those values into law in the 1970s.
Increasing numbers of like-minded and well-educated people learned of the
respect for environmental values in Oregon and moved here. For many of
them, their work lives and their love for nature were inseparable. For the
creatives, whether designers or entrepreneurs, work tends to come in bursts
of intensity. These they often intersperse with bouts of rural retreat and
exercise—a work-life balance that continues to shape and revise the places
in which they live and work. They have developed lifestyles that embrace
both wild and man-made places, and the physical and mental abilities to
enjoy them to the full. The city has been formed around these people and
their values.
Values behind this lifestyle have shaped the built environment, through
political, financial, civic, and other choices made individually and collec-
tively over many years. Each decision influences those that follow, so that
a consensus in lifestyle is eventually reflected in the design of the physical
environment of the entire city.
Older cities reflect in their architecture a stable and unchanging order,
often conveyed by the convention of neoclassical buildings. Youthful
Portland began with some of the same moves toward aggrandizement—
such as the gracious Portland Hotel of 1889: neoclassical, but with a novel
tweak toward a Renaissance revival style. Portland architects continued
their nonconformist ways, notable in Pietro Belluschi’s design for the Ayer
Wing of the Portland Art Museum. On the instructions of the museum’s
senior trustee, it was to be designed in the Georgian style, and so the design
work began. The building that was opened in 1940 bears a classical sym-
metry, but the style is modern and original. Forty years later, Bob Frasca
turned a downtown jail into another nonconformist civic masterpiece in the
Justice Center. Nonconformist innovation has become a continuing trend.
Architectural precociousness is just one example of a deep conviction
shared among Portland’s intellectual pioneers. Freedom of expression,
unbounded by tradition or expectation, has always been a hallmark of this
 Symptoms of Urban Health 3
pioneer town, and has drawn independently minded people to it ever since.
Among them, Portland has its share of planners and civic activists who con-
stantly search for better ways of doing things, and this is evident in the
urban design of the Central City—though it is certainly not without its flaws
and unresolved places. So an exposition of the city’s anatomy—both its
good and bad features—can be usefully instructive.
This book is about the reflection of a community’s values in the physical
form of the city. Belluschi encapsulated this well when he wrote: “the city
can be an unending source of pride, even a work of art, if it is free to express
the life and the joys that animate it” (Bosker and Lencek 1985: x).
Life and joy are what this young and vital city are all about, the energy
sustained by each new generation of artists, artisans, entrepreneurs, and
professionals. Values are influenced as much by place as by people, and
together they have cultivated a lifestyle of healthy living that continues
to reshape this ever-evolving city. But of course grave mistakes have been
made too, usually stemming from adoption of ideas from elsewhere that
have no place in this culture or locale. One was adoption of a well-meaning
but misguided zoning code; another was adoption of Robert Moses’ brutal
highways plan. Targeted treatments are needed to maintain the anatomy
of this city in good health, to sustain the life and joy that animate both the
place and the people.

Urban Health
As with human physiology, good health is the sum total of every aspect of
the city: physical, mental, and its other intangible qualities. Urban health
encompasses the civic, social, and fiscal well-being of the city, as well as the
physical health and well-being of its citizens. Portland is a healthy city in the
sense that a balance has been achieved between man and nature (although
we continue to consume resources at an unsustainable rate, no better than
anybody else). A practical compromise has sometimes been found between
the expediency that devalues many political decisions, and the priorities of
those who live under the consequences. The Central City 2035 Plan is con-
structed on three priorities for rectifying some of these while maintaining
and enhancing the health of Portland:

1 integrating energy conservation with energy production;

2 integrating storm-water management with urban habitat; and
3 transportation alternatives that lower the city’s carbon footprint and
promote human health.

The plan continues with a goal for the Central City, describing how it should
be in 2035: “The Central City is a living laboratory that demonstrates how
the design and function of a dense urban center can provide equitable ben-
efits to human health, the natural environment and the local economy.”
4 Symptoms of Urban Health
A healthy city is reflective of the values, lifestyles, and freedoms of its
inhabitants. It depends on economic health and social health—embracing
equity, happiness, and other sensory factors that are difficult to define. The
health of any city is the result of both historical accident and deliberate inten-
tions and actions. Some of this is transferable to other cities, and some is not.
The Pearl District is a recent and conspicuous success, and is a useful place to
begin a forensic analysis of the health of the larger place that is Portland—a
place as idiosyncratic as its architectural history:

Living in Portland has changed my ways. It would be hard not to evolve

in a city where people think so boldly and broadly about how to heal,
strengthen, and nourish both body and mind. An embrace of all things
outdoorsy is almost a voting requirement . . . and I have come to love
these qualities.
(Dundas 2016: 6)

A generation ago, bringing transportation and planning professionals

together to address questions of land use was considered quite progressive.

Figure 1.1 Central Portland has expanded from Downtown to embrace both sides
of the river. The predominant 200 × 200 foot city blocks measure out
walkable neighborhoods west to the West Hills and east from the river.
Once dominated by industry and warehousing, properties near the river
are being reborn as public open spaces and mixed-use developments.
 Symptoms of Urban Health 5
Healthy and sustainable cities depend on the merging of planning and trans-
portation and many more disparate silos. Success depends as much on the
sustainability of businesses, services, and of social structures as it does on
design of the physical environment. The key is to recognize interrelation-
ships between these four provinces, and to use physical design in ways that
support economic and social success over time.
Related yet separate is the issue of the health of those who use the city.
Environmental maladies that afflict three age groups across the nation are
obese children, sedentary adults, and isolated seniors. All would benefit
from spending less time in vehicles and more on their feet, but with few des-
tinations within walking distance for most, that option is limited. However,
for those who inhabit healthy inner-city neighborhoods, almost everything
that one needs is within walking distance. The density of opportunities
that characterize metropolitan living make walking the preferred way to
get around. Mixed-age communities are being rediscovered as marketable
options, with a burgeoning population of capable seniors taking a more
active role in the well-being of others—and incidentally enriching their own
lives.2 These are simple values that Ebenezer Howard strove to recover from
preindustrial living patterns.
The Pearl District is developed to relatively high densities and supports
a mix of jobs, homes for all income levels, as well as services and entertain-
ment. It has become a magnet to those of all ages who value metropolitan
lifestyles. In order to understand how it has achieved this success, it is useful
to examine what has worked over time in a nearby established urban set-
ting where similar values are held. Desirable qualities of existing places can
be emulated in a new neighborhood, but should not be copied verbatim,
because too many needs and values change from generation to generation
and from microculture to microculture within a city. Also because the ten-
dency is to copy certain features but not others, resulting in an incomplete
place like a stage set.
The era in which Portland’s Northwest Neighborhood was built was
one in which natural resources were used as if they were limitless, climate
change was unknown, and cars had not yet outnumbered horses. Changes
just as great are likely to overtake urban environments that we build today.
We cannot know what those new considerations will be, but we can design
a flexible and adaptable urban framework, and we can build with the cer-
tainty that natural resources will become scarcer, and that homo urbensis
will remain predictably curious, gregarious, and acquisitive—all strong
clues as to how we should shape the built environment so that it will con-
tinue to sustain conviviality and vitality in the next generation of urbanites.

Urban–Suburban Divide
Before delving into the particulars of how the Pearl District came to be, it
is important to be clear about such terms as metropolitan and suburban.
6 Symptoms of Urban Health
We make the distinction between urban and suburban casually, but there is
a clearly definable difference: urban places, whether villages or metropolitan
centers, are inclusive of diverse uses, activities, and populations. Suburbs are
exclusive in three senses: they are often places accessible only to people with
independent means of transport—in most cases, private cars; they are exclu-
sive in the sense that all but stipulated uses and activities are disallowed;
and third, they are often socially exclusive by disallowing apartments and
duplexes, thereby preventing the less affluent—which includes many ethnic
minorities—from living there. As far removed as these exclusive traits are
from the spirit that built America, they are to a large extent the result of
well-intentioned but massively damaging zoning codes adopted before most
dispersed suburbs were built: after the Second World War.
Many urban centers began to form long before automobiles or planning
restrictions existed. They grew organically around human activities with
the simple purpose of making life more comfortable and convenient. Three-
quarters of the urbanized land in North America was developed after the
Second World War (we currently consume about 2 million acres a year with
new development), and much of it was shaped around the dimensions of
automobile travel. Across the country, low-density suburban living is the
default option: not by personal choice, since for most people there is little
else on offer.
For an urban–suburban contrast, think about a typical downtown arte-
rial street. It will be contained by buildings with frontages directly connected
to the life of the street with bustling sidewalks that may include retail, ser-
vices, offices, and homes. The street itself will be designed to accommodate
general traffic, transit, bicycles, and pedestrians. Now consider a typical
suburban arterial. Much of it will be designed exclusively for swift-moving
vehicles and will be largely inaccessible to pedestrians, and thus of little ser-
vice to transit. Buildings will be set back from the right of way, may not be
directly accessible to it, and will usually comprise a single land use. Signage
will be frequent and big, directed at drivers. The downtown environment
is dimensioned around people; the suburban street takes its scale from fast-
moving vehicles.
A further distinction is between urban and metropolitan places. These
differ in the concentration of different opportunities and activities within
a short walking distance of one another: greatest at the metropolitan end
of the spectrum, fewer in other urban areas. It was the potential to achieve
both an intensity and diversity of uses that ignited development in the
Pearl District. Those who choose to live and work there have traded a life
shaped around the automobile for access to all that a metropolitan center
provides—accessibility that can be calibrated by a walkability score,3 infor-
mation now indispensable to any advertisement for real estate in Portland.
Inner-city neighborhoods offer many of the advantages of accessibility
enjoyed by the metropolitan core. They can usefully be defined by the con-
vention of the “20-minute neighborhood”: a place in which everything that
 Symptoms of Urban Health 7
you need—from a hot dog to a hospital bed—lies within a 20-minute walk.
In Portland, as in many North American cities, the inner neighborhoods
were built around streetcar lines early in the twentieth century. Homes,
shops, and places of employment were all clustered around streetcar stops.
Few lots were larger than 5,000 ft2 (465 m2), some filled with apartments or
commercial buildings, others, sometimes smaller, supporting a house and a
patch of greenery. The streetcar neighborhoods had land use patterns that
responded to the needs of a population that relied mostly on walking and
transit, and thankfully many and varied neighborhood centers still flourish,
despite subsequent disappearance of first-generation streetcars and adop-
tion of exclusive-use zoning codes.
The virtues of a 20-minute neighborhood have been recognized by some
suburban homebuilders, especially on greenfield sites adjacent to new light
rail stations. Orenco Station4 is an example. Bucking the convention of single-
use zoning, special mixed-use areas were designated around light rail stations
as they were being constructed. Farsighted developers began by developing
lots close to the existing arterial street, introducing a village-like mix of retail,
commercial, and residential development on small lots. As transit ridership
grew, lots closer to the station were developed at increasing densities until
a critical mass of diverse uses and residents was achieved—in the process
generating a great deal of value that was not there at the outset. This is a
welcome change from the too-familiar dispersed suburbs that sprawl across
the nation, imposing unsustainable burdens of resource management and
transportation from Stockton to Atlanta and beyond.

Public Realm
Public right of way and even public realm miss the real point of what a
street can be. Its first and foremost function is as the interface between pri-
vate life in the buildings that line and define a street, and communal activity
of the street itself. The street enables a kind of social friction between build-
ing occupants and visitors; interactions ranging from trivial to life-changing.
The number and diversity of private uses on a street determines who will be
drawn to the street and why. The street is a communal room for all the pri-
vate occupants of the buildings that front it, and all who are drawn there as
visitors. As Glaeser (2011) has observed, both physical and social proximity
between people are necessary to a successful place.
In Hatton Garden in London, diamond merchants who have their busi-
nesses there treat the street very literally as a communal room; as a fair and
open place in which to make transparently honest deals. The function of
the city is to enable a huge range of business, social, political, and recrea-
tional interactions to occur in conveniently close proximity to one another.
The street is a subset of this, and even if the range of uses is limited, con-
centration of homes or businesses in close proximity can create attractive
vitality in the communal space of the street. Who uses a street depends upon
8 Symptoms of Urban Health
the particular mix and concentration of uses. The people and the physical
attributes of the street define it as a place, and in the right circumstances
that sense of place confers an air of comfort and safety on those who use it.
That is to say street users develop a sense of ownership and identity with
the place; a protectiveness among the community of other street users that
makes it a safe and agreeable place to be.
There is a threshold of activity below which no discernable sense of place
or of personal investment exists. These marginal and generally unloved
places cease to function as real streets, becoming instead places of convey-
ance: links to other places. It would be misleading to refer to them as public
realm. There are many streets that have been forced into becoming primarily
traffic routes, and as such they become progressively less attractive to people
on foot. These declining streets are prime candidates for interventions that
will restore safety and facility. Reduction of conflicts between pedestrians
and vehicles is often the place to begin.
Vision Zero programs begun in Sweden in 1994 sought to humanize such
streets, and reduced pedestrian deaths by 50 percent in just eight years by
introducing design features that slowed traffic, shortened street crossings
for pedestrians, and gave them greater visibility. Just a 5 percent reduction
in vehicle speeds can result in a drop of 30 percent in fatal crashes. Drawing
from multiple datasets, London’s Department for Transport (2010) con-
cluded that fatalities increase slowly with impact speeds of up to 30 mph,
but increase rapidly above that speed—by a factor of 3.5 to 5.5, depending
on circumstances. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents in the
UK found:

•• When a pedestrian is hit by a car at 20 mph, 5 percent are fatally injured.

•• When a pedestrian is hit by a car at 30 mph, 37–45 percent are fatally
injured.
•• When a pedestrian is hit by a car at 40 mph, 83–85 percent are fatally
injured.

The tools to slow down traffic can be as simple as narrowing travel lanes,
installing stop signs at strategic locations, and marking and shortening
pedestrian crossings with curb bump-outs and central refuges. The reward
is not only a safer environment for pedestrians. Streets with lowered traf-
fic speeds have experienced dramatically increased retail and employment
revenues (Arup 2016). As streets become easier to cross, so they cease to be
barriers between districts, putting a greater number of potential destinations
within everyone’s reach. Reassigning space in the public realm can change
behaviors in many respects, and is emerging as a powerful tool in reshaping
the physical city to suit the lifestyles of its occupants.
The public realm encompasses all that is freely accessible to those on
foot, and in some places that includes a multitude of parks, plazas, water-
fronts, and wynds. This is explored in more depth in “Vocabulary for the
 Symptoms of Urban Health 9
Public Realm” in Chapter 8. In Portland’s case, there are 11,000 acres of
public parks; a park within half a mile of every home is the almost-achieved
goal. That equates to about an acre of public park for every 50 residents.
Those open spaces are linked by a network of trails and safe streets that
extend the public realm like a small gauge net across the fabric of the city.

Notes
1 Portland Population from US Census (see www.census.gov/search-results.html?
q=Portland+Oregon&page=1&stateGeo=none&searchtype=web&cssp=SERP&
search.x=0&search.y=0).
2 Elders at Bridge Meadows: Bridge Meadows is a unique and innovative solution
to a long-standing foster care crisis. Located in the Portsmouth Neighborhood of
Portland, Bridge Meadows is a three-generation housing community consisting
of homes for adoptive families and apartments for elders 55 and older. Elders at
Bridge Meadows act as surrogate grandparents and mentors to the children and
families who live here. Elders volunteer 100 hours per quarter, or an average of
eight hours per week, teaching arts and crafts, giving music lessons, and taking kids
to the park during the summer. Elders at Bridge Meadows are involved and active,
and experience meaning and purpose in their lives (see www.bridgemeadows.org/
our-impact/).
3 Walkability score: Definitions of walkability vary. WalkScore rewards neighbor-
hoods with access to things like grocery stores, restaurants, libraries, parks, and
schools. Another definition of walkability factors includes the number of trees,
homes, crosswalks, mass transit stops, etc. You can learn more about walkability
and how it is calculated at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkability.
4 Orenco: The Oregon Nursery Company once occupied the site of this eponymous
community. The site of Orenco Station was designated a “Town Center” under
Portland’s 2040 regional plan, one of a number of Town Centers along a new light
rail line (see www.portlandbridges.com/portland-neighborhoods/00-Orenco%20
Station.html).

Bibliography
Arup (2016) Cities Alive: Towards a Walking World. London: Arup.
Bosker, G. and Lencek, L. (1985) Frozen Music. Portland, OR: Oregon Historical
Society.
City of Portland (2016) Portland 2035 Comprehensive Plan (Draft).
Department for Transport (2010) Relationship Between Speed and Risk of Fatal
Injury. London: Department for Transport.
Dundas, Z. (2016) “Editorial.” Portland Monthly, June 24.
Glaeser, E. (2011) Triumph of the City. London: Macmillan.
Nike (2015) Designed to Move: Active Cities. Advertisement.
Pasanen, E. and Salmivaara, H. (1993) Driving Speeds and Pedestrian Safety in the
City of Helsinki. London: Printerhall.
2 A City Cast in Place

Stand in any Portland street and you can see a conifer-clad hillside and
sometimes the Cascade peaks—a silent reminder of extreme seismic events,
past and yet to come. Geography and climate have considerable influence
on both city and lifestyles. Forest Park is a 5,000-acre, 2,090-hectare wedge
of wild woodland thrust almost into the center of the city: a highway for
wildlife and a maze of trails for active folk. Portland is a place where nature
is always evident and accessible, embedded in the values and expectations
of those who live here. Yet within this constant setting, populations shift
and change, communities and districts move through independent cycles
of economic and social change, and through this diversity runs a consist-
ent thread of values that result in a healthy city. Some man-made features
of Portland result from thoughtful and deliberate planning; others through
historical accident; some are outright failures that need fixing. The crucial
issue is how we build upon those features as we adapt the city to meet the
demands of the future.

Place Defines Behavior

For those who came of age in the 1970s, Oregon was that odd defiant state
inhabited by the last pioneers; where one could enjoy the freedoms of open
country and open minds. It was the place where the bottle bill was invented;
where all beaches were declared public in defiance of cupidity in the state
to the south; where urban growth was quelled not to control the city, but
to protect precious farm and forest lands. For those who cared passion-
ately about preserving an unspoiled natural environment, Oregon became a
powerful magnet. Young and thoughtful adults were attracted to this place,
reinforcing a powerful consensus on how life should be lived and making
it their own. And with them came the values of a healthy outdoor life, of
a lifestyle of healthy exercise and bountiful local produce that a wet and
temperate climate can provide. This is where the will to create a healthy city
was established: further consolidated by each new arrival, eager to become a
twentieth-century pioneer in Wild Oregon. “Well, we were touring around
 A City Cast in Place 11
the Western states in our VW bus. We stopped in Eugene, which was refresh-
ingly different from the Mid-West, then we came to Portland . . . and never
left.” How many variations of that tale has one heard?
In the 1970s, the city itself was in many ways unprepossessing: ravaged
by freeway construction and massive urban renewal efforts. Downtown
retailers had won or lost their visibility when streets had been converted
to one-way couplets to speed up the traffic. Billboards addressed to drivers
filled every view. Dusty parking lots had replaced historic buildings. Only
the nation’s insatiable demand for timber to build houses buoyed up the
economy. The mill towns were thriving and mill workers were taking home
fat wages.
Young, well-educated, and liberated by the era in which they grew up,
the newly arrived pioneers felt neither duty nor loyalty holding them to their
parents’ hometown—or to their parents’ values, for that matter. They could
make a new life in the West where like-minded folk abounded. Eventually,
intellect and ingenuity led to a means of making a living—some entrepre-
neurial, many occupations were artistic and tenuous. By 1980, Portland had
more theater companies than cities twice its size, and despite the modest
means of its citizenry, supported so many restaurants that they were listed
in the phone book by ethnicity as well as by name. All this prepared the
ground for a generation of “locavores and health nuts,” as one visitor char-
acterized Portlanders today.
In 1982, a fledgling running shoe company ran radio ads to persuade
listeners that its name did not rhyme with Mike or like. They found a ready
market among the new generation of young adults for whom priorities
were fitness and the outdoor life. Trading in their wingtips for athletic foot-
wear was a way of literally walking the talk as they went about their daily
business. So began an extraordinary shift that was apparently unnoticed
by the mainstream fashion industry: people began to show up for work
dressed as athletes—and in liberally minded, meritocratic Oregon, few
employers objected. Nike diversified beyond sports shoes, as did Columbia
Sportswear and other native companies, broadening their market from
mountaineers and skiers to the general population. Many more followed
in their wake as the pool of talent grew and supply line businesses spun off
the growing sports apparel companies.
Among the earliest adopters of athletic dress were the techies who inhab-
ited the “Silicon Forest” that had sprung up around Howard Vollum’s
Tektronix west of Portland and their cousins in the eastern suburbs of
Seattle. Defiance of convention was part of their way to the future. Ties
were out, Nikes were in. Soon an ambiguous wardrobe somewhere between
gymnasium and workplace became the norm—and spread around the globe.
Fashion may be skin-deep, but this change was a clue to membership of a
growing fealty to fitness and agility of both body and mind. It was a natural
progression from the environmentalism that had recently attracted so many
12 A City Cast in Place
to Oregon. The new dress code signified a readiness to be an early adopter
of new ideas; fitness to accept any challenge. New economies were emerg-
ing in a new age. In the 1980s, the virtual collapse of Oregon’s century-old
timber industry and the exit of Portland’s two Fortune 500 companies left a
lot of bright people with a new future to invent for themselves—or at least
redefine from emerging businesses and institutions. This was the only dec-
ade in which more people moved out of Oregon than moved in.
This all may seem far removed from urban design, but what it repre-
sented was a consolidation of public values around a healthy lifestyle, and
an assertion of independence from mainstream values. A broadly based
demand became apparent for a physical environment designed to uphold
those values. Perhaps not something that most people were aware of, but it
really mattered that even downtown, one could glimpse mountains and for-
ests on the distant skyline as an ever-present reminder of why we choose to
live here, and where we would bike, hike, or kayak next weekend. Portland
was filled with active urbanites breathing clean Cascadian air and drink-
ing pure water from mountain rains. No convincing was needed; they were
already committed to widely shared values.
The values that brought young professionals to Portland in the 1970s
and 1980s brought responsible environmentalism to the forefront well in
advance of many other cities in North America. Popular agreement on the
importance of recycling was sufficient to enact the statewide bottle bill in
1971, and soon many were rinsing, flattening, and recycling cans, as well
as delivering bundled newspapers and cardboard to salvage companies. An
aversion to driving alone to work each day was also part of this credo.
Transit services were revolutionized by opening of the downtown Transit
Mall and a fare-free zone to encourage ridership among those wealthy
enough to drive if they want to. Those same young professionals sought
homes where they could afford them—in inner neighborhoods mostly
occupied by aging couples and by transient populations in apartments and
rooming houses.

Gentrification
In the wake of 1960s urban renewal and the displacement of whole commu-
nities from the South Auditorium District (to which we shall return later),
there was great sensitivity to the evils of gentrification. However, a distinction
must be made between unwilling displacement that occurred under urban
renewal, and the gradual transformation of inner neighborhoods through
incremental reinvestment. Confusingly, both are referred to disparagingly as
“gentrification.” The second process is not only desirable, but essential to
the natural economic cycle of any urban neighborhood. Typically, a century-
old neighborhood in Portland includes homes built for the moderately
wealthy to buy and raise their families. Over time, some became rentals, and
in the Second World War many became rooming houses. Maintenance was
 A City Cast in Place 13
often deferred, and as decades passed, whole neighborhoods deteriorated
both socially and physically. In the case of inner Northwest Neighborhood,
the banks declared it an unwise place to invest and withheld loans for pur-
chase or improvement of property, thus speeding its decline.
Like other inner neighborhoods, Northwest Neighborhood was largely
occupied by aging households and by transient populations in apartments
and rooming houses. Enter the recently arrived, eager young professionals
of limited means in the 1970s and 1980s. No longer red-lined by the banks,
this was a place where a decent if dilapidated home could be bought with
the aid of a just-affordable mortgage. Over years of weekend improvement
projects and incremental investment, a house could be brought back to its
former glory after a century in decline. By this means, the descent of whole
neighborhoods into slums was reversed—and revived with them was the
commercial life of retail, services, and all sorts of embedded businesses—for
these neighborhoods mostly preceded the foolishness of exclusive zoning,
owing their compact urban form to streetcar proximity. The physical, social,
and commercial welfare of the neighborhood was restored, and the density
of population increased. Parking remained scarce, but transit thrived, and
sidewalks became busier than they had been for a generation. Transient pop-
ulations of renters in these neighborhoods ebbed and flowed as usual, but
over time, as rooming houses reverted to single-family homes, the renters
moved elsewhere.
This process can accurately be described as gentrification, since un-wealthy
transient populations of tenants were replaced by household investors who
subsequently became wealthy, and by those who were rich enough to buy
into the improved neighborhood. This is positive “gentrification.” It needs
another description, perhaps one that embodies another important result: the
preservation of the history associated with the renovated homes, and their
gardens and conservation of big trees; refreshing a whole neighborhood. Not
just the fact that buildings may be 100 years old, but the irreplaceable quali-
ties of old-growth timber used generously in making them; in hand-made
panel doors, deeply molded architraves, and other details that tell the history
of this place built in and from an ancient Cascadian forest.
Undeniably, there were some unwilling displacements, now recognized
to have been unforgivably divisive, such as the many African-American
families who were first displaced by the Vanport flood of 1948 to inner
neighborhoods on the east side of town, and were again displaced en masse
to make way for freeway construction in the 1960s. Neither disruption was
for the benefit of wealthier residents, but “gentrification” is the generic and
pejorative word used for the displacement and scattering of established
communities that occurred.
Young Portland had not experienced the abandonment of the inner city
to poor residents seen elsewhere. Thus, much of the “gentrification” that
occurred in the 1970s and 1980s did not involve displacement of vulner-
able populations, but did rescue neighborhoods in decline through the
14 A City Cast in Place
sweat equity and investment of recently arrived young people. The benefits
of bringing back declining inner-city neighborhoods included reduced com-
muting distances and less reliance on the automobile, increased patronage
of local retail and service providers, and of transit. As neighborhoods were
restored, population density increased, stronger communities emerged, and
property values and tax revenues grew. In other words, renewed community
health. As a consequence, the neighborhoods became attractive to new resi-
dents, and the development industry responded, beginning in the 1980s, by
infilling soft spots with row houses and condominiums, further increasing
the density of residents.

Urban Growth Boundary

The passage of the Oregon Senate Bill 100 mandating the urban growth
boundary in 1973 had little immediate effect on inner neighborhoods,
because the law required that sufficient land for 20 years’ development be
included within the boundary; a boundary that included not only Portland,
but 26 other jurisdictions making up Greater Portland. Development of
tract homes in the suburbs continued unabated until the late 1980s. This
is where folk of modest means could afford to buy, and for many the shift
from an urban rented home to a suburban property had been a lifelong
ambition. For others, an apartment in a suburban “woody walk-up” was
an affordable first step to independence, or a place to begin a new life.
Meanwhile, the supply of affordable housing within the city was greatly
expanded by the annexation of unincorporated lands to the east of I-205 in
the early 1980s. Semi-rural homes had been built in unincorporated areas of
the county with few development controls and often no sewer connections.
Typical houses were modest in both scale and quality of construction, but
affordable. These homes were spread too thinly to support transit, and the
streets that connected them were often unpaved or substandard. As of 2015,
59 miles of these east Portland streets still lacked sidewalks. Some residents
had retail within walking distance, but most did not. Many were without
sewage lines and the City of Portland lacked the finances to provide more
than basic services.
It was to these “East County” neighborhoods that poor families displaced
from inner-city communities migrated. There too went a steady stream of
new immigrants from far-off countries driven by poverty or war; about half
of Portland’s foreign-born immigrants reside there. So began another cycle
of urban repair and improvement in numerous neighborhoods in the eastern
reaches of Portland.
A tidal change was taking place: those driven by economic necessity gravi-
tated to socially homogenous suburbs. Those with least wealth and least
choice ended up in outer east Portland, but those wealthy enough to choose
where they wanted to live and had not yet put down roots began to favor
the inner city. Though slow to recognize the shifting market, homebuilders
 A City Cast in Place 15
began to refocus on the inner city. It was the shift of the early adopters that
enabled the Pearl District to blossom. Those who moved to the suburbs drove
more, exercised less, and were less engaged socially and civically. Those who
moved to the inner city walked and bicycled more, drove less, and rediscov-
ered the benefits and pleasures of an urbane and actively engaged lifestyle.
Gyms and spas opened and prospered. Sports equipment stores moved in
from suburban centers, following their customers into the center of the city.

Ideas That Shaped Early Portland

In 1850, the year before Portland was incorporated as a city, Ebenezer
Howard was born in far-off England into a roaring Industrial Revolution
that generated great wealth, while degrading the lives of the working poor.
As a child, he lived in the midst of the City of London, but was sent to
school in the country. The towns and villages of an agrarian past were to be
seen everywhere; reminders of a quieter, simpler life now lost to those who
labored long hours in gritty and squalid industrial centers.
As a young man, Howard spent five years in America, much of it in
Chicago, where he again witnessed the disturbing extremes of wealth and
squalor, but also debated with thinkers and poets such as Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Walt Whitman. Back in London, he read Henry George’s
influential Progress and Poverty, which again brought into focus the plight
of the working poor locked in vile housing among the mills contrasted
with the bucolic, if simple, pleasures of country life. Howard set out his
ideas for reconciling these differences in To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to
Real Reform, published in 1898. This envisaged places where the wealth
of industry and the calm of the countryside could coexist in harmony. The
book was updated and refined in the more widely known Garden Cities of
Tomorrow, which was published four years later.
Dismissed by many as utopian, the really revolutionary idea behind the
book was not garden cities, as the title suggested, but the idea that cities
should be planned rather than growing organically—or more accurately,
as business interests and political expedience dictated—as they had done
for the past century. In America, Howard had seen a more orderly pat-
tern of urban growth around a regular, orthogonal grid of streets—derived
from Roman military settlements, via Philip of Spain’s plans for cities in the
New World, and tempered by the Enlightenment (see Chapter 4). But even
these grew as economic opportunity directed, isolating workers in industrial
slums. Howard’s idea was to make home, work, and nature within walk-
ing distance for every citizen—restoring the pattern of preindustrial towns
and villages, but within populous cities. Natural precincts, like the parks
created by Capability Brown in England, would be incorporated in the
city as it grew. These were extravagant ideas: planning and building whole
cities—or at least towns—from scratch. To many, this seemed idealistic and
unaffordable, yet the underlying idea of planning cities around social as well
16 A City Cast in Place
as physical and economic parameters is now accepted as obvious common
sense. Public green space is integral to any thoughtfully planned urban envi-
ronment today—just as Howard advised.
In the spring of 1903, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and John Charles
Olmsted, stepson of the elder Frederick Law Olmsted, came to Portland
with a commission to prepare a park plan: “Olmsted wanted Portlanders to
look far in the future—50 years or more—especially when it came to pur-
chasing land while it was still within the city’s means” (Orloff 2004: 145).
Anticipating the outward spreading of Portland, the Olmsteds prescribed
parkways and boulevards linking existing green spaces in the city with pro-
posed parks around its periphery:

Parks and parkways should be acquired betimes [warned the report to

the Park Board]. Unless parks properly distributed, located and bounded
to best preserve beautiful local scenery, and . . . are secured while the
land is comparatively unoccupied by expensive improvements, they
rarely can be secured at all.
(Olmsted Brothers 1903: 120)

Inevitably, their plan was tempered by expediency, yet much of what was
proposed is there today in an interlinked sequence of green streets and
parks of every scale and design. It would be an overstatement to suggest
that Portland was designed around a garden framework, but the continuity
between generous parks and woodlands and almost every neighborhood
certainly brings the natural world right into the city. And that is what the
Olmsted brothers had in mind when they suggested the idea of Forest Park.
The City Club, Portland’s century-old civic organization, eventually chiv-
ied the city into purchasing the land for Forest Park in 1948. Eight miles
long and covering 5,172 acres (2,090 hectares), replanted with 30,000 trees,
and interlaced with trails, it brings wild countryside to the doorstep of the
Central Business District, achieving something that Howard had advocated
half a century before.
Portland’s first playground was opened in 1906 in the North Park
Blocks, replete with swings, a slide, climbing ropes, and bars. Active recrea-
tion proved so popular that playgrounds, pools, and indoor recreational
programs proliferated throughout the city’s parks and open spaces. The first
golf course was created in Eastmoreland, on the southeast edge of the city.
A Community House Program was created, notably in Peninsula Park in
1913, expanding indoor recreation opportunities and adding day-care pro-
grams for working mothers—programs that continue to be popular today.
As Chet Orloff put it:

Portland has always been a city of exercisers. Almost as soon as they

trudged in from the 2,000-mile hike across the Oregon Trail or stum-
bled stiff-legged off the ships that brought them up the Pacific Coast,
 A City Cast in Place 17
Portlanders took to the town’s hills and nearby mountains, its rivers,
bicycle routes, horse tracks and walking trails.
(Orloff 2004)

Following the euphoria that surrounded the Lewis & Clark Centennial
Exposition of 1905, and heeding the advice of the Olmsteds’ report, Edward
H. Bennett compiled the Greater Portland Plan, published in 1912. Bennett
was a protégé of Daniel Burnham and the City Beautiful movement.
He conceived a plan for the city that would grow without subsequent
modification—in the manner of Haussman’s Paris, illustrations of which
recur throughout the plan document. He wrote:

the result will be the Greater Portland, placed where the great rivers
of the West flow together, at the head of deep sea navigation, the
unquestioned social and commercial metropolis of a wide and fertile
___domain, famed the world around for form and beauty, dominant and
proud in prestige and power.
(Bennett 1912)

Not bad for an upstart town with of 207,214 souls (1910 census) antici-
pating a future population of 2,000,000 (see http://sos.oregon.gov/archives/
Pages/records/aids-census_osa.aspx). He also anticipated an increase in
Portland’s footprint from 54 square miles to about 150. In 2015, Greater
Portland covered 145 square miles with a population of 2.4 million, so he
was pretty close. A central proposal of the 1912 plan was to drive diago-
nal streets through the established orthogonal grids on both sides of the
river. He declared this to be “a feature indispensable to perfect circulation.”
However, one vital legacy of Bennett’s plan was the parks system. Measured
against Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, he found Portland to be seri-
ously deficient, and set about siting a dozen new parks in central Portland
and another 38 within three miles of the center, most of which have since
been realized.

Geography and Climate

Rome is defined by its seven hills, San Francisco and Seattle by their steep
streets and views of water. Portland’s geography is at once less dramatic yet
every bit as place-defining as those cities. It is centered on the Willamette
River, flowing south to north where it joins the Columbia River in a delta of
silty flats once washed by seasonal floods but now occupied by the airport,
industrial parks, golf courses, and the Portland International Raceway.
Geography and climate influence both cities and lifestyles. As observed
above, from most Portland streets, conifer-clad hillsides and sometimes the
Cascade peaks can be seen—a constant reminder to residents of the val-
ues that brought them here, but also a silent reminder of extreme seismic
18 A City Cast in Place
events that created the mountains and will one day shatter this place. Forest
Park brings wild woodland almost into the center of the city: a highway
for wildlife and a maze of trails for active urbanites. Portland is a place
where nature is always visible and accessible. Within this constant setting,
the city’s various populations shift and immigrants from far-off countries
are assimilated; communities and districts move through independent cycles
of economic and social change, yet through this diversity runs a constant
thread of widely shared values reflected in lifestyles.
The Central Business District extends from the west bank of the
Willamette toward the West Hills—more properly termed the east slope
of the Tualatin Mountains. This long ridge of fractured basalt is occupied
by Forest Park to the north, with housing ledged into the rest of it reaching
south into the suburbs. East of the river, there is no such containment, and
the grid of streets stretches over gentle undulations and the steeper slopes of
weathered volcanic buttes.
Rumpled folds in the West Hills provided two early routes from the
fertile Tualatin Basin. Canyon Road and Burnside still introduce visitors
from the West to the city between steep forested slopes, keeping arrival in
the city as a last-minute surprise. Burnside was extended east across the
Willamette, marking a shift in the street grid north and south of it, and pro-
viding a notional equator through the middle of the town, dividing north
from south addresses.
Near Burnside on the east side of the Willamette winds a deeply eroded
watercourse named Sullivan’s Gulch. An even gradient commended it first
to railroad engineers, and much later for the first leg of Portland’s Interstate
Freeway network. Back on the west side of the river, Tanner Creek, named for
the tannery of an early settler who used its waters, has vanished, but the void
left by its widest reach now holds a soccer stadium. Thus, in some particulars,
the city of today is a palimpsest revealing the features of a vanished geography.
Before permanent settlement, the Willamette had wide mudflats along its
banks, washed and restored by sediment from seasonal floods. Below the
silt lies a deep “V” cleft in the basaltic Troutdale Formation filled with flu-
vial sediments. Here and there, the formations shoulder their way above the
river, and it is at these narrowings that the first ferries ran, later replaced by
bridges. These bridge locations were not always wisely chosen, as we have
since learned: the land beneath the west abutments of the Sellwood Bridge
moves slowly but relentlessly eastwards, compressing the bridge and pulling
it from its foundations. The earliest bridges extended east-west streets to the
east side, and with them came a disciplined band of surveyors to establish
a continuation of the 200-feet (61 m) city block pattern and the formwork
of a fine-grained city.
Wood was plentiful and inexpensive in early Portland, so was used to
build everything from chicken coops to Gothic churches. It was not until
railroads succeeded tall ships that brick began to appear, transported from
the Midwest on the return journey of trains exporting timber and grain.
 A City Cast in Place 19
Some of the older brick buildings are clustered about the rail yards, where
they provided less flammable warehousing. Downtown entered a new era,
with brick and concrete enabling higher and denser development than tim-
ber alone had been able to provide. Clean sand and gravel were in plentiful
supply under Ross Island, in the river just south of Downtown, feeding a
growing demand for mortar and concrete. Today, the northernmost rem-
nants of the island are preserved as a nature reserve, home to a sizeable
colony of great blue herons, whose distinctive flight is often glimpsed over
the city. The trees of Ross Island combine with those of the Park Blocks and
dozens of parks, plazas, and residential neighborhoods to create safe flight
paths to nearby forests and wetlands for many bird populations, both resi-
dent and migratory. The “urban forest,” though artificially created, restores
integrity to the passage of birds and other creatures that recognize no juris-
dictional boundaries. The trees restore shade in summer and break the force
of winter winds, and they restore the spirits of the city’s biophilic occupants.
From virgin forest to urban forest in 180 years, clothing a geography that
continues to shape our lives.

City Form and Scale

Geography shaped the formwork on which Portland was built, but a series
of purposeful decisions has shaped the built environment. The most far-
reaching decision was to establish 200 ft2 city blocks divided by 60-feet
streets and 80-feet north-south streets Downtown (61 m square blocks
divided by 18 and 24 m streets). This pattern was established in 1845 when
Thomas Brown platted 16 blocks along the west bank of the Willamette.
When land north of Burnside was platted, the grid was maintained, but
skewed to parallel the waterfront with all streets 60 feet wide. Development
grew westward from the waterfront, and as more blocks were developed, so
the potential for a catastrophic fire increased. When the town reached eight
blocks back from the waterfront, insurers demanded a 200-foot firebreak,
no doubt to the disgust of landowners at the time. How astonished they
would be to see what that firebreak has become today. The 100-foot-wide
Park Blocks flanked by 50-foot streets are among the city’s most distinctive
features and most frequented parks.
The 200-foot-square city block size imposed a discipline on the scale of
the buildings that occupy them. Typically, Downtown’s blocks were platted
with 100-feet-deep lots facing east and west onto the 80-feet-wide avenues. A
few contrived light wells to bring natural light to the center of the block, but
most developers filled their lots entirely. Closely spaced intersecting streets
ensured light and activity at street level, and natural light on all sides of a
40,000 ft2 (3,700 m2) footprint, the largest building possible on a standard
city block. In the past 20 years, as condominiums and apartments have pro-
liferated in the Pearl District, back-to-back buildings have been built on a
block with an alley, a landscaped paseo, or a garden between them, giving
20 A City Cast in Place
even greater exposure to daylight and a finer grain to pedestrian circulation.
In the early years, grander houses would occupy an entire block, much as the
Pioneer Courthouse does to this day, with trees and landscaping on all sides.
Another of Portland’s distinctive features is the set of 12 bridges across
the Willamette, from the 1931 Saint Johns two-tower steel suspension
bridge in North Portland to the 2016 Sellwood steel deck arch bridge in
the south. Each bridge is an exceptional example of its type, and some are
unique: such as the 2015 Tilikum Crossing, a two-tower cable-stay bridge
that carries trains, streetcars, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians, but no gen-
eral traffic. Many are not glamorous old bridges to rival those of London or
Paris. With few exceptions, they reflect the utilitarian engineering of the era
in which each was built, such as the double deck, vertical lift Steel Bridge of
1912. Alas, these stars all but disappear after dark, except those on which
architectural lighting has been installed by a force of local volunteers named
the Willamette Light Brigade. Exceptions are the two newest bridges—the
Tilikum Crossing and the Sellwood Bridge, both of which combine care-
ful architectural and environmental design with advanced engineering,
and both have architectural lighting integral to their design and contribute
splendidly to the appearance of the river after dark.
Alas, not all man-made features enhance the quality of the city. Following
consultation with Robert Moses in 1943, and accelerated into reality by
generous federal funding of the Interstate program a decade later, freeways
were incised into the urban fabric, cleaving communities in the process.
National priorities hastened completion of the Interstate system, but freeway
construction inflicted serious physical and social damage by building these
massive structures. The first to be constructed, the I-84 Banfield Freeway,
discreetly followed Sullivan’s Gulch eastwards from the river—but I-5
destroyed “Jump City” and hogged the waterfront with huge interchanges
through the city center, slinging the unlovely Marquam Bridge obliquely
across the Willamette. By contrast, the business loop of I-405 on the west
side dives under Burnside, and south of it most surface streets connect over
the freeway. Had I-5 on the east side been confined to a similar below-grade
alignment further from the Willamette River, and the street grid kept intact,
the Central Eastside would be a very different place today. Eastside develop-
ment could have come up to a waterfront quay as it does in Copenhagen’s
harbor front, London’s Embankment, and Cologne’s Altstadt. On history’s
bright side, the most damaging parts of the urban freeway system—Harbor
Way and the Mount Hood Freeway—were rejected and never built.
Ironically, the freeway system creates a safer place for cyclists and those on
foot by diverting a great volume of traffic off the city’s surface streets onto
the freeways. Since I-5 usurped the Interstate Bridge between Oregon and
Washington, local traffic has no alternative to joining interstate traffic and
contributing to congestion and delays.
A turning point in the healthy city was reached with the decision to
build the Portland Transit Mall. All buses serving Downtown would be
 A City Cast in Place 21
routed southbound on Fifth Avenue or northbound on Sixth Avenue. This
would enable interchange between all services with no more than a short
walk between stops. A new and enlightened tri-metropolitan transit agency,
TriMet, recognized that to increase ridership it must make walking and wait-
ing for a bus pleasurable experiences. Wide sidewalks of warm red brick
were furnished with comfortable shelters, drinking fountains, and public art.
Street trees lined each avenue, restoring a little of the greenery that had disap-
peared over a century ago.
This was a momentous urban design statement without precedent. For
over half a century, every important improvement in the city’s streets had
been exclusively to benefit drivers and their vehicles. Walking and bicycling
had become more perilous as the way was cleared for cars and trucks to
speed quickly through town. Streets were made one-way and signals timed
to keep traffic moving briskly. Historic buildings were cleared to provide
parking lots. Against this backdrop, the transit authority sought out an
internationally recognized firm of architects and urban designers, SOM,1 to
create a safe and agreeable place for its riders to come and go from its buses
downtown. They designed streets for people on foot, furnished them gra-
ciously, and provided spectacular shelters. Street intersections were paved
with brick too, clearly marking pedestrian crossings for reasons of safety as
well as visual continuity.
While other cities treated transit riders as an embarrassing and incon-
venient financial burden, Portland treated them like royalty. Walking along
Portland’s Transit Mall beneath street trees and past planters of seasonal
blooms was a promenade not to be missed. The transit authority has restored
those on foot as the rightful owners of the public realm. Many transit malls
were opened across the country in the 1970s, but few have succeeded or
even survived as this one has. A major reason for the success of the Portland
Transit Mall is that it did so much more than accommodate buses. It rebuilt
the streets from building face to building face to make them the best streets
in the region. The Transit Mall provided exceptional places to walk down-
town, but also recognized the relevance of businesses fronting the sidewalks,
and enabled drivers to access the streets too. Running the length of the CBD
and crossing the main retail center, these two streets exuded such a sense of
quality that they redefined the image of Downtown.
A below-grade parking garage had been built in one of the midtown Park
Blocks in the early 1970s. Mayor Goldschmidt called landscape architect
Bob Perrin and asked him if he could design a park on the bleak concrete
lid of the garage; the budget would be small. Nurserymen from around
the region donated hundreds of rose bushes, and a fountain was commis-
sioned. Named for Portland’s first mayor, Hugh O’Bryant, the space was
transformed into a perfumed garden—an oasis of peace amidst the roaring
traffic. O’Bryant Square opened in 1973, and soon a variety of programmed
and spontaneous events began to occur, surprising many with the crowds
that they attracted. Previously invisible seams of culture emerged with
22 A City Cast in Place
often impromptu, but increasingly programmed literary and musical per-
formances, festivals, and simple but welcome social interaction. Another
reason to walk downtown.
Just a couple of blocks away was a far more visible space: the site of
the vanished landmark Portland Hotel, now reduced to a parking lot for
department store Meier & Frank. This space was twice the size of O’Bryant
Square, and much more conspicuous, spanning from the new Nordstrom
store on Broadway to the revered Pioneer Courthouse below 6th Avenue to
the east. Flanked by two prime shopping streets, SW Morrison and Yamhill,
this would be the perfect place for Portland’s resurgent pedestrians to con-
verge: a sort of urban living room. This was possible politically because
having replaced Harbor Way with Waterfront Park, and with the Transit
Mall up and running, a consensus had solidified around the changing status
of those on foot: that the car was no longer king.
An international design competition was launched to create one of the great
new people-spaces of the twentieth century. Designs were submitted from
around the world, and models of the best submissions were put on display.
The winning scheme was a simple brick-paved plaza with a waterfall, an arc
of steps overlooking a central arena, and a whimsical colonnade separating
it from the streets. The public was further drawn into the venture by funding
construction—through buying individual bricks. From the first concept, ordi-
nary people took possession of Pioneer Courthouse Square as their own. It is
a place where everyone is welcome, a place to see and be seen, or just to chill
out amid the hubbub of the working day. Its immediate and warm adoption
by citizens and visitors alike, together with the comfortable fit of the design
in this particular ___location, made the new square an old friend in short order.
Jan Gehl (2000) has acclaimed it as one of the world’s best public squares.
Part of the success of Pioneer Courthouse Square was due to its timing,
affirming as it did the new age of the pedestrian heralded by the Transit
Mall. Part of it was due to skillful management and programming to ensure
that it was always safe and clean, and there was always something interest-
ing going on. Events that had drawn crowds to tiny O’Bryant Square were
now programmed on a larger scale in Pioneer Courthouse Square, bringing
their followers with them. But there were imaginative new events—such as
an annual showpiece in which nurserymen from around the state donate
potted plants that are arranged as a tapestry across the square, depicting
a scene commissioned from a local artist. There were plays, dinners, mov-
ies, concerts—always something to see and do, making this the place to go
when visiting Downtown, putting more people on the sidewalks and draw-
ing retailers and restaurateurs back into the center of town.

Growing Downtown’s Public Realm

A healthy city is one that not only accommodates walking, but positively
invites it. Routes between popular destinations should, for practical reasons,
 A City Cast in Place 23
be direct, but they can also enrich the walker’s experience. A route that includes
leafy parks, urban plazas, pathways, and sidewalks can add variety and delight
to everyday work trips and errands. Small city blocks in a regular grid of
streets offer numerous routes of equal distance across town. The discerning
walker will soon learn routes that are both quick and delightful, changing
with weather and seasons. Though embattled by freeway construction in the
1950s and 1960s, central Portland retained its heritage of much-loved parks
and open spaces, but hunger for an enriched public realm was far from satis-
fied. The values of citizens and their elected representatives demanded more
greenery and more places to walk, run, and recreate from their workplaces—
especially Downtown.
Close on the heels of the first freeway construction had come another
well-intentioned but destructive initiative: Portland’s great experiment in
urban renewal of the South Auditorium District. In 1955, new federal legis-
lation was used to clear 84 acres south of Downtown for redevelopment. At
the cost of displacing 2,300 residents, property values multiplied and new
jobs and upmarket homes were created. The venture was declared a massive
success in renewing a tired old part of town. In 1966, the urban renewal
area was expanded northwards to Jefferson Street, bringing the total to 110
acres (44 hectares). The clearances removed long-established Italian and
Jewish communities and displaced dozens of small manufacturers and mer-
chants, some of whom thrived elsewhere, though many disappeared—but
all still lingering nostalgically in the collective memory. A silver lining to
this gloomy cloud was the commissioning of landscape architect Lawrence
Halprin in 1968 to design a series of linked parks through the redeveloped
district, tying it back to the parks and open spaces of Downtown.
Lownsdale Square, Chapman Square, and Terry Schrunk Plaza are a trio
of city block parks (two public parks and the third the landscaped lid of
a private parking garage) that mark the center of Portland’s civic district.
They are fronted by City Hall, the Portland Building, law courts, and the
Justice Center. Halprin proposed another city-block-sized park opposite
the Keller Auditorium three blocks to the south. Inspired by waterfalls cas-
cading into the Columbia Gorge, Keller Fountain Park was an instant and
lasting success. A footpath leads two blocks further south to Pettygrove
Park, a densely green block of grassy hummocks and graceful trees. A short
walk further south leads first to Lovejoy Fountain Park, with paved ter-
races, passive pools, and quietly choreographed ledges and benches. The
walk terminates at the Source Fountain, a simple font-like monument by
Lincoln Street.
The walking trail in Waterfront Park along the river has been popular
since the park was opened in 1978, replacing Harbor Way and former
industrial sites. Some years later, as part of the Hawthorne Bridge refur-
bishment, wide sidewalks were added on both sides of the bridge, giving
safe access to the east side of the river on foot and by bicycle. Completion
of the Eastside Esplanade in 2001 and addition of a footway along the
24 A City Cast in Place

Figure 2.1 Ira Keller Fountain was designed by Lawrence Halpren as the beginning
of a sequence of public open spaces to connect Portland’s civic center
to the South Auditorium urban renewal district. Recirculating streams
trickle and gather in the wooded meadow that occupies much of a
city block before dashing over the brink of a multifaceted waterfall,
crashing into a pool far below street level where stepping stones take
the intrepid far from the noises of the city. Fountain seems inadequate
to describe this massive and energetic park evoking waterfalls tumbling
into the Columbia Gorge.

south side of the Steel Bridge created a loop around this central reach of the
river that attracts hundreds of runners and walkers each day.
In the Pearl District, developers and the city agreed on a series of three
park squares to be created as development advanced north from Hoyt Street.
First to be completed was Jameson Park. Its designer, landscape architect
Pete Walker, conceived an active space for young and old. A ridge of mas-
sive golden granite blocks divides the block from north to south, and down
its west side, water gushes and tumbles into a shallow semicircular pool.
Periodically, the water stops and the pool drains away, leaving an expanse
of paving with lawn and trees filling the margins to the street. The east-
ern half of the square is surfaced with decomposed granite, inviting boule
players (who for years never came, but they have found it at last). Much
to everyone’s surprise, in sunny weather the pool to the west attracted par-
ents and children from miles around. Far from the restful splash of water
expected by the many empty nesters roosting in condominiums fronting the
park, squeals of delight echoed off the buildings as the park became a surro-
gate beach. So popular has it become that the city was compelled to install a
 A City Cast in Place 25
public restroom, one of the famous “Portland Loos.” Walker also designed
a boardwalk along 10th Avenue, planning to connect Jameson to the two
future parks and to a footbridge over active rail lines and Naito Parkway as
a link to the riverfront Greenway Trail system. Like Halprin, he recognized
the importance of continuity between public open spaces, contributing to
a green network spread across the city. In due course, landscape architect
and urbanist Herbert Dreiseitl won a competition to design the second Pearl
District Park: the passive Tanner Springs Park, bringing a microcosm of
Oregon’s natural landscapes sloping down to a pool where herons wade.
The largest and most accommodating of the three is Fields Park, with dif-
ferent sections serving strollers, Frisbee players, dog walkers, and crocodiles
of children from the elementary school. But as yet, there is no footbridge to
the Willamette Greenway Trail.
Before the parks were built, while streets were being platted across the
rail yard, an urban design team working with the City Engineer recognized
that the demand for east-west circulation would be limited since several
streets terminate at I-405 to the west and 9th Avenue to the east. Irving and
Kearney Streets were consequently designated as park streets with no access
for general traffic. These shady and sheltered streets now provide places to
pause and chat, and they extend the greenery of the park squares deeper into
the district, further encouraging walking as the most convenient and enjoy-
able means of getting around.
After the millennium and three decades of successful transit operations,
the Transit Mall couplet through Downtown was suffering the effects of
repeatedly deferred maintenance. Planning was underway for the latest
extension of the light rail system to Milwaukee, seven miles to the south. It
would best be served by adding tracks and stops on the Transit Mall. There
was widespread skepticism about introducing rail into the 80-feet-wide
streets (only 60 feet wide north of Burnside) that already served dozens of
bus routes, had wide and well-used sidewalks, and accommodated general
traffic. The transit agency broke with common practice by selecting not
engineers, but urban designers, to lead design,2 with engineers and other
specialist consultants under their direction. The result is a truly complete
pair of streets, serving all users equitably. Buses and trains weave back and
forth between two lanes to serve stops and overtake stationary vehicles,
while a third lane carries general traffic. Wide sidewalks and efficient and
elegantly understated shelters provide waiting riders with weather protec-
tion, comfort, information, and light. Additional public art pieces were
commissioned and building frontages were spruced up, strengthening the
identity of each segment of the Transit Mall.
Strengthening the connection between the North and South Park Blocks
has been an ambition of successive generations. The skinny 50 feet (15 m)
streets flanking the developed Park Blocks provide a functional connection,
but have not realized their potential as intimate and distinctive places as
have the Gothic alleys of Barcelona or the lanes of Brighton. A block that
26 A City Cast in Place

Figure 2.2 The Transit Mall on SW 5th and 6th Avenues was rebuilt to include
a light rail line extending the system south to Milwaukee. Buses and
trains occupy two lanes on the right-hand side of the street, each
bypassing the other at passenger stops. The left-hand lane is open
to general traffic and bicycles. Wide brick sidewalks are universally
accessible and include passenger shelters, public art, fountains, planters,
and street trees. These complete streets are 80 feet (24 m) wide and
accommodate all bus services to and through Downtown.

was to be developed with a multistory parking garage instead had parking

built beneath it, and the surface was donated to the city for what was to
become Director Park. The design team recognized an unusual opportunity
to extend the park across the flanking streets, thereby doubling the width
of the usable space from 100 feet to 200 feet. Distinctive warm white gran-
ite paving stretches from building face to building face, unifying the space
and doubling its area for major events when the marginal streets are closed
to traffic. This achieves something that is usual in Europe’s organic cities,
where streets enter squares but do not circumscribe them, but rare in the
orthogonal street grids of North America. The flanking streets are curbless
green streets surfaced in matching granite pavers, prototypes for their con-
tinuation north and south to the Park Blocks. They will become part of the
Green Loop: a walking, jogging, and bike circuit around central Portland
crossing the river via Tilikum Crossing and the Broadway Bridge.
All of these parks and pathways serve to redress the balance for walkers
and cyclists in a circulation system that had been skewed entirely in favor
 A City Cast in Place 27

Figure 2.3 The Green Loop is a six-mile linear park encircling the city center on
both sides of the Willamette River. It will connect the North and South
Park Blocks with new green spaces on both sides of the river to provide
safe and attractive walking and cycling routes accessible to increasingly
dense living and working districts through which it passes.

of motorized vehicles in the 1950s and 1960s. As in many cities, streets

had been made one-way and curb radiuses increased to speed vehicles
through the city. Pedestrian crossings had been lengthened or sometimes
replaced with barriers and “no pedestrian crossing” signs. With thoughtful
design and political will, all modes of transport can coexist equitably, as the
Transit Malls demonstrate, making the city as a whole more functional and
a healthier place to be.
As the city has become easier to negotiate on foot and bike, so more people
walk and cycle, benefitting their health in the process. The “complete street”
concept can be expanded to “complete district” or even “complete city.”
Barriers to personal movement can be removed by taming streets that are too
fast or too wide to cross easily and safely without compromising traffic capac-
ity. Methods are discussed in “Street Size and Safety” in Chapter 6. Sharing
street space has to be relearned after years of automobile dominance, so devices
such as the “sharrow” symbol stenciled onto neighborhood streets remind driv-
ers and cyclists that they should anticipate one another’s movements.
The primary function of urban streets is to give access to the homes and
businesses that line them, not to speed traffic through to somewhere else.
Thus, streets should be designed for safe and convenient access by which-
ever mode one chooses to use. The old engineering standby of LOS (level
of service) as a means of assessing the worth of a street measures only effi-
cient throughput of vehicles. It is blind to the social or commercial success
28 A City Cast in Place
of a place. A more comprehensive measure—an urban design quotient—
would be far more useful in assessing the quality of a place as well as
the capacity of the street. That quotient would consider such qualities
as transparency of the building frontage and frequency of active door-
ways; the convenience and safety with which pedestrians can cross the
street; noise and light levels; street furniture and paving materials; side-
walk dining and other sidewalk uses; street trees and planters; shade and
shelter; bike racks; safety record for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians; and
safety and convenience for delivery vehicles. More about this in “Sensory
Urbanism” in Chapter 8.
A socially and commercially successful street may score well in urban
design terms yet conflict with traffic safety. For example, Portland’s NW
23rd Avenue, described in “Urban Health” in Chapter 1 as a success-
ful street, owes part of its triumph to the apparent abandon with which
people cross the street illegally—dashing between slow-moving vehicles,
thereby enforcing a modal equity that the law does not recognize, and in
the process enlivening businesses on both sides of the street. This messy
vitality is the very quality that we seek when we explore streets for pleasure.
The Netherlands have found a way of making such behavior legal in its
Woonerfs, and we tolerate it in the unusual case of NW 13th Avenue, where
loading docks survive and the street has no sidewalks. Somehow, the inter-
ests of all street users must be reconciled so that they can not only coexist
safely, but can positively thrive together. The key to that lies in recognizing
that every stretch of a street functions slightly differently to the one next to
it, and that the rhythm of movements must vary too.

Planning Law and Urban Growth

In the preceding sections, the focus has been on Downtown and the inner
neighborhoods, since the components of a healthy city are perhaps most
conspicuous there. But the values that created equity between modes there
are evident regionally. Metro is the elected regional government respon-
sible for strategic planning for the entire urbanized area comprising 24
cities and three counties. This is the only elected regional government
in the nation. Metro also consults with Vancouver and Clark County
across the Columbia River in Washington State to achieve some measure
of coordination with that part of the metropolitan area, although under
separate jurisdiction.
A signal initiative by Metro was the 2040 Growth Concept, completed
in 1995. This was an effort in which communities were asked to look ahead
50 years to discover whether they favored building up or out as population
increased. There were three options: (1) expand the urban growth bound-
ary (UGB); (2) keep the UGB substantially unchanged but develop more
intensely within it; or (3) grow satellite communities outside Portland’s
UGB. Growth within the UGB was broadly supported, and Metro went on
 A City Cast in Place 29
to identify established and potential centers for growth; both regional and
neighborhood centers, and station areas connected by transit corridors that
would also support increased density. This decision essentially endorsed the
1973 statewide planning laws, and provided a common set of planning prin-
ciples to guide all 27 local jurisdictions.
An adopted plan of transit corridors linking local and regional centers still
provides priorities for pedestrian and bicycle improvement projects: mak-
ing transit more accessible with safe sidewalks and street crossings. It also
enables local planning authorities to identify places where greater density
should be permitted, and to designate areas that should remain essentially
unchanged. This in turn gave the public at large some peace of mind, replac-
ing a knee-jerk reaction to oppose any change on the assumption that it
might mean development in their backyards. The 2040 Plan also served to
demonstrate to suburban communities the benefits associated with equitable,

Figure 2.4 The 2040 planning process culminated in an agreement that Portland

should keep the urban growth boundary intact and accommodate
growth by strategically increasing the density of development within
its bounds. The 2040 map shows local and regional growth centers,
station area communities, and connecting corridors along which
development would be encouraged and transit services would run.
30 A City Cast in Place
multimodal thinking as opposed to the default position of automobile-centric
planning. Young planners joining suburban planning authorities were bring-
ing such notions with them in any case. Now most, if not all, outer urban
communities aspire to some degree toward healthy city values and initiatives.
Although wide suburban arterials remain as formidable barriers to walking
and biking, real efforts are being made to accommodate people willing to get
out of their cars for local errands and exercise.

Transit and Daily Travel

The Portland Transit Mall had bucked national trends in the mid-1970s
by redefining transit, lavishing precious resources on handsome streets and
comfortable shelters to show respect for their riders. Meanwhile, transit
elsewhere was often tolerated as the mode of the impoverished, regarded as
an unwanted financial imposition. A less conspicuous part of the Portland
transit agency’s quiet revolution was building a regional bus service to
replace the less coordinated services provided by a scatter of private com-
panies in the past. The next big step was funding of the first segment of a
light rail system with money diverted from the moribund I-80 Mount Hood
Freeway project, and with it the idea of a metro-wide system that would
both supplement and complement the bus network. Transit was reaching
more and more people. Populous corridors were obvious routes accessible
to a growing ridership, and this strategy was reinforced by the 2040 Plan,
with its mapping of future growth along those corridors, and to new or
expanded local and regional centers. This was coordination of land use and
transportation at a strategic level. In retrospect, this was an obvious way to
plan city growth, yet in cities across the country land use and transporta-
tion remained siloed in separate departments with separate governance and
more enmity than communication between them.
From the mid-1970s, Portlanders had been exposed to a fresh and posi-
tive image of transit, most conspicuous downtown, where as many as 200
buses plied the Transit Mall during the busiest hour of the day. Ridership
received an unexpected fillip when non-attainment of federal air quality
standards drove the city to cap the number of parking spaces downtown.
Parking fees went up and more commuters took to using transit. Voices of
doom predicted an end to business and employment growth Downtown,
yet over the 15 years that the lid on parking spaces remained in place,
Downtown employment rose steadily (except for the lean years of the early
1980s). Meanwhile, the myth persisted among retailers that “our customers
are not transit riders.” That may have been true in the 1960s, but successive
surveys demonstrated that such was no longer the case. TriMet had largely
succeeded in its goal of matching the socioeconomic profile of its riders
to that of the Metro population. In other words, many who were wealthy
enough to drive and park Downtown chose instead to use transit.
 A City Cast in Place 31
Widespread acceptance of transit in Portland dates to a period between
the opening of the first light rail line to Gresham in 1986 and the vote
to fund Westside Light Rail. As the Gresham line was being designed and
built, few people understood what light rail was, and the press did little to
change the terrifying image of an Amtrak locomotive roaring down local
streets scattering children and pets in its wake. It was portrayed as a costly
white elephant that few would want to ride. Perhaps this negativity was
all to the good, for when service began, people took to it in droves. MAX,
as it was dubbed, for Metropolitan Area Express, was designed and built
around commuter traffic, fulfilling the intended purpose of the defunct
Mount Hood Freeway. Consequently, sufficient rolling stock was procured
for weekday commuting, with the plan to do maintenance over the week-
ends when minimal service would be needed. The system was mobbed for
the first few weekends, and this was supposed to be due to novelty and
curiosity. But the pattern persisted. So-called “weekend excursion travel”
maintained surprisingly high ridership numbers month after month. Proof
of Portlanders’ romance with MAX came in a ballot measure that asked if
voters were willing to tax themselves to help pay for a new Westside MAX
line reaching 15 miles to Hillsboro—74 percent said yes.
Meanwhile, the city was engaged with plans for the River District infill
of the rail yards north of Downtown. An important question was how to
connect this isolated spot to the CBD and to established neighborhood
services on NW 23rd Avenue. Light rail was the hero of the moment and
an obvious choice, but its victories were won racing through the suburbs
at 55 mph, not maneuvering through narrow streets pretending to be a
streetcar. Why not build a real streetcar; one designed to snake through
the tight spaces of European cities? TriMet was not at all keen on the idea
of adding yet another mode to their services, so the city decided to go it
alone. Engineers were dispatched with strict criteria for service, opera-
tions, and maintenance to scrutinize the best streetcar systems in Europe,
and returned with a sound choice from Pilzen in the Czech Republic. The
2.5-mile (4 km) line was designed and built to minimize disruption of
businesses, inserting tracks into mixed traffic lanes along a couplet of one-
way streets, paralleling the Transit Mall five blocks (¼ mile) to the west.
Service began in 2001, and again ridership projections were exceeded as
pedestrians used it to extend their range; new residents of the River District
increasingly left their cars in the garage. With subsequent expansions of
the original streetcar line, it now reaches the Lloyd District and OMSI
on the east side of the Willamette in both directions in a circuit that
embraces the CBD, the South Waterfront, and several inner neighbor-
hoods. Average miles driven per capita in Portland have continued to
decline every year since 1997 despite steadily growing population—a sure
sign that transit has been fully embraced as a part of the healthy city, along
with more walking and biking.3
32 A City Cast in Place
Bike Culture
In 1990, an already numerous cadre of dedicated bicyclists formed the non-
profit Bicycle Transportation Alliance in Portland to lobby for equity among
transportation modes—initially in Oregon, and now nationally. Early vic-
tories included the right to take bicycles onto TriMet buses and trains, and
a lawsuit to uphold the 1971 Oregon Bicycle Bill, which required accom-
modation of pedestrian and bicycle traffic on any new road.
More recently, the city has embraced a campaign to create a network
of “bicycle boulevards”—low-speed streets that have been improved as safe
bicycle routes. Berkeley, California, implemented the first bicycle boulevard
in 1980, and now many cities across the US have their versions in operation.
Now renamed “neighborhood greenways” in Portland to connote their suit-
ability for walking and playing as well as bicycling, the city now has 70 miles
of them, with more in preparation.
The Yellow Bike Project of 1994 put 400 restored and uniformly painted
bikes onto Portland’s streets free to use at one’s own risk. Sadly, the bikes
slowly disappeared, but the benefits of being able to pick up a bike and use
it were not lost—nor were the social and ecological values of a program that
continues to make bikes a conspicuous alternative to driving in town. Bikes
are still restored by at-risk youth and donated free to those who need them.
Not until 2016 did a full-fledged bike rental scheme with 1,000 gleaming
machines open. After many false starts, this bike-centric city was among the
later adopters of public bike rentals, which many visitors now expect to find
in any large city. Biketown launched with 1,000 conspicuous bright orange
bicycles, and stations at 100 locations around the CBD and inner neighbor-
hoods, making a huge statement about changing attitudes.
In 1996, the Willamette Light Brigade4 negotiated temporary closure of a
number of Portland’s bridges in order to enable Bridge Pedal as a fund rais-
ing event to light the bridges. On a summer weekend, 7,500 riders turned
out for the ride that zigzagged across the Willamette River, giving immedi-
ate visibility to the popularity of bicycling in the city. This annual event
subsequently became Providence Bridge Pedal, named for its new primary
sponsor. It still relies on BTA volunteers as the event has grown to attract
20,000 riders and walkers each year.
Counts from 2014 showed that 17,000 regularly commute to jobs in
Downtown Portland by bicycle, representing 7.2 percent of all work trips.5
The opening of Tilikum Crossing in 2015 has almost certainly increased this
number beyond 8 percent—against a national average of 0.5 percent. Behind
these numbers are 350 miles of bikeways, with more in preparation. There
are also thousands who bike for pleasure but commute by other means. For
many of them, separated routes such as the Springwater Corridor are attrac-
tive, with 20 miles of shared bike and pedestrian trails. This former rail line
was acquired by the City of Portland in 1990 as part of its effort to complete
the Forty Mile Loop proposed by the Olmsteds in 1903 as a component of
 A City Cast in Place 33
the Parks Plan. It threads together a number of parks and scenic spots with
a paved trail suited to even the most timid of cyclists, some of whom will
certainly graduate to join the ranks of bike commuters.
Sometimes careful planning is blessed with blind luck. The Oregon
Health Sciences University (OHSU) is the largest corporate employer in
Portland with over 15,000 jobs. Having reached the capacity of its hilltop
campus, there was a real possibility that it might relocate to the suburbs.
This spurred the city to search for ways to retain them. Former industrial
property on the riverfront only half a mile away could meet their needs,
but separated by 400 feet in elevation, a freeway, and a network of steep,
crooked, and busy roads, access was challenging. From a range of exotic
solutions to this problem emerged the idea of an aerial tram. Conceived as
an adapted ski lift, it emerged via an international design competition as a
sleek and speedy pair of cars each able to carry 78 people to and from the
waterfront in four minutes. It was designed by Angelil/Graham/Pfenniger/
Scholl, based in Zurich, Switzerland, and Los Angeles, and the cabins were
made in Switzerland. What no one had anticipated was that the aerial tram
also made commuting to OHSU by bicycle a practical proposition with-
out having to negotiate the long and tortuous climb to the hilltop campus;
something attempted by very few. At first dozens and now hundreds of
OHSU employees bike to and from work each day, leaving their bikes in
secure storage at the waterfront station. With the opening of the Tilikum
Crossing in 2015, more Eastside neighborhoods are within cycling distance
of OHSU, PSU, and Downtown.
The option of cycling to work is a natural choice in the healthy city, where
an extensive infrastructure of bike shops, cycling outfitters, designers, and
manufacturers of bicycle components and apps flourishes. This is the same
pattern of affinity through values to proliferation and creation of jobs that
was earlier demonstrated by Nike and its peers. The intangible qualities and
values that drew people to live in Portland have propelled the activities and
industries that have helped it to succeed as a healthy city.

Land Use Changes and Mobility

Cities and jurisdictions across the country adopted zoning codes that
allocated single uses to most urbanized areas, preparing the ground for
massive tracts of suburban “homes for heroes” beginning in the 1940s,
and continuing today in many parts of the country. The practicality of
this massive urban expansion depended on the expectation that every
household would possess at least one automobile. In fact, widespread car
ownership prompted outward growth in what Paulo Soleri (of Arcosanti
fame) dubbed “the Detroit continuum”: car ownership enabled people of
modest means to buy inexpensive land on the urban fringe and live away
from gritty and crime-ridden inner-city neighborhoods with greenery and
34 A City Cast in Place
fresh air to breathe—until leapfrogged by the next wave of growth, and
the next, each expansion obliterating greenery and fresh air as it advanced
across former countryside. The result is the familiar monoculture of hous-
ing too sparse to support transit, and every trip to school or to the store
requiring an automobile.
Just as Ebenezer Howard had harked back to preindustrial towns and vil-
lages to find a model of simple but civilized living, a century later urbanists
theorized about sought-after mature towns and neighborhoods and recog-
nized the value in balancing land use and transportation. Mobility increases
the number and variety of destinations within one’s reach, but paradoxically,
the automobile is not always the best enabler of mobility. People in mixed-
use neighborhoods choose from among driving, walking, biking, and riding
transit, and enjoy a much greater range of potential destinations. The key is
clearly close proximity of home, workplace, retail, services, and recreation.
Land use and transportation are undeniably related, yet in most jurisdictions,
land use planning and transportation were (and in some places still are)
designed and implemented in separate departments, with minimal communi-
cation between them. Transportation facilities were designed around current
and projected demand, without any attempt to influence the cause of that
demand, which stemmed of course from the expanding suburbs.
Even the most dedicated driver becomes a pedestrian at each end of a
trip, and storage space for the car is thus necessary at each destination. Each
suburban home generates on average a dozen trips a day, requiring parking
spaces at home, at work, at the shopping center, and occasionally at health
or recreation destinations. This equates to about eight parking spaces, or
more than 2,500 ft2 (230 m2) of paving per home—covering about the same
area as an average sized house—just for parking. Add roads and driveways,
and soon the paved area per car approaches the size of each housing lot.
Percolation of storm water into the earth to restore groundwater dimin-
ishes as the area of paved land per home increases. Interrupted by roofs,
roads, and parking lots, storm water must be diverted into expensive drain-
age systems. Without detention, huge volumes of runoff rush downstream,
increasing the likelihood of flooding. The problem is neatly shifted from
those who caused it to FEMA and other agencies far away downstream.
Historically, in Portland as elsewhere, new neighborhoods had sprung
up around streetcar lines in the interwar years. The people who lived there
mostly depended on walking to transit, so development clustered around
stations. This precedent was remembered in the 1980s as the nation’s
first new light rail system in several generations was being designed in
Portland. How to maximize ridership at each station? Commuters would
populate a morning and afternoon peak ridership, but add homes, retail,
entertainment, and workplaces at each station, and a more balanced,
round-the-clock ridership can be achieved. Opportunities to do this on the
first line to Gresham were limited as the alignment was largely through
established communities, but opportunities along the Westside alignment
 A City Cast in Place 35
to Hillsboro were many. In fact, the alignment was in several instances
directed through places that offered the best opportunities for rezoning
to enable development of nodes of dense mixed uses around each station.
A good example is Orenco Station, built in the midst of former nursery
farmland (named for Oregon Nursery Company).
Developers recognized that urban densities would not be viable there
initially, so began with small lot housing some distance from the station,
together with a neighborhood center of stores and restaurants with apart-
ments above them facing Cornell Road, a busy arterial. Twenty years later,
the tide of development has reached the station, with mid-rise housing and
employment buildings clustered around the platforms, and a busy café com-
munity flourishing at its base. The people who live and work there enjoy
many of the attributes of the healthy city, with bikeways to carry them into
deep country and light rail to carry them to work and leisure alternatives.

Land Use and Transportation

In 1991, the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission
(LCDC) formulated the Transportation Planning Rule (TPR). The TPR
was a means of implementing the State Planning Goal 12, which inter alia
discouraged dependence on any single mode of transportation. The TPR
required local governments to provide bicycle facilities, designate land for
transit-oriented development, and to require cooperation of large develop-
ments with transit service providers. In the Greater Portland area, Metro was
able to direct transportation funding to support implementation of the rule.
Implementation of the TPR was required within two years, and it had
immediately discernable effects. Average miles traveled per person (VMT)
had been climbing year by year, but in 1997 began a slow but sustained
decline. This was cause for alarm among those economists who saw a cor-
relation between VMT and GDP. In fact, as Litman (2014) showed, the
true correlation was between access and GDP, and so included all modes.
As urban densification occurred in central Portland, more non-auto trips
were made, and the number of readily accessible destinations increased. As
automobile is per capita the most expensive mode of travel in the city, sub-
stitution of other modes in accessing a business effectively lowers costs of
providing services or products, thus boosting GDP. Cortright (2007) found
that by driving less—Portland’s average VMT was 20 percent below the
national average—the city netted a “green dividend” of $2.4 billion a year.
He arrived at this number by computing the number of miles not driven and
the time not spent driving by Portlanders compared with national averages.
There is an important conclusion to be drawn from this. Oregon state
planning law is based on a series of aspirational goals rather than inflex-
ible rules. Initiatives in land use, transportation, and restraint imposed
by the urban growth boundary have all played a part in implementing
the TPR by increasing usefulness of non-automobile modes of transport.
36 A City Cast in Place
This could be characterized as rebalancing the transportation system after
decades of favoring motorized vehicles above all else. VMT fell as dense
mixed-use developments proliferated. Transit services improved as rider-
ship increased, more people were able to live near their places of work,
and even more were able to cycle to work, and the health of the local
economy—and of the workforce—benefited.
An already healthy culture of bicycle commuting grew stronger, and
regional transit service improved. In addition to refining bus services, TriMet
had launched light rail east to Gresham in 1986, and added Westside light
rail service to Hillsboro in 1998, Airport service in 2001, Interstate service
to North Portland in 2004, and Milwaukee “Orange Line” service to the
Southeast in 2015.
After a 50-year hiatus, streetcar service was restored in 2001, linking the
Pearl District to retail and services to the west, and south to Downtown.
Extension to South Waterfront soon followed; a link via the Broadway
Bridge to the Lloyd District and OMSI was added in 2012. With the open-
ing of Tilikum Crossing in 2015, the streetcar loop serving both sides
of the river was completed. Each improvement strengthened the bonds
between land use and transportation, and the distances that people walked
and bicycled increased.
The effects of full coordination between land use and transportation
contributed significantly to the success of the River District urban infill
that became the engine for the Pearl District. The first new residents were
empty nesters, many from auto-dependent suburbs, and young profession-
als whose rite of passage to adulthood had been car ownership. Both groups
used their cars less and less as the convenience of walking and transit use
became apparent to them. Car-share services have increased as car owner-
ship has diminished throughout the district.
Almost 25 years ago, Portland’s City Council enacted a measure that
removed the requirement that housing developers provide off-street park-
ing for multifamily housing near designated transit corridors. While the
measure would help to stem traffic generation, its primary intention was
to reduce the cost of housing and stimulate development of more close-in
condominiums and apartments that are affordable to the workforce. Supply
was failing to keep pace with demand, forcing prices upwards and excluding
many from renting or buying their own homes. The response from housing
developers was slight until the post-recession boom began to take effect in
2012. Dozens of under-built sites along transit corridors such as SE Division
Street and N Interstate Avenue sprouted five- and six-story blocks of condo-
miniums and apartments. The outcry was immediate and loud from nearby
residents, who regarded parking in the street close to their homes as an
absolute right that had been usurped by the new multifamily housing resi-
dents. Not all were built without parking, and many have well-used bike
storage facilities. The intentions of the City Council two decades earlier
had in fact been perfectly met, with the added benefit of accommodating
 A City Cast in Place 37
population growth close in, where they are most likely to use transit, walk,
or bicycle rather than depending on a car.
Competition for on-street parking is undeniably fiercer than it was before
the current crop of apartments and condominiums, and the ire of those dispos-
sessed of free and convenient parking is certainly understandable if unjustified.
Established residents do, however, benefit from the greater choice in locally
available retailers and services that have followed the influx of new residents.
Sidewalks are busier as more people stroll them for pleasure rather than walk-
ing out of necessity. Over time, the scarcity of on-street parking may not
change, but attitudes to it will. In neighborhoods that were built before cars
were commonplace—such as inner Northwest Portland—everyone has limited
expectations of finding on-street parking: it is not a matter of right, but of
good fortune if one happens to find a convenient place to park. Important to
note is that a lack of parking has not impeded a steady increase in popularity
and property values in the Northwest Neighborhood.

Central City Planning

The net effect of all the tiny steps outlined above has been to bring about a
shift of attitude and expectations of life in the inner neighborhoods. Most of
Portland’s inner neighborhoods come close to achieving Ebenezer Howard’s
elusive goal of safe and convenient access to workplace and city benefits,
as well as to the fresh air and healthy exercise offered by the countryside.
This succeeds where many suburbs fail because of the density and diversity
of development, and because of the more balanced use of transportation
modes. Without lengthy commutes, there is more time for leisure pursuits.
The city also succeeds in integrating urbs and ruris because tendrils of coun-
tryside extend deep into the Central City—via stream banks, wildwood
trails, and the evermore complete canopy of the “urban forest.” While
individual political and investment decisions might appear random and
unconnected, there is sufficient consensus about life values, environmental
respect, and sense of place to effect a prevailing harmony among actions.
A context has been created in which achievement of a healthy lifestyle is a
recurrent theme, which finds expression in apparently unrelated decisions
affecting how we build and use each place in our city.
Alas, this pattern of reinforcement is not without its flaws. Formal plans
have a tendency to paraphrase high ideals as “motherhood and apple pie”
truisms. Subsequently, as strategic planning concepts are interpreted by
staff into development regulations, ideas are further edited, perhaps with
the intention of relieving elected members of having to make discretion-
ary decisions that they may find politically difficult. Thus, grand plans are
ground down until they become the fine dust of bureaucracy. Where the
1972 Downtown Plan had been forthright in its intentions and clear in its
graphic representations of how the city was to work, the Central City Plan
published in 1988 got lost in its own detail. It tinkered with the precepts
38 A City Cast in Place
of the 1972 plan, though it did expand the footprint from Downtown
to Central City and identifying eight sub-districts covering 2,750 acres
(1,112 hectares), but it offered no bold strokes or new ideas. The only
growth that it caused was in the size and complexity of the zoning code
and contingent design guidelines.
The next update of the plan was adopted in 2016. Perhaps recognizing
the limitations of the 1988 version, it began by eliciting from citizens and
experts a vision of how Greater Portland should look and function in the
year 2035. The 25-year strategic plan sought alignment of actions around
three shared priorities that would result in equity and opportunity:

•• education;
•• healthy connected neighborhoods; and
•• economic prosperity and affordability.

A worthy attempt to get the planning machinery back on track, reflecting

the values of the population.
The Central City 2035 Plan applied the precepts of the overall plan
to the particular circumstances in 10 sub-districts of an enlarged Central
City, replacing the 1988 plan as the city’s planning policy document. The
application of these policies to each quadrant of the Central City tested
provisions that would be enacted in the updated Comprehensive Plan. It is
in the Comprehensive Plan that healthy city ideas such as improved river
access, creation of the Green Loop, and other improvements to the green
infrastructure of the city are given authority.
The values of Portlanders discussed in the following chapter are reflected
in many provisions of the adopted plan. But resistance to change is endemic
in the human condition. When building height limits had been introduced in
1979, the notion was to keep the riverfront open, and to increase permitted
height with distance from the river—producing a wedding cake pattern of
steps. The 2035 plan recognized that to take full advantage of the river, one
cannot be standoffish; the river must be embraced, but not overwhelmed.
The plan distinguished between open stretches of riverbank and bridgeheads
where urban energy builds and spans the river. The new plan suggested
expanding that energy into tall, mixed-use buildings at each bridgehead—
increasing the capacity of the Central City, but also making river views
accessible to many more people who live or work in those new buildings.
Though the rationale was clear, resistance to change irked many, who saw
this as sacrificing our riverfront to the cupidity of developers. They were
energetically supported by those who believe that any building tall enough
to cast a shadow across a street is intrinsically evil and should be cut down to
size. Such disputes are probably good for the open discussions that precede
major changes in planning policy, but can be depressingly counterproductive
at times. The fact that one of the first new bridgehead towers managed to
sidestep the conditions of approval imposed by the Design Commission did
 A City Cast in Place 39
nothing to sweeten the process. However, the higher purposes of the 2035
plan provide a sure touchstone; they are strong, valid, and widely supported,
testing each decision against the ability to promote:

•• education;
•• healthy connected neighborhoods; and
•• economic prosperity and affordability.

Notes
1 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, formed in Chicago in 1936, opened an office in
Portland in 1960, to which Pietro Belluschi shifted his practice when, in 1965, he
was appointed Dean of Architecture at MIT.
2 ZGF Architects LLP, the firm responsible for architecture and urban design of the
first modern light rail line to Gresham, which opened in 1986, and for the line to
Hillsboro, which opened in 1998 and received the Presidential Design Award.
3 Joe Cortright, The Green Dividend (see http://old.relocalize.net/portlands_green_
dividend).
4 Willamette Light Brigade (see www.lightthebridges.org/home/about-us-2/)
5 For updated numbers of bicycle commuters in Portland, go to www.portlandore
gon.gov/transportation/article/407660.

Bibliography
Abbott, C. (1983) Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth Century
City. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Bennett, E.H. (1912) Greater Portland Plan. City of Portland.
Cortright, J. (2007) Portland’s Green Dividend. White Paper. Chicago, IL: CEOs
for Cities.
Ehrenhalt, A. (2012) The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Gehl, J. (2000) Cities for People. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Howard, E. (1946) Garden Cities of Tomorrow. London: Faber & Faber.
Lansing, J. (2003) Portland: People, Politics, and Power, 1851–2001. Corvallis, OR:
Oregon State University Press.
Litman, T. (2014) The Mobility-Productivity Paradox. Victoria, BC: Victoria
Transport Policy Institute.
Olmsted Brothers (1903) Report of the Park Board, Portland, Oregon, 1903.
Orloff, C. (2004) The Portland Edge, edited by C.P. Ozawa. Washington, DC:
Island Press.
Shoup, D. (2005) The High Cost of Free Parking. Chicago, IL: Planners Press.
3 A City Shaped by Values

Values change over time, but respect for the natural environment has
remained a strong theme in Portland, influencing how we plan and design
the built environment. Priorities have been to safeguard farm and forest
land. In the 1970s, landmark planning legislation broadcast to the nation
that Oregon was a place where environmental values are vigorously upheld
and are further championed by civic organizations. People to whom these
things are important were drawn to live here, bringing their skills and ambi-
tions with them. Subsequently, industries have been built around outdoor
recreation, exceptional produce—and vines and hops. These industries and
employers’ values have attracted young talent to launch a new generation
of makers and innovators, increasing demands for places designed around
healthy lifestyles.

People Who Shape the City

Much has been written about how the city shapes people’s lives and affects
their health (e.g. Freudenberg et al. 2006). A useful metric for the health
of a population is the incidence of diabetes—highest among populations
that eat too much and don’t exercise enough. Nationally, rates have dou-
bled over the past 20 years, led by West Virginia, with an adult diabetes
rate greater than 14 percent. By contrast, Multnomah County, in which
Portland is located, has a rate of 7 percent, virtually unchanged over the
past 20 years. That figure is still too high, but suggests that a large propor-
tion of the population pursues a relatively healthy lifestyle.
Less has been written about the reverse: how a city can be shaped by the
values and aspirations of those who inhabit and constantly update their city.
Greater wealth and social standing confer wider choices in where and how
to live; those at the more modest end of the wealth spectrum are driven by
affordability. If one could watch decades of household moves in a few min-
utes, the city would appear as a twitching organic thing, always making and
remaking parts of itself. Each movement is initiated by an investment of time
and money to make a better place—whether for a household or a district, or
something in between. Although prevailing views are often of regression and
 A City Shaped by Values 41
failing efforts at progress, these are fueled more by prompts from the media
than from real experience (Norberg 2016). We are actually quite successful
at making life better for ourselves and building better places to inhabit.
The greatest investments that precipitate radical change are usually from
the public purse: driving a new highway through the tissue of the city, for
example. The extent of both investment and disruption are huge in such a case
and require some form of consensus. Historically, wealth and power of an elite
has driven such decisions: such as the construction of Grand Central Station in
New York, or its equivalents in London and Rome. Early Portland had its taste
of this too with the imposition of rail lines and yards wherever the federally
backed rail companies chose. More of the same federal authority drove free-
way construction and urban renewal in the 1960s. But in the 1970s, Portland’s
neighborhoods began to feel their power. Having witnessed the destruction
and scattering of established communities as I-5 was driven through the city,
and as the South Auditorium District was cleared, common people found a
voice when another link in the urban freeway system was planned.
The Mount Hood Freeway, the westernmost piece of I-80, was to link
central Portland to a commuting workforce in Gresham 12 miles to the east—
and would ease weekend trips to the mountains from the city. 92 percent of
the cost of this massive construction would be borne by federal authorities,
making fiscal decisions simple for local politicians. But other voices became
audible. What about the communities that would be divided and disrupted
by the new freeway? What about the 1,500 homes and businesses that would
be cleared to make way for the eight-lane highway and its access ramps?
Financial compensation might balance the books, but the social damage
would be irreparable. Affected communities banded together in opposition
to the project. The implicit question had been “How can we speed up com-
muting traffic to spur the economy?” The objectors effectively rephrased the
question as “How can we take care of the commuters and at the same time
sustain our quality of life?” They posed a much more broadly based and rel-
evant question, which demanded a less simplistic answer.
As it happened, the directorates of both the Oregon Department of
Transportation and city government were sympathetic to this broader aim.
Through an astonishing feat of negotiation, the mayor and his supporters
were able to convince the federal authorities to authorize the expenditure
without building the freeway. Speedy commuting between Gresham and
Portland would be provided with a newly built light rail line for half of
the freeway budget: $214 million, and the other half of the money would
be spent on improving pinch points throughout the Greater Portland road
system, thus speeding commuters to and from other suburban communities
too. The fact that no light rail had been constructed in the US for a couple of
generations made that part of the deal difficult to swallow, but the proposed
line was presented as the first link in a citywide transit system—certainly a
refreshing new approach to public transit. And Portland had already proved
its competence with the now famous Transit Mall.
42 A City Shaped by Values
The success of such an audacious proposal was remarkable, but equally
remarkable was the ability of neighborhoods in underprivileged parts of
town to make their voices heard. They had a sympathetic ear at the county,
and champions in City Hall and in the ODOT director, but nonetheless,
their voice was heard and their quality of life—and in many cases, their
livelihoods—were rescued. At about the same time, the neighborhoods saw
realization of their plan to create a waterfront park in place of enlarging
Harbor Drive. These two victories heralded the neighborhood as a political
force in Portland’s local government. It marked a decisive shift from elitist
decision-making to consensus-driven plans and policies.
When the 1972 Downtown Plan was being prepared, the Willamette
waterfront was still dominated by industrial remnants such as the build-
ing where the daily evening Oregon Journal was printed, and by Harbor
Drive, a limited access highway that extended I-5 and 99W into the city
center from the south. Many saw such a traffic artery as essential to the
health of the CBD. Downtown Plan drafters visualized instead a green
“front yard” for the Central Business District stretching to the water’s edge.
The neighborhoods got behind this idea, despite dire warnings of economic
stagnation. Governor Tom McCall halted the freeway project and initiated
an alternatives study. Within a few years, a green meadow filled the length
of the Downtown waterfront and the effectiveness of the neighborhoods as
a political force was confirmed.
Subsequently, a city department was established, giving formal stature
to Portland’s neighborhoods in the system of government; now named the
Office of Neighborhood Involvement, 95 neighborhood associations are rep-
resented. The continuing influence of the neighborhoods is evident in city
government decisions that are directly reflective of the communities and indi-
viduals affected. The people shape the city just as much as the city shapes
their lives. Who lives here and why they came is thus key to understanding
the anatomy of this healthy city.
Most of the city was built before the neighborhoods gave ordinary citizens
an effective voice in City Hall. Huge tracts of land on which unregulated
development had occurred outside the city are now included within its bound-
aries. Cheaply built housing on shoddily built streets without sidewalks and
often without sewers spread for miles beyond the city’s east boundary, merg-
ing with freeway-industrial lands beyond I-205, Portland’s eastern bypass
for I-5 traffic. These unlovely tracts are now occupied by recent immigrants
and people who have been displaced by rising housing prices from the inner
neighborhoods. Not much to brag about, but viewed from a historical per-
spective, this is how most citizens began their lives in Portland prior to the
Second World War: arriving with few possessions, but willing to work hard
and create a decent life for themselves and their families. As in most pio-
neering communities, people are valued for what they can do; who they are
related to is much less important. This meritocratic spirit survives, and is
the parent of civic aspiration. Many of the respected citizens of today began
 A City Shaped by Values 43
life with almost no wealth except for initiative and a sound work ethic. This
social dynamic is key to understanding how a young city in the West has
grown and continues to develop and change. Many are descended from folk
who came to the Pacific Northwest to make a living in the lumber trade, and
became familiar with the forestlands—walking its trails and absorbing its
lore: “The sense of place to which people become attached [is] continually
reconstructed . . . and disrupted by newly arrived or invented cultures and
sub-cultures, lifestyles, architecture . . . ” (Sussman 2004: 118).
Community radio has nourished these disruptive cultures for half a
century, contributing to Portland’s underlying dynamic. Importantly, com-
munity radio respects no territorial or jurisdictional bounds; it is listened to
in the most and least affluent parts of the city, both urban and suburban.
Community radio achieves on a local level what BBC World Service has
achieved internationally: providing a window into ideas and culture unob-
tainable by any other means.
An apparent paradox in our society is that those who exploit natu-
ral resources are often leaders in conservation: duck hunters and Ducks
Unlimited; fly fishermen and Trout Unlimited. Of course there is no para-
dox at all: the enthusiast becomes knowledgeable about habitat and the
science of ecology. The more he or she learns, the deeper the respect gained
for the complexity and wonder of the natural world. In like manner, the
generations who relied on timber for their livelihood developed an affinity
with life outdoors: with hiking and fishing, hunting and birding. One could
speculate that because so much of their time was spent outdoors, their need
for exposure to the natural world, their biophilia, is stronger than most.
After the forest workers, the next wave of immigrants to Portland was
the influx of workers to build Liberty ships during the Second World War.
These were racially and culturally diverse, many recruited from urban indus-
trial workplaces in the southern and eastern states. Most were isolated from
established Portlanders, being housed in hastily constructed townships near
the shipyards. Forty thousand lived in quickly improvised public housing
collectively known as Vanport—the largest such wartime settlement in the
nation, and suddenly the newest and second largest city in Oregon. It occu-
pied 650 acres of what had historically been a delta at the confluence of the
Willamette and Columbia Rivers. Social values that arrived with the new
residents resulted in their de facto segregation. At the end of hostilities, many
returned to their homes and families elsewhere, but thousands remained. It
was the catastrophic flooding of Vanport in 1948 that forced the 18,500
remaining residents, of whom 6,000 were African Americans, to mix with
established, predominantly white Portland communities. Inevitably, all had
to make uncomfortable adjustments. Few people welcome change or the
unfamiliar, but the years after the war brought both in abundance.
Timber remained the mainstay of the economy until the 1980s, and
a widespread appreciation of the natural environment persisted. A nota-
ble champion of wild places, Tom McCall, became governor and Oregon
44 A City Shaped by Values
enacted a series of environmental protections. In 1971, scoring a national
first, Oregon passed the so-called bottle bill. As a consequence, 84 percent
of bottles were redeemed, and the proportion of drinks containers in
roadside litter diminished from 40 percent to 6 percent. In 1973, another
environmental law without precedent was passed: “Uncoordinated use of
lands within this State threaten the orderly development, the environment
of this State, the health, safety, order, convenience, prosperity and welfare
of the people of this State” (Senate Bill 100, section 1, paragraph 1). So
began Senate Bill 100, which enacted protections to farm and forest lands
against incursions by development.
Many of those who moved to Oregon thereafter came in part because
of this demonstrable respect for the environment, and have since helped
to withstand numerous attempts to undo those state planning laws that
inhibited sprawling low-density development. What this legislation acted
upon was the recognition that natural resources were being consumed at
an unsustainable rate, and environmental protections are essential to a sus-
tainable economy. There remain huge holes in these protections: east of the
Cascades for example, state permits have enabled extraction of more water
each year than nature can replenish. Forty years and many legal and ballot
box challenges later, the McCall era planning laws remain intact. Valuable
farm and forest lands nearby have been effectively protected from being
developed, and their productivity has been enhanced.

Values: Place-Based Livability

Livability is widely used as a term to describe what is desirable in a place
to live, yet it lacks a precise definition. Attempting to make it measurable,
Chapman and Lund (2004: 118) assessed livability in terms of: “(1) acces-
sibility of parks, retail and civic uses and (2) the quality of these public and
semipublic spaces.”
A richer definition would address the frequency and quality of human
interaction, exposure to cultural stimuli, satisfaction of aesthetic sensibili-
ties, and a sense of health and well-being. It is this more sensual definition
that describes a population that is passionate about local hop varieties,
coffee roasters, fragrant truffles, pinot noir, and public and private art in
all its many forms. “Livability” describes the best of a place where body,
mind, and senses are encouraged to expand their potential. But not just
any place. A vocabulary of livability elements is learned from specific sur-
roundings, from the place where you live and the things to which you are
exposed. Livability is a place-based set of qualities. Yet within a single
community, the things to which one is exposed can vary widely; as, for
example, between different ethnic groups that each retain their native
cultures and practices but live in the same district.
Livability values shared by many Portlanders relate in some way to the for-
ests, mountains, and rivers that define the natural environment around them.
 A City Shaped by Values 45
Even for people who rarely venture outside the city, those places are part of
their world. The lore of forests and wild places acquired by generations who
worked there persists in everyday values. But there are other forces at play
that threaten livability. Changes in climate across the nation such as recurring
droughts and extreme storms will increase the influx of “climate migrants”
to the temperate and water-rich Pacific Northwest. Portland was in 2015 for
the third year running the leading city for in-migration nationwide (Van Lines
Report). Different people with different agendas are tempering the set of values
that influence both livability and the aspirations that shape the evolving city.
In-migration has been accelerated by rising housing prices in the Bay Area and
Seattle, prompting growing firms to move to Portland, where housing is less
expensive and the workforce is more than willing to live.
This makes the shaping of the city sound a passive process, and in many
ways it is. Most development is driven by economic opportunity—the chance
to accrue corporate and personal wealth. That has always been the case,
but opportunities are the consequence of value-driven instruments such as
Senate Bill 100. Before the bill was enacted, there was no incentive to depart
from the nationwide norms of developing sprawling suburbs, but as reserves
of greenfield sites within urban growth boundaries became scarce, develop-
ers saw opportunities in urban infill development. In the 1980s, dilapidated
buildings in the inner neighborhoods began to be replaced by sets of row
houses—a new and untested form of housing on the market that simulta-
neously drew protests from neighbors averse to change, and ready buyers
who could see the benefits of compact living in an established mixed-use
neighborhood. Thus, notions of livability and of respect for the natural
environment that prompted Senate Bill 100 dramatically affected the shape
of the city in just two decades.
The city shapes our lives, but we shape the city in the first place by the
values that drive governance. A healthy city can be achieved intentionally,
provided that we continue to take the initiative to act on our values to direct
opportunity. Retrograde steps are inevitable as the city grows and changes;
too many of them and Portland could slide back into mediocrity.

Changing Demographics
Portland’s population declined slightly in the early 1980s with the slump in
timber industry, but since then has added 72 percent, contributing a total
of 632,000 to the MSA population of 2.3 million as of 2015. Seventy-six
percent of Portland residents are white, 14 percent were born overseas, and
17 percent have incomes below the poverty line. Economic and political
refugees make up a substantial part of the last two percentages, and as they
become more fully assimilated into the life and work of the city will have
an increasing influence on expectations of livability, and on the values that
drive governance. Will the newcomers assimilate as they have done in the
past, or will the politics of polarization leave them on the wrong side of the
46 A City Shaped by Values
drawbridge, isolating them culturally and geographically? History suggests
that isolation will be short-lived. Increasing interest in foreign cultures is
apparent in the diversity of the food scene and the arts that permeate the
city. A day spent in an east-side elementary school brings home the size and
diversity of recently arrived populations, most learning English as a second
or third language. They are embarking on the path trodden before them by
newly arrived citizens bringing little more than initiative and a will to work
hard and make a decent life for themselves and their families. Like them,
most will succeed.
Assimilation of immigrants has been fundamental to America’s culture and
economy since colonial times, yet each generation resists and often resents
new immigrants on some level. Even if we understand that the success of our
economy depends upon a young immigrant labor force, pundits loudly insist
on huge public costs of accommodating them, though the facts deny this; they
distort the picture to justify a political position. The greater threat to building
a healthy city may come from another quarter entirely: those moving north to
escape heat, smog, wildfires, drought, flash floods—the symptoms of global
climate change. Many will bring with them assertive political views to over-
whelm the tenuous majority that has thus far protected statewide planning
law from dissolution, or at least dilution. A few will recognize the connections
between community values and the features of a city committed to a healthy
lifestyle. Many will not.
Many newcomers will bring with them norms of opportunity to gener-
ate wealth regardless of sustainability. They will be affronted by what they
perceive to be too liberal values and too many controls on property devel-
opment. We are only a few votes away from despoiling our farm and forest
lands with sprawling development that would enrich a few and dispossess
many. The unifying influence of strong leadership has marked those periods
when great strides have been made in implementing beneficial change—
notably under the influences of Governor Tom McCall and Mayor Neil
Goldschmidt in the examples cited above.

What Is Livability Worth?

Fellows of AIA, APA, and ASLA got together with other thought lead-
ers in 2004 to ask the question of how we can maintain the hard-won
livability that we enjoy in Oregon in the absence of charismatic leadership.
The group recognized that the massive machinery of government is very
limited in its ability to change direction. The fellows therefore looked for
alternative ways to respond to recognized threats of climate change, seismic
hazard, unsustainable use of natural resources, political polarization, and
ever-present poverty in an affluent society. Part of the problem was that
the protocols directing bureaucratic process had been devised in a far-off
era that has little relevance today. For example, Oregon is divided into
36 counties so that no one shall be more than a day’s ride on horseback
 A City Shaped by Values 47
from a County Court. Jurisdictions are divided by county lines, which
rarely coincide with natural boundaries such as watersheds. If our livabil-
ity is to be rescued from immanent threats, it must depend upon initiatives
taken outside the conventional departments of authority. This was not ful-
minating rebellion, but rather the fellows recognized that society at large
would have to marshal its various talents to awaken an awareness of both
opportunity and its dire alternatives independent of established political
process and jurisdictional boundaries. This would be achieved by offer-
ing compelling directions for reform to state leadership, and assisting with
implementation of statewide initiatives.
The fellows’ group aired these ideas in symposia in Portland, inviting
bright minds from medical, academic, and other professions to assist in
thinking through a viable process. Initiatives were needed that could achieve
what no elected official would attempt, but which were nonetheless essen-
tial to maintaining the best aspects of our lifestyle. For example, we know
with certainty that many places around the state will be devastated in the
event of a major earthquake—yet we allow people to build homes, schools,
and workplaces in such places. A first step had been taken with Senate Bill
379 in 1995, which prohibited construction of critical and essential facilities
in tsunami zones, but nothing has been done since to prevent placing more
people in places known to be potentially fatal to them. Established codes
confirm rights to develop property and the bankable value of the property is
often reflective of its potential worth as occupied space. Denial of the right
to develop such places would be seen by the law as taking wealth away from
the owner. Elected representatives have every reason to steer clear of such
dangerous propositions. Society’s default position is morally unsupportable:
to do nothing until disaster strikes and lives and property are lost. The win-
ter storms of 1996 caused 9,500 landslides in Oregon. The Department of
Geology and Minerals Industries (DOGAMI) has identified over 700 land-
slide sites in Multnomah County with 2,450 buildings located on or below
them, so we cannot pretend that the risks are not real. In 2011, the state
initiated a resiliency plan, which is commendable, but prevention of disaster
is every bit as important as determining how to recover from it.
Following the 2014 Oso landslide in Washington in which 49 buildings
were destroyed and 43 lives were lost, offers of buyouts were made—the
intention being to encourage owners to rebuild on a site unaffected by land-
slides. Few accepted, preferring to stay where they were. The likelihood of
landslide can be reduced with retaining walls and drainage to lessen the pos-
sibility of waterlogged soils, but even these often expensive precautions can
do little more than reduce risk. As DOGAMI extends its Lidar surveys, so
the number of previously unrecognized landslide sites increases. They will
publish a new landslide guide in 2018. Little is known about how all these
landslide sites might respond to a major Cascadian subduction event.
Problems of this magnitude are far larger than Portland or even the state
is equipped to address. But if we can devise some route to lessening the risk,
48 A City Shaped by Values
if not removing it entirely, then we shall have something with very wide
application. One possible venue that is independent of government involves
the insurance industry—but is probably only practicable after a devastating
earthquake. If resilient construction were to attract a lesser premium reflec-
tive of reduced risk on the part of the insurer, both the responsible property
owner and tenants would win, as would the insurance company. This would
require measurable resilience in a seismic event, and now we have a metric
for resilience in three categories from the US Resiliency Council (USRC).
The USRC certification system rates three distinct sets of factors: those
that minimize the likelihood of injury or death of the occupants; those that
minimize potential damage to the building, its furniture, and equipment;
and those that would minimize the time and cost of restoring external
support to the building and its occupants so that it can resume its nor-
mal functions. Occupant safety, restored functionality, and viable district
support systems are all positive goals that anyone can support. However,
absence of these would expose owners to high insurance premiums, and
would create a disincentive to build in vulnerable locations.
There may be other such initiatives with far-reaching outcomes that can
begin without legislative action. Once proven effective, then legislation may
follow to ensure widespread use—as was the case with seat belts in automo-
biles. Modern, three-point seat belts were introduced as standard equipment
in 1959 by Volvo, as part of their safety branding. Not until 1970 did a gov-
ernment (Australia) act to make use of seat belts mandatory. Now statistics
clearly demonstrate how their use has reduced death and serious injuries,
and most governments require their use by law. How discouraging that it
took half a century to achieve.
The fellows took their presentations to national conferences of AIA,
APA, and ASLA. They found sympathetic audiences but no bold new initia-
tives to overcome the inertia of lumbering government machinery. If other
states were unconcerned about earthquakes, they nonetheless suspected that
climate change would have profound effects, but there was limited aware-
ness of what those effects might be, and still less sense of what to do to avert
them. All this in spite of increases in the frequency and ferocity of extreme
weather events.
There is a fatalistic acceptance of flash floods and tornadoes in many
places, although we know how to minimize risk from them. As with the
massive flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, areas liable to inun-
dation had been mapped years before, and technicians had urged investment
in levees and other protections—but elected officials were unwilling to sug-
gest diversion of funds from popular programs to implement defenses for
something that, in the estimation of many, might never happen—at least
not in our lifetimes. Besides, most people would rather not think about
such things, and identifying with disasters is no way for a politician to gain
popularity. When Hurricane Sandy’s damage was tallied, it amounted to
some $75 billion. Shattered lives, irreplaceable personal treasures, and lost
 A City Shaped by Values 49
livelihoods add an incalculable sum to this. Yet we choose to ignore solid
scientific evidence of other impending disasters such as rising oceans and
overdue earthquakes.
A healthy city is one that addresses the potential, invisible, but no less
real dangers that threaten its citizens. This is a dimension of health that
Portland has yet to address head-on. The fellows’ effort has become the
Oregon 2050 Alliance, and has the support of many professional organiza-
tions. Yet the obstacles to progress remain stubbornly immovable. Seismic
codes have been strengthened, and in 2015 the US Resiliency Council was
established, using a star rating system to certify achievement of risk reduc-
tion in each of the three aspects of safety, damage, and recovery.
The significance of formation of the US Resiliency Council is that it has
brought together FEMA, practicing engineers, and architects to develop
credible standards for resilience in buildings and structures. The City of Los
Angeles has undertaken to rate all of its city-owned buildings, setting an
admirable precedent for public responsibility over seismic risk. The hope is
that just as buildings are designed to achieve LEED certification for energy
efficiency, so buildings and other structures will be designed to achieve high
USRC star ratings in all three categories. In the early days of LEED, the real
estate industry resisted its use because of the construction and certification
cost premiums involved. Soon they noticed that LEED-certified buildings
leased up more quickly and even commanded better rates than uncertified
space, and began to demand LEED. The hope is that as soon as the USRC
star rating system becomes more widely recognized and appreciated, the
real estate industry and their insurers will recognize it as a bona fide method
of reducing risk, and will demand that all new projects achieve at least three
stars out of five in each category. That standard would be difficult to achieve
on many sites known to be vulnerable to seismic damage or inundation.
So some progress is evident in one set of problems that are too big for
government to address. The others identified by the fellows, threats from
climate change, political polarization, unsustainable use of resources, and
unacceptably high rates of poverty, remain obdurate targets for resolution
in the healthy city.

Health and Diversity

Diversity has become a politically laden word meaning demographically
mixed, but in a larger context it is about range of choices in everything
imaginable. In that case, health and diversity are complementary; a healthy
city can become so only if it offers a diversity of opportunities and choices,
enabling many paths to physical, fiscal, and social health and well-being.
Without tolerance of alternative views, it is difficult for diversity to flourish,
and this is just one reason why political polarization can be counterproduc-
tive. That Portland has been an early adopter of various personal freedoms
is evidence of the openness of its citizens to diverse ideas and points of view.
50 A City Shaped by Values
It is precisely because Portland is too young a city to have developed the
protective strictures of centuries-old communities that attitudes are permissive
of things that a more authoritarian community might prohibit: our annual
nude bike ride, or vegan strip clubs. These may seem eccentric examples, but
freedoms of expression are vigorously protected in state law, and the visibility
of them sends a strong message to young and well-educated people who are
drawn to live in Portland, even if they have no job to come to. Whether artists,
scientists, techies, or philosophers, they find freedom here to experiment and
explore. This is not new—Reed College has been cultivating and launching
brilliant and often offbeat graduates for a century. It is the intellectual part of
the “pioneer spirit” that still pervades the Pacific Northwest.
Since the Second World War, inventive types have been drawn from all
over the world to work for Tektronix and its now numerous heritage of
innovative electronic and software companies. Others were drawn to join
biomedical research teams, several now part of OHSU. While those bright
sparks may be few in number, their propensity for original thinking has
remained potent, drawing writers of distinction, theater and ballet compa-
nies, animators, designers, and makers of every stripe—each pushing the
bounds of convention, feeling comfortable among their peers to try a new
direction; to try and fail until a breakthrough is achieved.
Juvenal’s “Mens sana in corpore sano,” so beloved of Victorian educa-
tors, is perfectly personified in those inventors and innovators for whom the
great outdoors is both a stimulant to thought and an expander of horizons.
The earlier Thales added “and a docile nature,”1 which may be a better
match in Portland. But a docile nature should not be confused with being
passive. These are people who may be tolerant, but they are also passionate
in their pursuit of anything deemed worthwhile.
Physical health finds many pursuits, with rivers, mountains, and forests
all around, sailing, kayaking, fishing, skiing, and mountaineering attract
many. Walkers, joggers, fun runners, and iron men and women are every-
where—buying from and sometimes working for a firm that makes shoes
or other equipment to enhance performance. The industry has progressed
from running shoes to every kind of sports apparel. Thus, physical health
has spurred economic health. Add the need for athletic and outdoor cloth-
ing made with new high-performance fabrics. Designers, manufacturers,
and the entrepreneurs that make it all work have built a hub of industry
around healthy lifestyles; a hub with worldwide reach and a magnet to draw
more creatives to town, some of them drawn to supply-line jobs or ancil-
laries such as a graphic design and advertising. Portland was perhaps the
natural place for such industries to take root, but as some of the world’s
foremost companies have congregated here, they have drawn in a workforce
for which a healthy lifestyle is a fundamental necessity. The values that have
created the healthy city have been hugely reinforced.
Every neighborhood has its bicycle shops, its adventure outfitters and
trip arrangers, its gyms and sports clubs, its ladies who hike, their dogs and
 A City Shaped by Values 51
husbands. And they need food stores and restaurants for healthy eating and
kale karma. A host of businesses have grown up around what healthy and
affluent people choose to eat and drink. Wine and spirit makers who chal-
lenge the best that Europe has to offer. Competitive coffee roasting and
brewing. More breweries than any other city in the world and our own
native hop varieties to perfect them. A nascent cider industry, organic ice
cream, brioche doughnuts, and everything from gluten-free pizza to vegan
strip clubs. Here is a partial roll call as of 2016:

•• 11 cider makers;
•• 20 craft distilleries;
•• 21 farmers’ markets (30 in Greater Portland);
•• 43 coffee roasters;
•• 70+ breweries (109 within an hour of Portland); and
•• 600–700 food carts (numbers vary with the season).

Most of these are in walkable neighborhoods or downtown, more accessible

on foot or by bicycle than by car. They signify openness and hospitality.
They add sights and aromas that become part of the identity of each place.
They exhibit makers and artisans as integral to Portland’s identity as the
mountains and forests that surround it.

Civic Health
Civic life references that streak of altruism that inflects all but the most
boorish of citizens. It reflects the conscience of the community, and at
its best stimulates an investment of time, care, and sometimes money for
the benefit of others. Big philanthropy is notoriously scarce in Portland
(though we do have a few standouts), yet civic engagement is widespread,
and an important indicator of civic health. To use resources effectively in
the public good, it is useful to know what the issues of greatest impor-
tance are. In 1916, a few worthy gentlemen (such was the way of the
world then) established the City Club of Portland “to inform its members
and the community in public matters and to arouse in them a realization
of the obligations of citizenship” (letters of incorporation of the City Club
of Portland).
For 100 years, the City Club’s volunteers have striven to do this. They
have compiled reports on every aspect of civic life, offering advice to elected
leaders, but more importantly giving everyone access to balanced and non-
partisan information about everything from fluoridation to prostitution;
from affordable housing to GMO labeling. Informed but disinterested
panels have, along with the League of Women Voters, disentangled the
meanings and consequences of ballot measures so that voters understand
not only what they are being asked to approve or disapprove, but also what
the direct and collateral consequences of approval might be.
52 A City Shaped by Values
Aware that Americans were becoming increasingly insular in their views
in the years following the Second World War, some professors from Reed
College founded what would become the World Affairs Council of Oregon.
Its mission is to broaden public awareness and understanding of interna-
tional affairs, and to engage Oregonians with the world. Like the City Club,
they have forged strong connections with public schools to instill civic val-
ues into enquiring young minds. That is also a feature of the Portland Arts
and Lectures series, which advances an appreciation of good literature in the
community and brings authors to talk about their work—often in front of
the largest literary audiences that they have ever experienced. Many of those
authors spend time in high schools working with students and no doubt
igniting the talents and ambitions of some.
Other volunteer organizations are formed to fill a conspicuous gap in
the civic fabric. The Willamette Light Brigade2 is an example: formed to
celebrate with light the distinctive forms of a dozen bridges that span the
Willamette River in Portland; bridges that distinguish the city by day and
all but disappear after dark. In most communities, such opportunities are
seized upon by the city and implemented. Not so in Portland, nor has pri-
vate funding been forthcoming except for some minor lighting projects. So a
more conspicuous demonstration of what lighting can accomplish has been
established in the annual Portland Winter Light Festival. Each February,
when the city is at the nadir of winter, the festivities of the holiday season
a fading memory, an explosion of creativity in light-based art illuminates
the riverfront and various other places in the city. If the city won’t take the
necessary initiative, then civic-minded citizens will lead the way.
The work of these organizations and others like them complement the
more conventional but no less essential volunteer efforts of individuals serv-
ing on city and county commissions and committees. These independent
bodies also offer an alternative to people uncomfortable with religiously
connected agencies and charities. All succeed in reaching across spectrums
of wealth, culture, and education to engage citizens with the values of the
community as a whole.
Just as the capacity of a street to carry vehicles is an insufficient measure
of its contribution to the vibrancy of an urban center, so no single metric can
represent the health of a city. All of the factors contributing to health and
well-being—physical and intangible—must be considered. By unpacking
these, one is able to identify contributory factors that may be transfera-
ble elsewhere. Priorities in a healthy lifestyle differ from person to person,
yet the physical context, the urban environment in which that lifestyle is
achieved, has evolved with Portland’s population and their values. The next
chapter investigates the dimensions and influences exerted by some of the
more powerful formative factors and values. By understanding those values,
one can interpret the physical environment and aspects of it that can inform
an intentionally directed evolution of urban environments elsewhere.
 A City Shaped by Values 53
Notes
1 ὁ τὸ μὲν σῶμα ὑγιής, τὴν δὲ ψυχὴν εὔπορος, τὴν δὲ φύσιν εὐπαίδευτος.
2 See www.lightthebridges.org/ and http://pdxwlf.com/.

Bibliography
Abbott, C. (1983) Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century
City. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Biggest US Cities (2012) Portland, Oregon Demographics. Available at: www.
biggestuscities.com/demographics/or/portland-city.
Bishop, B. (2008) The Big Sort. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Chapman, N. and Lund, H. (2004) “Housing Density and Livability in Portland.” In
C.P. Ozawa (Ed.), The Portland Edge. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Freudenberg, N., Galesa, S., and Vlahov, D. (2006) Cities and the Health of the
Public. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Norberg, J. (2016) Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. New York:
Oneworld.
Oregon State Highway Department (1955) Freeway and Express System, Portland
Metropolitan Area, 1955. Salem, OR: Oregon State Highway Department.
Portland Planning Commission (1965) Mt. Hood Freeway: Report to the Portland
City Council. Portland, OR: Portland Planning Commission.
Senate Bill 100 (1973) Senate Bill 100. Available at: www.oregon.gov/LCD/docs/
bills/sb100.pdf.
Sussman, G. and Estes, J.R. (2004) “Community Radio in Community Development.”
In C.P. Ozawa (Ed.), The Portland Edge. Washington, DC: Island Press.
US Resiliency Council (n.d.) USRC Rating System. Available at: www.usrc.org/
building-rating-system.
4 Dimensions of a Healthy City

Discrete, Sensible Places

The way in which one place is connected to others in a city is the network
of streets, lanes, plazas, and roads, but also natural features such as ridges
and rivers; they give spatial definition to the city. We can enjoy cities in
which we recognize through our senses different places that are discrete
and interesting. Where these sensible places are grouped together within
walking distance and without disruptive barriers, we find the greatest sat-
isfaction and feel secure. Human scale and the range of human senses are
the measures of those places. Physical barriers often intervene. A street
with fast-moving traffic limits walking and so constitutes a boundary.
The boundary effect can be minimized by restoring an equitable balance
between pedestrians and vehicles.
Discrete sensible places are defined by the reach of an individual’s senses
of sight, sound, touch, and smell. Such a place might be a garden filled with
colorful and fragrant flowers, with birdsong and the caress of a summer
breeze, a prospect across field and forest to distant mountains. Or such a
place might be a twisting lane in an ancient city hemmed in by large and
small buildings of uncertain design, fading daylight barely illuminating fine
rain, chill against skin and glazing the cobbled paving. Feeble light reflect-
ing from a storefront as another sensory signal is received: the sounds and
smells of coffee grinding overlaying the murmur of conversation within.
Perception of place relies on all of one’s senses, yet we typically try to
evaluate places and design them in terms of materials and dimensions only.
The height of a wall and the width of a sidewalk are certainly important to
the nature of a place and to the ways in which it can accommodate activity,
but they only set the physical parameters. Overlaid with a patina of time
and culture, even an uninspiring physical setting can acquire an intriguing
identity sensible to those who are exposed to it. The design of good urban
spaces depends on a keen understanding of scale, materials, and dimen-
sions, but must allow for the elasticity of perceiving things at close range
and at various distances and from constrained viewpoints, in different sea-
sons and varying lighting conditions. This is something that Camillo Sitte
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 55
(2013) analyzed so effectively. Design of spaces must also anticipate and
enable use of all the other senses: sound, smell, and touch.
A clumsy approximation to this on a grand scale is the sort of set design
approach taken at the designer towns of Seaside and Celebration in Florida.
A somewhat more organic approach is taken in some other New Urbanist
developments, especially those that supplement existing settlements. However,
each uses new construction to copy the appearance of old and beloved places.
The result may be superficially similar, and may achieve a visually interesting
and a walkable environment, but feels rather like wandering through a film
set or a world’s fair. It looks convincing, but the other senses are unsatisfied;
something feels bogus. Of course, there are valuable lessons to be learned
from established urban places that are successful, but reproducing chunks of
them in pastiche misses the point. The point is to interpret the nexus of sen-
sual stimuli that attend the successful place, and to discover how they might
be encouraged to flourish similarly in the place being designed. In classical

Figures 4.1 and 4.2 (continued)

56 Dimensions of a Healthy City
(continued)

Figures 4.1 and 4.2 Neoclassical architecture has been used in most cities as a
means of asserting permanence and authority. Only when
those qualities are beyond doubt can such formality be
left behind; eventually such freedoms can be indulged as
experimenting with biomimicry and advanced building
technologies. Each depends for its urban influence on the
sensibilities of those who experience it.

times, architecture was designed to bring reason and order to a chaotic world,
using conventions of proportion and style. Having abandoned the classical
orders, and having survived the nadir of brutalism, we are now flirting with
the complex organic forms that technology has made open to both designers
and builders, often finding inspiration in biomimicry.
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 57
The design of each place takes its cues from what is there already: historical
and cultural clues in the structures and natural features of the site, the microcli-
mate, the movement, and mood of passersby. Among these are opportunities
to employ each of the senses—and from these in turn come clues about scale,
dimensions, and materials with which to contain this new sensible space. The
physical framework of a place is designed around what it can be, so must fol-
low a clear concept of how the place is to function. It is a conclusion drawn
from the design process, not a base from which to develop a design.

What Is the Right Size?

Is there a “right size” for a city, and if so, from what perspective? The
ancient Greeks argued endlessly about the ideal size for a city state, based
largely on the limits of their direct democracy in which every free adult male
citizen who owned property could participate personally in government;
numbering about one in five of the total population.1 The relevance to cit-
ies today is that Greek government depended entirely on person-to-person
communication in the agora or on the steps of a civic building. Everything
was measured in human scale: architectural details, the width of streets, and
the dimensions of plazas. If a plaza becomes too big, then a speaker cannot
be heard and body language cannot be read, so communication is rendered
incomplete. The simple and enduringly relevant lesson is that dimensioning
the urban environment is about enabling human interaction. How far you
can see and hear someone effectively becomes the horizon of the sensible
city; the extent of the place that sight, sound, smell, and feel can reach.
The right size for a modern American city is complicated by a lot of
other things, yet there are some widely applicable measures. The funda-
mental reason for building cities is to maximize the opportunities for useful
encounters between people. A city too small to support a decent range of
potential destinations—homes, businesses, services, retail, places of enter-
tainment and of education, healing and cultural facilities—would fail that
test. On the other hand, a city so big that the journey to work and the
distance between destinations uses too much time would effectively put
most of those opportunities beyond reach, so would also fail. The national
average commute time is about 25 minutes (25.4 minutes in 2012).2 With
the majority of those trips being made by car, actual journey times range
from a few minutes to well over two hours in each direction. This, then,
is not a useful guide to city size. Much more relevant is the number and
diversity of potential destinations that are within walking distance. Just how
far that is depends on who is doing the walking, how interesting the route
is, on topography and weather, among other things. Portland has wrestled
with this question, compared walkability scores in different circumstances,
and concluded empirically that a 20-minute walk is a pretty good measure
of practical limits to access on foot. The age and condition of the walker
plays into this, so it is a fairly elastic measure. Biking or driving can increase
58 Dimensions of a Healthy City
the number of potential destinations reachable in the same time frame, but
walking distance provides a constant baseline against which to compare the
use value or walkability of a city or a neighborhood.
The “right-sized city” would be a medium to large city, compact enough to
be able to support good multimodal transportation systems, as these are nec-
essary to extend choices of destinations beyond walking distance. A smaller
or more spread-out city is unlikely to support efficient public transit, so a
20-minute walk or an equivalent drive or bike ride would define a person’s
effective boundary in this context. Larger and denser cities would clearly win
in terms of maximizing opportunities for person-to-person encounters.
If one accepts this rather simple analysis, then the key factors are
development density, mixed uses, and effective, multimodal circulation;
characteristics of mature, metropolitan centers. But even those cities only
qualify for communities within 20 minutes of the center. So while the den-
sity of development of a “right-sized city” might diminish from the center, it
would exclude sparsely developed suburbs. It might, however, have natural
boundaries to its growth, as do Manhattan and San Francisco, encouraging
dense development to the city’s edge.
So how does Portland measure up to this model? Like many American
cities, Portland’s jurisdictional boundaries are virtually invisible, since it is
conjoined with several of the 23 cities and three unincorporated counties
that make up the metropolitan region. But having a well-developed mul-
timodal circulation system and a fairly dense inner city with a diversity of
uses, a large proportion of the city proper passes the 20-minute walk test.
There are also many who live in the city but work in the suburbs who take
a long time to get to work and back, although they do benefit from all that
the city has to offer close to home.
All that this tells us about the “right size” for a US city today is that to
maximize opportunities and efficiencies offered by cities, they should be
compact, varied in uses, and large enough to support efficient multimodal
circulation systems: road, rail, biking, walking, and maybe aerial trams and
public elevators. Rephrased as “the right size for a Midwest farming town,”
the answer would be very different, as it would be for any city built around
dominant industries.
The general and rather obvious conclusion: live in a densely developed
neighborhood near the center of the city, and opportunities for useful
encounters will be maximized. Choose to live further out in a lower-density
neighborhood, and you trade space for a reduced number of opportunities
and will spend much more of your time and income getting from place to
place. For many, a less intense urban experience may be preferable. This
leads to the familiar bell curve as a descriptor of the “right-sized city” that
acknowledges choice as important as opportunity.
For those who do not choose a metropolitan lifestyle, living at the very
center of things, a distinction is made between the kinds of destination
that are useful close to home and those that we would expect Downtown.
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 59

Figure 4.3 Opportunities for interaction—the very reason for cities—are greatest

where density and diversity of uses peak. As development density
diminishes with distance from the urban core, uses are often segregated
and destinations too far apart to be walkable. For a resident in
the urban core, most needs are within a 10-minute walk, and few
necessities are more than 20 minutes away. Residents of distant suburbs
must budget much more of their time for travel between destinations.
The cost per interaction increases with distance.

That distinction is made in Portland’s “20-minute neighborhood” refer-

enced above. For purists, this means having almost every need met within
a 20-minute walk—about a mile, allowing for delays at street crossings.
A mile is roughly the threshold at which it is quicker to ride transit or drive
to a destination than walk there. Cycling has a closer threshold. Given
Portland’s street pattern, that 20-minute walk gives access to over 1,200
city blocks. In the inner-city neighborhoods, many of those will include non-
residential uses and a lot of choices.
Intrigued by how things work in Portland, and eager to improve the
design of new urban communities at home, the China Development Bank
commissioned a study of the Pearl District and Brewery Blocks that was
published in 2015. They mapped a 20-minute walk from the center of the
Pearl District, and found, among other things, that the WalkScore3 is 95
out of a possible 100; attributable to the diversity of uses, density of devel-
opment, and lack of barriers to walking within the district and into the
adjoining neighborhoods, including the CBD.

Economic Opportunity
We find that in the past, the wealth of a population increased with the
scale of its manufacturing base; today, it increases with the size of popula-
tion engaged in the knowledge industries (Glaeser 2011). And so Portland
60 Dimensions of a Healthy City
continues to hold its place as the largest city in the state and region by a
factor of two (Zipf 1949),4 despite the constraints on growth imposed by
the urban growth boundary. In fact, the UGB can be said to have increased
economic opportunity by increasing density (Krugman 1996).
Relating economic opportunity to development density harks back to
an important principle that was expounded by Adam Smith in his land-
mark Wealth of Nations in 1776. Smith observed that the capacity of
land to generate wealth depends on the labor and capital expended on
it, and the consequent intensity and efficiency of its use. Thus, greater
investment of labor and capital through farming practices that double
the harvest would double the ability of that land to generate wealth. If
one substitutes wealth-generating workers or residents for crops, the same
holds true for development: the more intensely land is developed, the
greater the potential to generate wealth. In the age of knowledge indus-
tries, the land with the greatest ability to support job density will be that
which is closest to the places where the most valuable workers choose to
live and recreate. These tend to be the young professionals who have cho-
sen a metropolitan lifestyle, living and working at the hub of action in the
city, yet using their mobility to enjoy the outdoors. Inner neighborhoods
that pass that test have finite capacity because of zoning restrictions. One
reason for the continuing success of the Pearl District and other parts of
Downtown is that they offer a metropolitan mix of uses, permit metro-
politan density of development, and still have unused capacity.
Density, height, and parking are three attributes of any proposed develop-
ment that can be depended upon to arouse fear and defensiveness in nearby
communities. The usual reflex reaction is to lobby for refusal. Better what we
know than whatever “they” want to foist on us. However, looked at calmly
and objectively, there are many places in most cities, Portland included, where
greater intensity of use—whether for employment, residence, or other uses—
could be introduced without harm to existing populations or urban fabric, and
without overtaxing the supporting infrastructure. Many such places would in
fact benefit from additional activities. These are places of great opportunity
for the creation of wealth that would also have the capacity to support and
maintain the historic neighborhoods in which so many of the protesters live.
Strategic relaxation of development controls could also encourage a
mix of uses where zoning has imposed a monoculture. Mixed uses pro-
mote walkability by broadening the range of nearby destination options.
Portland has done some of this by up-zoning properties along designated
transit corridors. Of course, there have been loud protests, but the result has
been infusions of new and much-needed multifamily housing, together with
services, retail, and employment that also benefit nearby single-use residen-
tial districts—more choices within walking distance, plus improved transit
service as ridership increases.
Infill development usually results in increased competition for on-street
parking spaces in nearby residential streets, prompting angry protests from
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 61
those who have for years enjoyed the luxury of parking outside their houses
whenever they wish. Remarkably, these protests are often taken seriously by
City Hall. There is no reason why the public purse should support storage of
private equipment in the public realm. That, after all, is what free on-street
parking amounts to. It is not free at all, and there is no reason to suppose
that residents should have special rights over any part of the public right
of way that they neither built nor maintain. Reduced parking requirements
for much of the recent wave of new housing has brought more protest, but
has achieved its purpose by making new housing more affordable (by about
15 percent for workforce housing) while increasing walking, transit, and
bicycle use.
A notable inadequacy of the zoning codes that are used to control devel-
opment over much of the country is that they impose limits on uses, heights,
and density everywhere—one could say indiscriminately. Zoning regula-
tions are spread like a layer of peanut butter across every piece of urbanized
land. One of the unintended consequences of this simplistic approach is that
whatever opportunities a site may present to generate wealth through more
intense use are often denied by limits on height, use, and density; limits that
are arbitrary but enforced. Regardless of the capacity of the infrastructure,
limits on height and density constrain the capacity of a district. This is what
has forced up the cost of housing in favored neighborhoods everywhere. The
number of wealth-generating people who live there is artificially limited,
so the land—in Adam Smith’s terms—is limited in its capacity to generate
wealth. The extra cost created by such artificial scarcities is rated as high
as 50 percent in San Francisco, 300 percent in Milan, and 450 percent in
London, according to one estimate from the London School of Economics.
The property owner, who may be entirely passive while price escalation
proceeds, benefits at the expense of the community as a whole that is denied
the jobs or housing that could thrive there. Profit to the owner derives from
this competition for scarce development capacity at an advantageous loca-
tion, but the community’s ability to generate wealth year to year remains
stalled. Sometimes there are good reasons to limit height and density—in
an enclave of historic buildings of cultural significance, for example. But in
many cases, height and density limits are arbitrary, imposed from a limited
range of development regulations adapted from some other city far away.
“Model” zoning regulations are available for purchase and applicable any-
where from Florida to Alaska. Such gross generalizations about appropriate
scale of development are wholly unnecessary today. We have a plethora of
data available on every piece of developable property in every incorporated
city, and we have the means to manipulate that data to identify practical
limits on the use, height, and density of any development.
A better approach to regulation of land uses and development would
be one that forsakes the “thou shalt not” attitude to development control
and instead takes a goal-based approach. This might be described as a non-
prescriptive form-based zoning code. The historic value of buildings and
62 Dimensions of a Healthy City
landscape in a long-established neighborhood may justify regulation of the
scale, height, and massing—and in some instances, materials—of any new
structure in or abutting that place. Important public viewpoints to or from
a neighborhood may justify height restrictions within the view corridor.
However, transitional areas and others lacking cohesion could allow con-
siderable freedom in use and form of development. Our urban areas are not
short of such undistinguished districts.
Development regulation uses simplistic generalizations about “appropriate
use” that are often based on an outdated list of codified uses rather than on
the needs or potential of the actual property in question. This may simplify
approval processes, but it stultifies the potential to achieve the goals of the
community that is supposedly being served by regulation. Despite periodic
updates, zoning codes are essentially cumbersome and static instruments.
They struggle when confronted with craft industry or other makerspaces that
simply do not fit any of the preformed pigeonholes offered by the code. It is
time to re-equip the workshop with some new tools. A code based on perfor-
mance and outcomes rather than on prohibitions would serve everyone better.
Oregon is going through a regulatory retooling process in quite a different
sphere to deal with the switch from prohibition to terms of permission for
marijuana. Though apparently confounding at first, order has been achieved
to the general satisfaction of both industry and government. An approach to
development control based on performance rather than denial is certainly
possible too. This is addressed in Chapter 8.

Streets That Endure

In any ancient city, streets and roads usually outlast everything else. Streets
like organic fissures in the urban fabric of Rome or London are palimp-
sests tracing long-vanished footpaths that deviated around rocky outcrops,
marshy land, sheep pens, and wooded thickets more than 2,000 years ago.
Some widened to become great streets as the cities grew; others became
fragmented, no more than wynds for intrepid walkers today. It took two
millennia and the power of the Vatican to drive a straight street through
Rome in the sixteenth century: the Via Julia. Otherwise, the ancient, crooked
pathways persist as twenty-first-century streets; the buildings fronting them
meanwhile have been built, demolished, and rebuilt at least a dozen times in
the lifetimes of the streets. Our era is no different: the streets and highways
in which we have invested so much will persist. Future cities—in most cases
meaning expansions of existing cities—will be shaped by filling in the voids
between established streets and highways.
In a conurbation such as San Antonio, the sprawling network of highways
envelops almost 500 square miles, an area 50 times the size of the historic city
at its center. Sparse development stretches along widely spaced highways—
too thinly populated to support transit or other efficient urban services.
None of those highways is likely to disappear, nor will the year-to-year costs
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 63
of maintaining them diminish. The opportunities for access that those roads
offer will determine where development will occur as far into the future as
we can peer. Sporadic tall office buildings pop up above one- and two-story
developments at intersections with cross streets, but there is little chance of
an urban lifestyle developing outside the historic city core. However, there
are efforts afoot in San Jose and elsewhere to seed dense mixed-use commer-
cial centers amid miles of undifferentiated residential suburbs. Transit service
between those nodes will become feasible. Absolute dependency on driving
will be eroded, providing new freedoms to the 30 percent who do not possess
cars. Those who are too young, too old, too poor, or too infirm to own and
drive a car comprise one-third of the nation’s population. For most of the
1,350 trips5 that an average American makes in a year, those without transit
must depend on someone else to drive them.
As North America embraced the automobile and began massive suburban
expansions in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of miles of
new roads and streets were built without provisions for walking. Where
sidewalks were built, they were often too narrow, too close to fast-moving
traffic, and tended to end abruptly at an otherwise unmarked property line.
Street standards were established in public works departments whose sole
concern was the swift, safe, and efficient movement of vehicles. Neither
the financial nor environmental cost of such streets was any of their con-
cern. Housebuilders who wanted to develop a tract of land were obliged
to conform to those standards at their own expense. Thus, standards tend to
require wide streets, occupying more land area, making more of it impervi-
ous, creating larger heat islands. This is a classic case of siloed regulation
and unconsidered consequences. The extra cost of over-designed street
construction is passed on in higher housing costs, raising the threshold of
affordability. Another consequence—a sadly ironic one—is that we now
know that wider driving lanes are associated with higher fatality rates. Had
narrower streets been the standard, they would have been less expensive
to build and maintain, would have reduced storm-water problems, would
lessen energy demands, lower housing prices, and would be safer.
Suburbs were built under “model” codes that segregated land uses, cre-
ating monocultures of housing separated by an automobile trip from retail
and services, also from work and leisure destinations. This is why so many
suburban children everywhere are of necessity driven to school, there being
no safe and practical walking or bike route. For each suburban driver, a
parking place is needed at each destination. The aggregate is up to eight
parking spaces: at work, mall, cinema, and other places visited, each with
access drives. These add up to a paved area about the same area as a home
lot. Yet still the myth persists that “parking should be free” (Shoup 2011),
so we bury the costs in everything from the price of an ice cream to the lease
rate of office space.
Streets are the frame upon which cities are built. It is Portland’s good for-
tune to be built mostly on a tightly woven fabric of relatively narrow streets
64 Dimensions of a Healthy City
just 200 feet (61 m) apart. Like most pre-Second World War neighbor-
hoods, Portland’s Northwest Neighborhood was built when people made
almost all trips on foot or by streetcar. Every street had sidewalks, and this
being a timber-based economy, most sidewalks on residential streets were
built wide enough to accommodate a cord of firewood next to the curb.6
The 4-feet-wide strips along the curb outside most houses are often planted
nowadays with street trees that contribute to the urban forest canopy. So
the pedestrian realm claims 12 feet (3.66 m) on each side of the 60 feet
(18 m) streets, leaving 36 feet (11 m) for two-way traffic with parking on
both sides. The narrow travel lanes and randomly opening doors of parked
vehicles are effective in keeping travel speeds down and serious accidents a
rarity. These make good walking, jogging, and biking streets. Outside shops
and restaurants, the space between street trees is paved, and fills with street
furniture or makes space for tables and chairs. The happy outcome of cha-
otic use of sidewalks is discussed below.
Two hundred foot city blocks are typically divided into 100-feet-deep
lots; spacious enough for houses to set back from the property line, with
vegetation giving some privacy from the street. But for apartments, com-
mercial, and light industrial buildings, a 100-feet-deep lot can be a tight
fit, so almost all build up to the property line, giving a uniform street edge.
In retail blocks, this is important, because pedestrians maintain awareness
of the storefronts as they walk. The blocks being short, there is the fre-
quent visual relief of a cross street and the need to refocus on crossing safely
before becoming engaged with the next series of storefronts. This pleasant
rhythm draws thousands to stroll what were simply neighborhood shopping
streets. They fill the tills of the merchants and restaurateurs, adding wealth
by intensifying use—just as Adam Smith described. And busy sidewalks are
themselves a draw to others, often more curious about one another than
merchandise. I long puzzled over why people regularly queue for 20 minutes
or more for an ice cream at Salt & Straw, until it dawned on me that they
were also there to watch each other and the steady stream of passersby.
They do the same at Blue Star Donuts; it’s all about the theater of the street.
Once a critical mass of foot traffic has been achieved, people find reasons
to hang out and watch one another. A queue justifies standing around and
staring at people. Another (to me baffling) feature of the nation’s favorite
pastime of shopping.
The width of the street adds another interesting dynamic. Two-way
traffic is slowed by drivers maneuvering in and out of parking spaces, or
coasting slowly in the hope of finding one. As a consequence, pedestrians
can safely (though illegally) zigzag across the street, enabling retail on
both sides to flourish. In other places, shopping streets with faster traffic
often confine shoppers to one side of the street or the other, so retail suc-
ceeds on one side or the other, not both, as it does here. Wider streets also
make it more difficult to recognize people and destinations on the opposite
sidewalk.
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 65
Another behavior that results from street configuration arises from the
obstacle course that promenaders on busy shopping streets must navigate.
Street trees, tables and chairs, signs, public art pieces, moored bicycles, and
leashed dogs result in a narrow and winding path along the 12-feet sidewalks.
In contrast to the big city sidewalks where one walks straight and avoids eye
contact, here eye contact is essential to determine how approaching pedes-
trians are to pass one another. That contact may not elicit a smile, but it
establishes a social connection and increases one’s comfort level. The sense
of safety and friendliness that this chaotic sidewalk environment creates has
much to do with its success as a shopping destination. People enjoy the social
friction of being here, and that is a palpable indication of urban health.
These observations may seem trivial, but together they begin to explain
why streets with these dimensions prompt convivial behavior. Mature street
trees are limbed up high enough for delivery vehicles and buses to clear,
so looking ahead along the sidewalk, a space is defined by storefronts,
overhead foliage, and an irregular colonnade of tree stems, lampposts, and
poles. People fill the view ahead. What happens above that space is barely
relevant, for attention is focused at storefronts and people.
When this street model was recreated in the former rail yards and adja-
cent industrial streets of the Pearl District, the sidewalks lacked their leafy
roof. But trees grow quickly in wet and temperate Portland, and most streets
are now full-fledged. Most new buildings have an extrovert ground floor of
storefronts, lobbies, and other active uses. Because of the small city blocks,
almost all properties in the Pearl District are built up to the sidewalk, giving
a continuous frontage line that effectively engages and holds the interest of
passersby. As in the old Northwest Neighborhood, a chaotic arrangement
of sidewalk obstacles soon began to appear. Of course, only a small propor-
tion of frontages are occupied by retail storefronts, but the same principles
apply to any frontage: plenty of transparency, visual interest and variety,
and frequent social encounters. Blank walls are wisely prohibited, and equi-
table use of the public realm is enforced by droves of people on two feet or
two wheels.

Evolution of City Form

Five years into Phillip II’s reign, the coast of Colombia was secured for the
Spanish Crown, and by 1538 Bogota had been established as capitol of the
Kingdom of New Grenada under Spanish rule. A decade later, all the instru-
ments of government were in place. Although the king only knew of the
new territories through reports, he was intrigued by the idea of creating a
new kingdom in the New World, and designing towns and cities for a new
age. He drew wisdom from Vitruvius’ (1960) Ten Books on Architecture,
which had been written for the benefit of Emperor Augustus in the first
century bc, advising on everything from the siting of cities to the internal
arrangements of a house. Phillip II had probably been exposed to Thomas
66 Dimensions of a Healthy City
More’s Utopia, which had been published in 1518 and described an ide-
alized though fictitious community on an island off the South American
coast in which citizens lived happily in highly regularized towns. The king
would also have been familiar with bastides: defensible towns built in south-
east France from the twelfth century and later also in Spain. Bastides were
modeled on the Roman castrum, or military camp, in which blocks of hous-
ing were laid out orthogonally around a central square parade ground, the
whole protected by a rampart. Whatever his inspiration, Phillip II issued
clear instructions to his agents on orderly siting and planning of new towns
in New Grenada, outlining an intentional urbanism. In the context of a non-
military settlement, the central plaza would take on an important social role
in urban life. Around it would be sited the principal church, the governor’s
house, and, in larger communities, the courthouse and military headquarters.
Vitruvius (1960) had suggested that the plaza be proportionate in size to
the population, its length being one and a half times its breadth. He had also
written of the importance of orienting streets to capture prevailing breezes
in hot climates, and that they should be narrow for shade. For Medellin, in
central Colombia, the king stipulated that major streets should be 30 feet
wide, others 25 feet (Martinez 1967: 66). While advice about dimensions of
streets and plazas was not always followed, the rationale of an orthogonal
grid of streets persisted as new towns were founded throughout the Spanish
Maine and Caribbean possessions.
Two centuries later, the same classical sources informed city planning in
new settlements such as Savannah, Georgia. That city was founded in 1733
in what was then a British colony, and was designed by James Oglethorpe
to incorporate principals of the Enlightenment. Oglethorpe had spent over
two years developing the plan for this new colonial capital. In his plan,
he embedded ideas of egalitarianism and civic virtue. Slavery was to be
prohibited, there would be no ruling class, laws would be secular, and ten-
ure of property assured. Like Phillip II before him, Oglethorpe delved into
Vitruvius, Moore’s Utopia, and studied the Renaissance concept of the ideal
city. In Oglethorpe’s plan, the town was divided into wards, each centered
on an open square surrounded by housing and smaller city blocks for com-
merce. Each housing block was divided into 10 parts or “tythings,” and
each ward was allocated a square mile of land to farm outside the city: each
family having 45 acres to farm as well as a kitchen garden closer to town.
Oglethorpe intended Savannah to be a model for future towns and cities
throughout the American colonies. In the century that followed, the orthog-
onal grid survived, dutifully followed by pragmatic surveyors, but the moral
principles were left behind. The National Land Ordinance established street
grids as the basis for all new settlements west of the Ohio River in 1785.
Oglethorpe’s ideals were overtaken by the worldly values of the surveyors
and their political masters as townships multiplied across the growing union
of states, reaching at last to the West Coast and to Portland over 100 years
after Oglethorpe’s plan.
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 67

Figure 4.4 Embodying the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment, James

Oglethorpe’s plan for Savannah of 1733 was intended to be the prototype
for all subsequent new towns in the American colonies. Slavery was
forbidden and freedom of worship was secure in all 24 wards. Each
ward had its own places of work, its own public square, and its own
farm outside the town. The geometry, but not the moral principles, of
Savannah was widely adopted as the nation expanded westwards.

The Consequences of Street Grid Scale

The defining urban scale of the City of Portland all began with 16 blocks
being platted along the waterfront by Thomas Brown in 1845; blocks small
enough to give access to tightly packed businesses along the waterfront.
East-west streets were unmettled, muddy, and rutted; wide enough for heavy
carts to pass carrying goods to and from the tall ships; strictly utilitarian in
purpose. Each building would have its formal entrance on the less-trafficked
north-south streets, a more generous 80 feet (24 m) wide to admit the sun
when it shone, and assuring light and air to each building.
Even in this remote forest clearing, no one would consider establish-
ing a new town without recourse to surveyors to construct a precise grid
of property lines. The moral principles embodied in plans for Savannah
and the new towns of Nuevo Granada may have been forgotten, but sur-
veyors had by then established baselines and quarter sections across the
nation. As each legal Addition was made to the original plat, the pattern of
68 Dimensions of a Healthy City
200 × 200 foot blocks was continued. North of a bend in the Willamette
River at Burnside, the grid was tilted to conform with the waterfront, and
the “needless extravagance” of 80-feet-wide streets was abandoned, mak-
ing all streets 60 feet wide. Narrowing of the north-south streets may in
fact have been done to bring them into closer alignment with their counter-
parts south of Burnside.
As the city grew westward toward steeper slopes, the grid was adhered
to, but sometimes doubled to 200 × 400 foot blocks. About a mile and a
quarter from the river, steep rocky outcrops barred the way and the regular
grid of streets gave way to existing roads out of town, weaving through
draws and canyons. Most homes developed in these heights came into being
much later, when the automobile was already changing the pace and dimen-
sions of travel, and much else besides. Hillside development was exclusively
residential and often opulent; the beginning of the suburbs that would spill
outwards until the 1970s and the restraints of statewide planning legislation
protecting farm and forest land from further encroachment.
East Portland was a separate municipality until unification with the West
in 1891, yet the 200 × 200 foot city block was adopted there too, run-
ning parallel to the waterfront. Initially, crossings of the river were by ferry,
yet the grids were aligned by those unswerving surveyors so that with the
advent of bridges, streets became continuous across the water.
Portland’s small-scale street grid created a permeable built environment
that was easy to navigate, but direct routes were compromised first by rail
tracks and later by freeways. These followed their own logic, unrestrained
by the street grid, cutting swaths that compartmentalized the city, and con-
centrated movement on the few streets that still connected each district to
the next. The equity of the grid was lost, channeling traffic onto through-
streets. Congestion mounted in the mid-twentieth century, and following
other cities’ example, Portland converted many of its Downtown and inner
neighborhood streets to one-way couplets to ease traffic—with little con-
sideration of the effects on businesses and life on those streets. Hardly a
surprising outcome since transportation departments almost everywhere
operated independently.
Eager to accommodate drivers, safety and convenience for pedestrians and
cyclists was passively downgraded. Retailers whose premises faced approach-
ing traffic on newly one-way streets gained visibility; others effectively
disappeared from view. Romance with the automobile had deteriorated into
an unseemly scramble. Billboards addressed to drivers proliferated through-
out Downtown, littering the faces of decent architecture. Then came the urban
freeways in the 1950s and 1960s, fueled by “free” federal money. Build and
prosper was the message as new highways were driven through urban com-
munities, severing streets and displacing families. Freight migrated from slow
ships and railroads to ever-bigger trucks speeding on the new interstate high-
ways, but also cramming into narrow streets to make deliveries. Vehicular
traffic multiplied and streets connecting the highways clogged.
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 69
Since the 1990s in Portland, there has been a mounting effort to redress
lost equity in the streets. By then, a new demand for street improvements
had arrived with annexation of unincorporated areas to the east. Poorly
built streets, often unsurfaced, with no sidewalks, and with little access to
transit, supported a car-dependent population; a dependency that most
could ill afford. Bringing all those streets—and just as many in more afflu-
ent Southwest Portland—up to standard remains an unfunded intention of
the city, although bus and rail services have been expanded to serve some of
them. What little funding that has been secured for street improvements has
been focused on pedestrian safety near intersections and transit stops: much
of it for sidewalks and signalized crossings.
Investment in transportation improvements has been guided by the 2040
Plan since its adoption in 1995 (see “Planning Law and Urban Growth” in
Chapter 2). By identifying local and regional centers and the transit cor-
ridors between them, the 2040 Plan identified places where sidewalks,
crosswalks, and other basic improvements were most needed.
In densely populated inner neighborhoods, painted crosswalks and signed
bike lanes have proliferated in recent years—a response to residents’ values
and a mature transit system. Since a peak in average miles driven per resident in
1997, AMD has declined steadily, even as population increased. Meanwhile,
the deficient eastern suburbs scramble to catch up—leveraging cheaper real
estate to launch businesses and cohesive communities. Discouraging though
some of those neighborhoods look, they are repeating the evolutionary pat-
terns of an earlier Portland, but with the benefits of the faster-paced and
technically advanced age in which few are without smartphones. The newly
arrived are finding their feet—in every sense of the phrase.

The Evolving Public Realm

The most powerful determinants of how we move through a city are street
patterns and geography. In contrast to the organic forms of most European
cities, Portland preceded development with a Euclidean plat of city blocks and
streets. A grid of 16 small city blocks laid out 170 years ago set the pattern for
an airy, walkable city, but could not protect it from twentieth-century urban
flight or freeways.
Streets outlive the properties they access, and the values of those respon-
sible for street design and how they are used shape the city in profound
ways. For a century, streets have been shaped and managed around vehicle
dimensions and movements. They are now being adapted to more equitable
multimodal uses. These changes reflect shifts in city politics and economics.
Urban infrastructure must earn its keep, and to do so streets must fulfill
multiple functions: they must become complete streets in every respect.
Specific details of street design have far-reaching influences on how they
can be used, and on whether a street is perceived as a sociable or unfriendly
place. Success is measured in the extent to which a street can sustain the
70 Dimensions of a Healthy City
physical, commercial, and social needs of those whom it serves. Mode share
differs from place to place, as do frontaging uses and the people who use
any given street. Only to the extent that these varying needs are met can any
street be deemed a success.
A street may be an inert thing, yet each has a life of its own. The com-
bination of the physical attributes of a street and the ways in which it is
used define its contributions—positive and negative—to the life of the city.
A handy if loose definition of success in a street is one that attracts people
from elsewhere. Usually, that means full use of all the assets that a street has
to offer, perhaps lined with popular destinations. Success often implies an
equity between modes of transport, drawing people from near and far. Even
a small street can meet this challenge: its assets may be few, but can be used
fully and equitably.
The street dimensions established by those first 16 city blocks have per-
sisted throughout the inner neighborhoods of Portland. Most are 60 feet
(18 m) wide between property lines. Concentrations of retail and services
in older neighborhoods sprang up where housing and commerce min-
gled; places where buildings often have no setback from the property line.
Neighborhood centers often mark long-forgotten streetcar stops, located
for the convenience of a population that depended on the streetcar for every
trip too long to walk. Thus, more by good fortune than through good plan-
ning, we have a scale and configuration of streets with active uses that work
remarkably well in accommodating twenty-first-century demands in which
automobiles are no longer the dominating mode.
The street at the commercial center of an older Portland neighborhood
is typically fronted by two-story buildings (though some are being replaced
by multistory structures with retail at street level and housing above). There
is little or no off-street parking since these neighborhoods were built when
cars were scarce. The pace of traffic is set by those searching for a rare open
parking space. On a busy day, the traffic engineer would classify the level
of service (LOS) “D” (as in disastrous?). The safety officer would despair
at the frequency of jaywalking. Curiously, this is a return to the era before
the automobile lobby took over and made jaywalking first an insult then
an offense. On the plus side, since traffic speeds rarely exceed 25 mph on
such streets, serious accidents involving pedestrians are rare. Our senses tell
us that this is an attractive place to be. There is a disconnection between
engineering and safety controls, on one hand, and a sensory value system,
on the other. If we knew how to score it, an “urban design quotient” might
provide a more dependable guide to what makes a good street. The engi-
neering parameters of LOS and the law that gives vehicles right of way over
pedestrians in a busy retail street are leftovers from a bygone era, and need
revision or replacement.
A delightful yet messy vitality ensues when sidewalks are encumbered by
trees, poles, and newspaper boxes along the curbside, and by potted plants,
tables and chairs, signs, and tethered dogs along the building frontages.
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 71
A city ordinance decrees a minimum clear width be maintained for pas-
sage, but people stop to talk, dogs stop to sniff, signs and seating somehow
drift into the open spaces. As discussed above (“Streets That Endure”),
this chaotic scene has a vital social effect: walkers are obliged to make eye
contact in order to wordlessly negotiate how to pass one another. Some
will smile, a few will scowl, but a social transaction has taken place at each
encounter. Everyone in a sense has established an identity with the place
that makes them feel comfortable and unthreatened, a sense that in many
cases will draw them back to this street. The relationship formed with a
place will bring people back, pleasing the tradesmen and providing a quanti-
fiable measure of success, through increased retail revenues per square foot.
But there are often flaws in this scene. Interruption of the retail frontage
with a blank wall or a parking lot will free up the sidewalk of obstructions
and encourage pedestrians to hurry on their way, their attention turned
inward without storefronts or patrons to divert them. Merchants who fill
their windows with posters similarly create a dead space and devalue their
locational advantage. Banks or offices with little visual connection between
indoors and outdoors do the same. The change of pace and attitude will
often persist until another obstacle reconnects walkers to the life of the street.
Holly Whyte (1980) noted this in the dead space downstream of a blank
wall on a shopping street. By contrast, the café or restaurant that dissolves
the separation between indoors and outdoors intensifies the interaction with
passersby. Where occupied tables and chairs spill out onto the sidewalk, the
energy level climbs. There is no mystery to this—people are more curious
about one another than almost anything else. Make the storefront a busy
stage and a flowing audience will throng the sidewalk.
In eighteenth-century Italy, Giambattista Nolli understood this, and can
be said to have defined more clearly the extent of the public realm when
he updated the map of Rome to include all publicly accessible spaces with
those of streets and plazas. He included the interior of the Pantheon and
the loggias of numerous other buildings that are directly accessible to the
public, if rarely occupied by them. The point was to identify spatial volumes
that contribute to the sense of each place. The Piazza della Rotonda exists
as an outdoor space by which to approach the Pantheon, and should be
understood as part of the same place as the portico and even the interior of
the rotunda itself. Though not visible from the Piazza, the interior space is
connected to it just as firmly as are the streets and alleys that lead off the
Piazza in other directions. Nolli’s rendition of the map is an injunction to
look beyond one’s immediate surroundings and understand the larger spa-
tial and architectural context. Neither the Pantheon nor any of the other
great monuments in Rome should be perceived in isolation from the rich
urban fabric into which they are woven.
Grasping the fact that the life and vitality of the street is heavily
influenced by its connectivity to life behind the storefronts is key to under-
standing the infrastructure of a healthy city. It is all about designing the
72 Dimensions of a Healthy City

Figures 4.5 and 4.6 Giambattista Nolli

made his Pianta Grande
di Roma in 1748. The
figure ground in which
he chose to engrave
the map effectively
defines the public
realm as any space
accessible to the public.
Thus, the colonnades
of St. Andrea’s and
the interiors of civic
monuments such as the
Pantheon are shown as
public space. In today’s
usage, “public realm” is
similarly inclusive.

physical elements of the streets to encourage interaction between people,

most of whom are unknown to one another. In Nolli’s terms, each time one
passes a storefront door, or a café window with animated people behind it,
an extension to the public realm is sensed. That is to say, the urban terri-
tory across which you are entitled to roam is expanded and enriched.
There exists on busy sidewalks a level of benign social friction that is
largely unnoticed because there is no formal encounter, no exchange of
words. Yet tiny reassurances occur, such as momentary eye contact through
a window, or one person pausing to let another past, a quantum of trust and
sense of security is generated. Collectively, the crowd of strangers on the
sidewalk behaves cooperatively, although unconsciously so. Anxieties are
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 73
calmed. One can relax and enjoy the moment, reassured of having chosen
the right place to be. This amounts to a confirmation that our values are
shared and reflected in the way that things are built—what you and I might
refer to as urban design. We will return to this topic in “Sensory Urbanism”
in Chapter 8.

The Urban Forest and Biophilia

In its virgin state two centuries ago, Portland was a forest with a clear-
ing near a reach of the river deep enough to moor ocean-going ships of
the 1840s. Two enterprising businessmen met in that clearing and tossed
a coin to decide whether the port they would build here should be named
after Lovejoy’s hometown of Boston, or Pettygrove’s Portland, Maine. Since
then, as new settlements extended outwards from the river landing, the for-
est vanished—or rather was literally sold down the river. The timber was
cut and exported, bringing wealth and development. Before long, substan-
tial houses were being built and ornamental trees were planted in streets and
yards. So began the slow and unplanned replacement of the natural forest
with a mix of native and exotic species. To begin with, young trees with
small canopies would have dotted the raw landscape of a fast-expanding
town, but as trees increased in numbers and maturity, their greenery could
be seen as a continuous fabric spreading across the skyline and weaving
between buildings as residential districts grew.
“Urban forest” seems rather a grand term for a random scatter of mixed
tree varieties across the city, but after successive generations of haphazard
plantings there is a great range of species and maturity. I counted 140 rings
in the freshly cut stumps of two great elms recently removed from NW
Irving Street near 21st Avenue. Tree canopies now cover 29 percent of the
city—so urban forest is a fitting description.
As the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exhibition was being planned, the
newly appointed Parks Board recognized the need for a parks plan reach-
ing beyond the popular City Park (now Washington Park) and the Park
Blocks. They engaged John Charles Olmsted and his brother, Frederick
Law Olmsted Jr., who had arrived in 1903 to plan the centennial fair-
grounds. Their work on a strategic plan for Portland’s parks is discussed in
“Ideas That Shaped Early Portland” in Chapter 2. Suffice it to say here that
their plan of inclusion of wooded parkland as a connected system of public
open spaces combined seamlessly with the legions of planted trees in streets
and private yards to create today’s urban forest. Implementation of the
Olmsteds’ plan was sporadic at best; it took 50 years to acquire Forest Park
and 100 to realize their “40-mile loop”—now many miles more—of con-
nected trails and open spaces. Today, the result is an extensive network of
footpaths and trails following and interconnecting the green infrastructure
of the city, and reaching beyond it into farmlands and forests. So tightly
integrated is this fabric of trees, streets, trails, and open spaces that no one
74 Dimensions of a Healthy City
in Portland can escape constant exposure to nature. At the very least, there
are those fleeting glimpses of conifers on hills and buttes framed by build-
ings in a downtown street. Omnipresent nature is a defining characteristic
of the healthy city.
Not anticipated in the Olmsteds’ time were issues such as contamination
of the air with particulates from vehicle exhausts and industry, heat island
effects, ecological continuity into and through urbanized areas. Yet the con-
nected system of tree canopies that threads together parks, streets, streams,
and open country address all of those things, making the built environ-
ment more resilient than it could be otherwise. The concept of biophilia was
probably understood at a visceral level by the Olmsted brothers and Park
Board members, but only now is the huge beneficial impact of ubiquitous
exposure to the natural world beginning to be interpreted and more widely
understood.
First to give credence to biologist E.O. Wilson’s (1975) pronouncements
on the concept of biophilia were hospitals. Recovery times were tracked for
patients who had an outlook onto gardens and woodlands, and were com-
pared with patients in entirely artificial environments. So striking were the
differences that healing gardens quickly became an essential feature of any
forward-thinking hospital. Educators similarly found that students with an
outlook onto nature—and access to it after classes—did noticeably better
than those without such access. (Louv 2012). Research continues, but there
is now little doubt that we all harbor an atavistic need for exposure to the
natural environments in which human kind evolved for millennia.
Related to biophilia are the biorhythms that time our waking, sleeping,
alertness, and much else. Visibility of the sky throughout the day enables us
to coordinate our circadian rhythms to the time of day and to the season.
Views of the natural environment usually include views of the sky and of
changes in the color and quality of light. These help us to calibrate our inter-
nal clocks in a way that is not possible in an insulated, internal environment.
So important is this process that sophisticated control systems for artificial
lighting inside a building are now used to adjust color temperature according
to the time of day and season. It has been found that tracking the color of
light to simulate the daily cycles of natural light improve the health, mood,
and productivity of occupants.
What appears to be a wooded hillside west of Downtown conceals wind-
ing streets and hundreds of houses clinging to the rock under a mantle of
earth, all held in place by the roots of the urban forest. Without the trees,
extreme rains or thaws would long since have sent earth and buildings tum-
bling down the slopes. The urban forest fulfills many important functions
here—knitting together earth and rock, but also detaining rainwater so that it
seeps away slowly rather than rushing downhill in a destructive torrent. But
this symbiosis is in delicate balance, easily upset by ill-advised felling of trees,
by over-irrigation, or by an earthquake triggering a landslide. City protections
against felling trees thus have practical as well as aesthetic motivations.
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 75

Figure 4.7 When the Transit Mall was built in the 1970s, street trees were a rarity
in the Central City except in the Park Blocks. Today, mature trees bring
seasonal change and tranquility to the busy streets.

For the past 40 years, there has been a city-led effort to extend the planting
of street trees beyond residential areas and parks through commercial and some
industrial areas. Trees have become an essential part of “complete streets,”
making them more appealing places to walk and to live our everyday lives.
In commercial districts, street trees and their dappled shadows and fallen
leaves contrast with the hard surfaces of buildings and paving, adding a sea-
sonal dynamic to each place. I have often noticed in visual preference surveys
that regardless of the development type being reviewed, images that include
mature trees invariably score higher than those without. This may hark back
to the atavistic origins of biophilia, but whatever the reason, the case for
extending the urban forest into almost every part of the city is compelling.
The 2035 Comprehensive Plan gives clear purpose to the growing net-
work of green infrastructure across the city:

City Greenways are a system of distinctive pedestrian and bicycle-friendly

streets and trails, enhanced by lush tree canopy and storm water facilities
that support active living by expanding transportation and recreational
opportunities and making it easier and more attractive to reach destina-
tions across the city. As Portland continues to grow, the City Greenways
system will strengthen connections to nature, weave green elements into
neighborhoods, and enhance mobility and recreation.
(City of Portland 2016)
76 Dimensions of a Healthy City
The Comprehensive Plan also addresses habitat corridors, including water-
ways as well as greenways.
A specific product of the 2035 Plan is the Green Loop, which extends the
safe green environment of the Park Blocks for walking, running, and cycling
across the Broadway Bridge and Tilikum Crossing to a newly established
route through Central Eastside. The Green Loop is an acknowledgment of
the importance for those who work or live Downtown to have direct access
to both green spaces and physical exercise. Already, the Park Blocks host
farmers’ markets, arts, and other festivals. Extended to a six-mile linear
park, the Green Loop will provide an active and unifying focus for rapidly
changing industrial areas east of the river. As the streetcar loop across the
same pair of bridges has improved functional connections between east and
west, so the Green Loop will draw the active and biophilic lives of inner
neighborhoods more closely together; an outer loop to the esplanade that
circles the river between the Steel and Hawthorne Bridges. A graphic depic-
tion of the Green Loop is included in Figure 2.3 in Chapter 2.
Perhaps the clearest statement of the importance of Portland’s urban
forest to its identity and its biophilic credentials is experienced as one
approaches the city from the west. The two principal entries, Canyon Road
and Burnside, are swaddled by forest trees for a mile or more before views
of the city suddenly open. For newly arriving visitors, there could be no
more eloquent preface to the healthy city.

Growing Up, Not Out

How can a flourishing urban forest be reconciled with increasing popula-
tion within the urban growth boundary? The early pioneer’s choice of home
may have been a cabin in the woods, but for many today it is a condo in the
Pearl—or the equivalent in any of the inner neighborhoods where the mix
of uses is such that almost every need—including place of work—is within
20 minutes’ walk or ride. Infill within these districts has accelerated since
the Great Recession, providing homes and workplaces at relatively high
densities and maintaining decent standards of design and building quality.
However, because zoning lags behind changes in land use demands, an arti-
ficial scarcity of developable land has been created. This has escalated land
prices and pushed up the cost of new housing. This is the phenomenon
mentioned above (“Economic Opportunity”) and discussed in Chapter 6.
This is not a criticism of Portland’s plan, but of the zoning conventions that
underlie development regulations everywhere.
There have been two direct consequences of land scarcity through zon-
ing. One has been to send some development further away from the CBD
where land is cheaper; the other has been to raise the cost of housing above
affordable levels. Restrictive zoning of underdeveloped land in the inner
neighborhoods has been retained in the 2035 Plan because of pressure from
vocal protectionist groups who fear competition or simply reject change.
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 77
This is directly responsible for the regressive effects of lost affordability,
evidently something that city government failed to understand when they
perpetuated limits on use and density that had been hatched in the 1970s.
A recurring argument is that it is essential to reserve land for industrial use
for blue-collar jobs. This overlooks shifts in inner-city manufacturing from
heavy machinery to precision workshops, and from local warehousing to
ex-urban distribution centers. The reality is that most inner-city industry
today is mostly compact, clean, and quiet, and it benefits from a mix of
uses around it that help attract and retain a competent workforce. Even
the best urban models change over time, and if the health of the city and its
denizens is to be maintained, then development regulation must keep pace
with change. A more proactive approach to land use is, of course, entirely
compatible with continued growth of the urban forest.

EcoDistricts and Green Streets

Given the provenance of values that created the healthy city, it should be
no surprise that design professionals in Portland led the way in energy effi-
ciency and sustainable architecture long before LEED came into being in
1998 under the auspices of the US Green Building Council. Portland was
also an early adopter of EcoDistrict principles—recognizing that district-
wide strategies for energy saving and resource management multiply the
benefits of separate building-by-building programs.
One of the first to embrace sustainable design at a practical level was the
Bonneville Power Administration in their new headquarters building in the
Lloyd District. Completed in January 1987, just weeks after MAX began
service, the building includes a heat recovery system, passive night cooling,
digital controls for HVAC, abundant natural light with automatic lighting
controls, an accessible floor system, and other “intelligent building” features.
Designed by Portland’s ZGF Architects, this building was used by the General
Services Administration to set energy standards for its major office buildings
nationwide. BPA went on to develop a comprehensive energy, waste, and
water management program, and today is an Energy Star certified facility
that has reduced its waste stream by 44 percent.
Emergence of the Lloyd EcoDistrict was influenced by an impressive
example of a public–private partnership. After years of delay, the Oregon
Convention Center (OCC) was funded and a site selected for it next to
the newly minted MAX light rail line in an area across the river from
Downtown that had been devoid of major investment since the assault of
freeway construction in the 1960s. As the OCC prepared to open in 1990,
the transit authority, TriMet, secured funding for a large new station to
serve convention attendees. Design improvements could be configured in
a way that would benefit neighboring property owners and the city if they
too would participate in raising the quality of the public realm. A half-page
agreement was drawn up between eight parties, stating in essence that they
78 Dimensions of a Healthy City
all agreed to participate, but if any party reneged, the whole deal was off.
By this means, TriMet’s $600,000 leveraged $32 million in public improve-
ments, transforming streets and open spaces and raising the profile of the
whole Lloyd District.
With this success behind them, and the example of BPA next door, it
was a relatively small step for public and private property owners in the
district to recognize the potential benefits of collaboration in an EcoDistrict.
Much planning was done, but the first really conspicuous demonstration
of resource management was the rain garden that was built as part of the
2003 expansion to the Convention Center. The rain garden wraps around
the southwest side of the OCC extension. It was designed to treat runoff
from 5.5 acres of roof, cleaning and cooling water before discharging it
into the river. Seeing the rain garden and understanding its purpose has
helped to make real for many people the potential of district-wide strategies,
especially since it saved $15,000 annually in storm-water charges. A solar
array added to the OCC roof generates roughly a quarter of the convention
center’s annual power requirement. The array also provides an independ-
ent power source in the event of a disaster, for which OCC is an emergency
shelter in the city’s resiliency plan. Making eco-management visible made it
real for many who had never confronted the topic before.
Several more major buildings in the district have achieved LEED certifica-
tion, and Hilton Hotels have used their remodeled Doubletree as a prototype
for the brand in energy saving, waste management, and local sourcing. The
most recent arrival is Hassalo on 8th—an LEED Platinum certified com-
plex of three buildings with 657 apartments, grocery store, secure storage
for 1,500 bicycles, and its own black water treatment system: NORM. The
Natural Organic Recycling Machine and filter beds are a central feature of
a mid-block open space, branding the complex for those who care about the
environment, and creating a tranquil urban plaza for the enjoyment of all.
The idea of district-wide coordination of energy and environmental man-
agement equipment and techniques as an EcoDistrict was outlined soon
after completion of the BPA building and the Holladay Street public realm
improvements. However, fragmented ownership and reliance on new tech-
nologies made progress slow. Only now that a critical mass of demonstrably
successful and money-saving projects have been completed are district-wide
strategies being energetically pursued.
Meanwhile, green streets have been proliferating throughout the city. All of
the older Portland neighborhoods had been built with sewers that combined
sewage and storm water. As population grew, so did the volumes of waste
carried by the sewers. As more impervious surfaces were built, so increasing
volumes of storm water found their way into the sewer system. Eventually,
each major storm resulted in overflows of the combined sewers into the river.
This distressing problem was addressed by the city’s largest ever engineering
project—the so called “Big Pipe”: a vast underground tunnel that both con-
tains and conveys sewage to the treatment plant without spillage.
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 79

Figure 4.8 NORM, the Natural Organic Recycling Machine, diverts from the main
sewer all wastewater and sewage generated by housing at NE Hassalo
and 8th Avenue. Water from the digester is further cleaned and filtered
through the plants and soils of a constructed wetland before reuse for
flushing toilets and irrigation. Surplus treated water is returned to the
ground via a dry well.

This unsavory tale is by way of introduction of the city’s passion for green
streets. Determined to avoid further mishaps, the city required by ordinance
that each development detain storm-water runoff long enough for orderly
downstream discharge. Streets, of course, are among the worst offenders in
rushing storm water into the nearest drain. A simple way to delay such runoff
is to divert it into a reservoir with a small aperture outflow pipe. Add some
80 Dimensions of a Healthy City
growing medium and carefully selected plants, and the reservoir will also
remove particulates and certain impurities from the water before discharge.
Appearing as below-surface flower beds—or at least beds of greenery—these
stormwater detention devices were quickly accepted. They declare the green
credentials of those around them and further enrich the public realm.
Thirty years after the Bonneville Power Administration demonstrated the
benefits of an EcoDistrict, the concept is still regarded with suspicion by
many; a reminder that innovations such as rating the energy efficiency of a
building or its resilience in a seismic event will take a long time to achieve
wide acceptance. As a species, humans are averse to change; established
patterns and behaviors help us to navigate through an increasingly complex
world. Changing the way that we do things throws uncertainty into the
complicated process of decision-making, so on the whole we would prefer
to just keep doing things the way that we have always done them. It is the
planner’s role not only to find a better way, but to coax a reluctant public
to move on from practices that we now know to be damaging—such as
further proliferation of dispersed, single-use suburbs—and to embrace solu-
tions that are beneficial across the spectrum of environmental, social, and
economic values.

Notes
1 Athens’ population peaked around 430 bc at about 230,000, including slaves
(Russell 1961: Chapter 7).
2 John Keefe, Steven Melendez, and Louise Ma of the WNYC Data News Team
survey of average commute times in US cities in 2012.
3 WalkScore is an open-source means of evaluating walkability that can be found at
www.redfin.com.
4 In 1949, the linguist George Zipf observed that in any region, the population of
the largest city is double that of the next largest, which in turn is double that of the
third largest, and so on. While the legion of factors that give rise to this phenom-
enon have yet to be unraveled, the rule of proportionality appears to hold true.
5 Survey by JJ Keller Associates (see www.jjkeller.com/learn/news/092016/Americans-
spend-an-average-of-7-workweeks-driving-each-year-survey-finds).
6 Firewood is still sold by the cord: a unit of closely stacked firewood measuring 4
feet wide, 4 feet high, and 8 feet long, named for the method of measuring it.

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Glaeser, E. (2011) Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us
Ricker, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. London: Macmillan.
Keefe, L.T. (n.d.) History of Zoning in Portland 1918–1959. Available at: www.
portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/147441.
Krugman, P. (1996) The Self-Organizing Economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Louv, R. (2012) Last Child in the Woods, 2008: The Nature Principle. Chapel Hill,
NC: Algonquin Books.
 Dimensions of a Healthy City 81
Martinez, C. (1967) Urbanismo en el Nuevo Reino de Granada. Colombia: Banco
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Smith, A. (2000) Wealth of Nations. New York: Modern Library Classics.
Vitruvius, M.P. (1960) The Ten Books on Architecture. Dover Edition.
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5 The Pearl District

A Vital New Metropolitan Community

People speak of “the Pearl”1 in almost mystical terms as though it had been
conjured from forest mists as a thriving and ultimately cool oasis of urban
development and metropolitan activity. What is remarkable is how quickly
this urban infill achieved a sophisticated maturity. The reasons are less mag-
ical, yet usefully instructive. Unlike many new developments, the district
benefited from strong form-giving antecedents of both design and context.
In April 1983, on the tenth anniversary of Portland’s first Downtown
Plan, a Regional and Urban Design Team (R/UDAT) assembled by the
American Institute of Architects (AIA) met to examine the desolate industrial
and warehouse district near Union Station, just north of Downtown, known
as the Northwest Triangle. They were a SWAT team of accomplished design
professionals recruited from around the country for this purpose. From that
effort emerged the city’s Northwest Triangle Report of 1985, replete with
recommendations for extending the North Park Blocks and protecting unac-
knowledged historic resources that included over 90 buildings. It noted that
railroad operations would likely continue for some time, but recognized that
the 40 acres of Burlington Northern yards might eventually be redeveloped.
This plan was subsumed into the Central City Plan of 1988.

In the spring of 1991, a handful of citizens gathered to consider the

future of North Downtown. Many owned or controlled property in
the area. All shared an inclination to make a collective contribution to
its health and redevelopment. Identified as the River District Vision,
it was presented to the Portland City Council for consideration. In
response, the City Council directed the execution of a Development
Plan to implement the vision.
(from the River District Development Plan, 1993)

The rail yards together with land fronting the Willamette River amounted
to about 50 acres (20 hectares), and as the name suggests, the River
District Development Plan recognized the waterfront as a crucial element:
 The Pearl District 83
“The vision outlines a community which is unique because of its image, its
diversity, and most important, its embrace of the Willamette River” (ibid.).
As it turned out, active rail lines and a busy road proved too great a
separation for the rail yards and waterfront to develop as one. It was the
little-regarded neighbor to the west that in many ways shaped and enabled
the success of the River District. Essential parts of the plan for the new
district reflected characteristics of the Northwest Neighborhood, which has
mixed uses and a socially diverse community that predates the city’s plan-
ning ordinances. First, continuation of the small street grid that would make
the River District eminently walkable; second, a varied mix and density of
uses that have succeed financially and socially for over a century; and third,
strong connections to established employment and recreation venues. The
Northwest Neighborhood’s organically evolved mix of uses and activities
had achieved a sustained balance between business, services, and the lives of
the people who lived and worked there. The result was a vital and gregari-
ous urban community, an example well known to the owners, developers,
and designers of the nascent River District.
The distribution of uses in the Northwest Neighborhood is such that
most everyday needs are within 10 minutes’ walk. The young and old,
simple and sophisticated folk who live and work there spend enough time
on the sidewalks to recognize one another, to know their neighbors, and to
care about the place. This is the antithesis of the social isolation character-
istic of sprawling, automobile dependent suburbs. Here, civic involvement
thrives at every level. In short, it is a place of physical exercise and social
engagement—the basic requirements for a healthy body and a healthy
mind. These were the very characteristics that health professionals were
recommending to combat obesity, enable aging in place, and sustain a
healthy lifestyle. None of this escaped the notice of those conceiving the
River District.
A neighborhood is to some extent a microcosm of the city of which it
is a part. The Northwest Neighborhood had developed an enviable and
sustained vitality because it had nurtured all the support systems that buoy
up a convivial resident community. It is diverse in its architecture, enjoys a
jumble of mismatched uses here and there, and is richly clothed with trees,
parks, and views. Despite the orthogonal street pattern, the Northwest
Neighborhood had grown organically, and had achieved maturity before
the meddling rules of zoning intervened. The neighborhood had been
brought back from the brink by young professionals who bought handsome
but dilapidated homes that had been marooned by red-lining, and restored
and repopulated them. This resurgence was well underway when work on
planning the River District began.
By great good fortune, planning the River District got underway at a
time when the zoning code had been greatly liberalized compared with
others around the nation. It permitted most urban uses, and planners and
architects advising on urban design stuck to the important basics, such as
84 The Pearl District
creating active storefronts, eschewing blank walls, and creating agreeable
places for people on foot throughout the public realm, including a generous
provision of new parks.

Timing Is Everything
Beginning in the 1980s, it became evident that young professionals with the
means to live where they pleased gravitated toward the inner city instead
of following their senior colleagues to big homes in the suburbs. Most
found their way to deteriorating inner-city neighborhoods, rescuing noble
but neglected homes from further decline. Old ladies and cats gave place
to energetic singles and couples who invested cash and sweat in “bringing
back” their newfound homes. With the new young population and their
disposable income came a resurgence of local retail, bars, and restaurants.
Throughout the inner city, people began to drive less, public transit rider-
ship grew, and commuting by bicycle gained popularity. Here, the reality
of a “20-minute neighborhood” began to emerge: communities in which
almost everything one needs is within 20 minutes’ walk of one’s home, with
many destinations much closer.
This tidal change from suburbs to inner city is certainly not unique
to Portland, but here there were some important differences. First, the
improvement of old inner neighborhoods occurred for the most part with-
out socially damaging displacements. Unlike many other cities, here there
had been no deserted inner neighborhoods for the urban poor to take over.
Second, because Portland is a relatively young city (less than 200 years ago
it was still virgin forest), the cycle from affluence to decline had been short,
and a majority of the original homes had survived, as had the neighborhood
infrastructure: all the nonresidential facilities had remained largely intact if
underused. New business owners and new management rose to the opportu-
nities presented by a resurgent population ready to fix up their homes, and
buy goods and services.
Historical accident had a part to play too. The Northwest Neighborhood—
located immediately west of the rail yards—had never known the exclusivity
of some posher places where only houses of a certain quality would be
permitted. The Northwest Neighborhood had large and small houses,
townhouses and apartment buildings, workplaces, and retail all jumbled
together, sometimes on the same block. It had always had a diverse social
mix and a large transient population. Its inhabitants had learned to live with
little off-street parking.
Just over a century ago, the neighborhood had been a stump-strewn hill-
side, so most of the buildings there today were the first to occupy their
sites. As young professionals filled the void left by departing empty nest-
ers and outmoded rooming houses, the population of apartment dwellers
in the neighborhood grew and continued its usual turnover. Importantly,
they boosted the population to make it one of the densest neighborhoods in
 The Pearl District 85
the state. Not surprisingly, retail within walking distance on NW 21st and
23rd Avenues flourished to the extent that this soon became a destination
for people who lived miles away. The savvy landlord of many of the retail
properties, Dick Singer, turned away national chains, knowing that in hard
times they would flee. Instead, he cultivated local merchants, and in the
process built a collection of shops like no other, some recording the highest
sales per square foot in the region.
What had emerged was a compact mixed-use neighborhood with streets
full of people strolling between their homes and shops, restaurants, services,
and workplaces. The Northwest Neighborhood predated development reg-
ulations that for half a century had enforced segregation of uses. Benign
neglect—including the period of red-lining—had enabled this part of town
to maintain its eclectic mix. Finally, it blossomed with the new millennium
as a model mixed-use neighborhood—now much sought after and no longer
affordable to young professionals launching their careers with little to invest.
Today, as more people work from home, there are more feet on the street
and a dozen busy coffee houses within 10 minutes’ walk providing places
for business meetings and social interchange. The Northwest Neighborhood
has completed a century-long cycle of decline and resurgence to become
a desirable, dense, and diverse, but increasingly expensive, neighborhood.
This was the model that was foremost in the minds of the developers of the
River District.

District Identity
The developers eschewed the bureaucratic process of planning applications
and took their plan directly to the Mayor and City Council with a proposal
that in 15 years they would create 4,500 homes and 3,000 jobs where none
existed. To achieve this, the city must enable them to move their devel-
opment plan swiftly through the formal planning approval and building
permit processes. The owners would contribute about $750 million in pri-
vate funding, provided that the city would commit some $125 million to
improve and extend existing infrastructure. This compared very favorably
with the cost of locating as many homes and jobs elsewhere in the city. With
the associated costs of expanding services, making transportation and other
infrastructure improvements, the proposal was too good a deal to miss. The
city agreed.
Having a great vision for the rail yards was one thing; selling real estate
in an untried market sector in an unprepossessing industrial setting was
another. Very little market-rate multifamily housing had been built in the
inner neighborhoods for 20 years or more. The risks were great and there
was no shortage of commentators marking it as folly. The first new build-
ing appeared in the southeast corner of the rail yards at NW Hoyt and 10th
Avenue. It was a modest brick-clad three-story building of one- and two-
story flats with a central landscaped courtyard. This neatly answered the
86 The Pearl District
problem of efficient development of half a 200-foot (61 m) square block;
the other half, fronting 11th Avenue, was occupied by the old parcel offices,
later remodeled as elegant row houses. The new flats quickly drew buy-
ers, despite the industrial setting. Outward views were bleak, across aging
industrial buildings, and there were no street trees outside the Park Blocks.
Encouraged by its success, others developed modest buildings around the
south end of the rail yards. Next came a mid-rise building of upmarket
condominiums—and the market was proven to be there and ready.
Early success with new construction in the rail yards stimulated repur-
posing of existing buildings in the 30 blocks between the yards and I-405;
an aggregate area of approximately 60 blocks or 73 acres (30 hectares).
What had been a no man’s land of underused or empty railroad era facto-
ries and warehouses near the I-405 freeway found new uses. Back in 1984,
Bridgeport, the first of the new Northwest craft breweries, had taken up
residence in an old rope factory. A daring young developer tried his hand at
converting a brick warehouse into loft apartments. As redevelopment of the
rail yards became a reality, interest in other old buildings quickened, and in
a few years the no man’s land was gone, and the Northwest Neighborhood
extended almost seamlessly into the River District.
As the first new buildings were appearing on the rail yards, some of the
nearby warehouses were being occupied by artists, galleries, offices for
architects, and photographers—any tenant that could use large, rough-
hewn, but inexpensive spaces. Not quite the incubator spaces envisaged by
the R/UDAT team, but fulfilling a similar economic function. These new
occupants helped to sustain what little retail existed around the fringes
of the River District, and this is where the first “toe in the water” new
development began.
Trading under the “Arts District” brand, more housing soon followed,
this time including street-level retail space and underground parking. These
were of more solid masonry construction, which attracted a flurry of pur-
chases by “empty nesters” who appreciated what the Central City had to
offer in the way of arts, entertainment, and fine dining, and were willing
to pay more for substantial construction. The pace of development in the
River District quickened. A noisy trattoria opened, and soon tables, chairs,
and chatter spilled out onto the sidewalk. Curiosity brought new residents
to investigate, and soon the Italian family that ran the place knew their cus-
tomers by name. Such events are trivial, but they have the effect of joining
people to a place. Café patrons recognize one another in chance encounters
elsewhere in the district. The first shoots of what was to become a thriving
street community were nurtured thus. People who recognize others in the
street feel that they belong there, and feel more secure because of it.
Embarking on development of the former rail yards with nothing but
obsolete railroad era industrial leftovers for company was a daunting under-
taking. Who would want to live here? Most postwar growth on the urban
fringes had been family housing, feeding the aspirations of new families
 The Pearl District 87

Figure 5.1 In this 2015 view looking north, the redeveloped rail yards of the
River District (shaded) have merged with nearby renovated and
infill buildings to become the Pearl District: a walkable mixed-use
neighborhood bordering the Central Business District to the south,
and the Northwest Neighborhood to the west—connected to both by
streetcar since 2001.

able to buy their own homes. In fact, almost three-quarters of the Greater
Portland housing stock was family housing, yet two-thirds of households
within the city were one- and two-person households, mostly without
school-age children. Here then was the market: young mobile professionals
and empty nesters ready to trade in the weekly chore of mowing the lawn for
the convenience of services and entertainment just around the corner. When
the youngsters paired up and got married, they would presumably move to
existing family housing elsewhere, of which there was evidently a surplus.
This logic cast a powerful influence on how the River District would take
shape. It would be a habitat for adults, so no schools or playgrounds, no
squadrons of school buses or of moms in vans. The River District would
take its cue from sophisticated metropolitan centers, mixing one- and two-
bedroom condos and apartments with offices, restaurants, galleries, cafés,
services, and retail. Parks would be places of respite and relaxation, with
some provision for active pursuits.
88 The Pearl District
Heights had been restricted to 75 feet (23 m) in adjacent Old Town
to discourage the practice of demolishing historic buildings in anticipa-
tion of one day attracting a high-rise developer. The same height limit was
placed on the River District to quell unfair competition for investment. The
second wave of new development was of six-story, solid masonry construc-
tion condominiums with basement parking. These were designed to meet the
needs of empty nesters: still wedded to their cars and mistrustful of flimsy
construction. A winning formula as it turned out, with a stronger market
than anticipated. Other developers, wary of a limited market for housing in
the Central City, built two- and three-story row houses and live-work units,
as well as more conventional five-over-one timber-framed apartments. The
architecture varied widely, but all adhered to a clearly articulated base
or storefront-level fronting directly onto the sidewalk, variously designed
intermediate stories, and a clearly stated top—whether of shading eaves or
of setback penthouse—each building had the completeness of architectural
expression found in the adjacent Northwest Neighborhood.
In examining the capacity for circulation through the district, it was clear
that traffic demand on east-west dead-end streets would be limited. So some
streets could be built as linear parks, extending the reach of public open space
throughout the district, enhancing the walking environment—and inciden-
tally reducing development costs from fully engineered city street standards.
Negotiation with the city’s Parks and Recreation department resulted in
agreement to build the requisite area of public open space in three distinct
episodes, to be constructed sequentially as development filled in the rail
yards from Hoyt Street in the south to Pettygrove Street and the active rail
lines in the north. Jamison Park was the first to be designed by landscape
architect Pete Walker, who also conceived the idea of a boardwalk to con-
nect all three parks, and continue as a footbridge over the active rail lines
and the Naito Parkway to touch down on the riverbank, where it would
connect to the Willamette Greenway Trail.
Jameson Park occupied a single block with one of the park streets, Kearny
Street, running along its north edge. The block was divided in two, the east-
ern half laid out with a surface of decomposed granite suitable for games of
boulles or bacci ball under shady trees. By contrast, the west half, separated
by a stepped wall of sandy colored granite blocks, roughly hewn, featured
intermittent tumbling of water into a semicircular pool, with lawn and trees
beyond providing a Scandanavian pastoral ambience; a place to loiter and
take in the sounds of rattling leaves and gurgling water. Just the thing, you
might think, for the empty nesters overlooking the park. But a strange thing
happened in this supposedly child-free enclave. Children, or their insightful
parents, recognized in the granite blocks, rushing water, and limpid shal-
low pool the perfect substitute for a summer beach. At first, there were just
a few, but each summer brought more—some traveling miles to get there.
The sedate park becomes a hub of joyful squealing activity from dawn to
dusk in the summer. Reluctantly, the city installed a public restroom to cope
 The Pearl District 89
with very real demand. The empty nesters learned to keep their windows
closed. However, at other times of the year, Jameson Park reverts to a place
of peaceful respite. The boulles and bacci ball players for years remained
absent, but now appear from time to time.
Brokers warned that the depth of the market for housing still looked lim-
ited. Why would people want to live in a place with no waterfront that is just
too far on foot from Downtown jobs and from Northwest Neighborhood
retail? To some, the answer was obvious: light rail had recently put Portland
on the livability map, and a loop into the district could surely be contrived.
But light rail is designed to dash between mile-apart stations, is expensive
to build, and the routes it could follow are limited. It does have one proven
value, however: tracks laid in downtown in the mid-1980s had attracted
what little development activity there was at that time because tracks prom-
ised permanence of transit service. Why not build a modern streetcar like
those in many European cities? It would be cheaper than light rail, could
be routed wherever it was needed, and would suit the scale of our 60 feet
(18 m) streets. The City of Portland recognized that south of Burnside, a
streetcar route could also revive the underserved west edge of the Central
Business District. TriMet was less than enthusiastic about complicating
their services with another mode, so the city decided to proceed on their
own. They invited bids for a design-bid-build-operate contract from which
Portland Streetcar Inc. emerged.
Streetcar’s function would essentially be to extend the range of people on
foot. Streetcar is short-range transit, complementing the light rail and bus
system, and providing an attractive alternative to driving. A 2.5-mile (4 km)
line was conceived with a major destination at each end: Good Samaritan
Hospital in the Northwest Neighborhood, and Portland State University
at the far end of Downtown. For residents of the River District, the shops,
restaurants, cafés, and pubs of Northwest would be five minutes ride, and
Downtown jobs would be 10 minutes away.

District Expansion
The emerging new district possessed three key features: a scale and pub-
lic realm that encourages walking; lots of active uses lining the streets;
and strong connections to Downtown jobs, the theaters, galleries, retail,
healthcare, and Portland State University. Here was a formula for a new
neighborhood that would be fully connected to the rest of the Central City,
in which use of a car would be less convenient for most trips than walking,
biking, or riding transit. Increasingly, active retirees and young profession-
als invested in the district. As the resident population grew, so the buzz
of sidewalk cafes, restaurants, and knots of people strolling the parks and
lanes increased. The district became a self-advertisement for healthy liv-
ing in a place rich in options for shopping, relaxing, recreating—and with
ready access to almost every other need. Spas and gyms multiplied, organic
90 The Pearl District
food merchants and a farmers’ market soon followed; as did employers who
found a valuable workforce in the early adopters who had moved in.
Demand for both homes and jobs in the River District grew more rapidly
than expected. In part, this was because of a national boom in real estate,
but in the River District it was aided by proximity to established restau-
rants, galleries, retail, and other useful destinations in adjoining districts,
and also by the arrival of prestigious tenants in existing and remodeled
buildings nearby. The Pacific Northwest College of Art left the confines of
the Portland Art Museum to establish a vibrant presence in a former indus-
trial building next to the River District. In 2015, it moved closer still, taking
over the much larger though sadly neglected neoclassical post office build-
ing on the North Park Blocks, and returned it to architectural magnificence.
Perhaps the most significant development project was the Brewery Blocks:
five blocks including the handsome 1908 decorated brick Blitz Weinhard City
Brewery building on the north side of Burnside Street. These were redeveloped
with mid- to high-rise offices, apartments, and condominiums, and together
with street-level retail and restaurants, including a Wholefoods supermarket,
provided a showpiece of sustainable architecture replete with district energy
systems. Local and national retailers filled transparent storefronts that looked
out onto generously landscaped streets. All shared a multi-block three-level
underground parking garage. The former armory building was remodeled as
the Gerding Theater. Immediate success of the Brewery Blocks, completed in
2006, confirmed the depth of the market north of Burnside. Properties from
the River District south to Burnside Street began to change hands, touching
off a decade of remodeling and redevelopment. Increasingly, people referred
to “the Pearl District” to bundle together the River District, the railroad
era buildings around it, the Brewery Blocks, and everything in between.
“The Pearl” had a cachet that continued to draw investment in redevelop-
ment throughout the economic bust years. The Pearl District now includes all
the land addressed in the 1985 Northwest Triangle Report, and has reached
well beyond the most ambitious plans suggested for the rail yards.
As the population of the new neighborhood grew, so the range and qual-
ity of retail and services improved, increasing the attractions of the Pearl as a
place to live. The active and wealthy population attracted more commercial
investment, and the streets became more animated. Getting out and walk-
ing in the Pearl was more fun than most had ever imagined. Faces became
familiar, since so many now lived nearby. A farmers’ market opened in the
forecourt of the restored 1895 Century Warehouse Building, now named
the Natural Capital Center, but generally known as the Ecotrust Building.
This was the first of its kind to achieve LEED Platinum certification. More
bars and restaurants put tables and chairs outside. People got to know one
another; conviviality flourished.
As River District development continued its northward progress across the
former rail yards, the second park square became due. An international design
competition was launched, and Berlin landscape architect Herbert Dreiseitl
 The Pearl District 91

Figure 5.2 Making a crucial connection between the River District and the CBD
was a five-block redevelopment known as Brewery Blocks, named for
and including the handsome 1908 decorated brick Blitz Weinhard City
Brewery building on the north side of Burnside Street. Rescued buildings
were supplemented by mid- to high-rise offices, apartments, and
condominiums over retail and three levels of parking. These showpieces
of sustainable architecture are served by district energy systems.

won with a microcosm of Oregon’s wild landscape. Meadow and wetland

planted with native trees, flowers, and grasses follow a symbolic recreation
of the now-vanished Tanner Creek down a slope into a pond. Grassy terraces
flank the park, inviting peaceful contemplation—in contrast with Jamison
Park, now boisterous with cavorting children whenever the sun is out.
92 The Pearl District
As the population grew with a preponderance of well-educated and
articulate residents, their voices became more audible in City Hall. Instead
of the usual NIMBY cries of “no zoning changes in our neighborhood”
(or the increasing demand of the BANANAs—build absolutely nothing
anywhere near anything), the sentiment was to allow taller buildings and
greater densities. As new development marched north across the former
rail yards, so buildings became taller. At a workshop arranged by city plan-
ning staff to discuss buildout of the remaining parcels in the north near
Fields Park, there was consensus that residential point towers like those
100-meter spires in West Vancouver, BC, should be allowed. After all,
there were no significant views that would be blocked or great shadows
cast by slim towers. The backdrop was the massive, mile-long Fremont
Bridge—a scale robust enough for tall buildings. Public open spaces are
already protected from overshadowing in the city’s zoning code. With big-
ger buildings, the eventual population of the River District may more than
double the original “ambitious” target of 15,000 of the Vision document.
Established rates of traffic generation in the district are far below normal,
and the engineers found no capacity problem if residential point towers are
permitted on remaining northern blocks.
An important finding of the R/UDAT study had been that the district
included an extensive collection of historically significant buildings, many
of them lining the unpaved NW 13th Avenue with its active rail spur. Few
of these buildings would qualify for heritage protection, but collectively
they recalled a vigorous industrial past, and many were soundly built and
modestly handsome structures. Residents and others active in the Pearl
District who supported increases in height and density also supported
maintaining the established scale and massing of buildings along NW 13th
Avenue—now paved, but still flanked by loading docks without sidewalks
along most of its length from Burnside Street to NW Savier Street. NW
13th is a welcome anomaly in the ordered structure of the city. Traffic
and pedestrians mingle in the 40-feet (12 m) space between loading docks
(street width varies with dock size), generally observing the conventions of
street use, but necessarily more vigilant than usual. In places, the loading
docks double as elevated sidewalks; in others, walkers must share the street
with general traffic—which moves slowly—so conflicts are surprisingly
rare. Recent introduction of traffic lights at some of the busier cross streets
may have unbalanced this equilibrium, speeding vehicles and empowering
them to demand their right of way.
Opening of the streetcar loop through the district in 2001 had brought
the Northwest Neighborhood and the Central Business District within easy
reach of the Pearl. Subsequently, the streetcar line was extended south of the
University to the South Waterfront District, and east across the Broadway
Bridge. When Tilikum Crossing opened in 2015, a circuit including both
sides of the Willamette River was completed, with streetcars circulating
both clockwise and counterclockwise. So the Pearl became one of the best
 The Pearl District 93
connected places in the city. Walking and using the streetcar became the
most convenient ways of getting around.
New residents who had been accustomed to isolated trips by car found
themselves thrust into a social milieu that is both friendly and stimulating.
For most local trips, a short walk is easiest. Few households have more than
one car, so parking demand has dropped. Developers no longer include park-
ing with every housing purchase or rental rate, instead leasing spaces only
to those who want them. This has lowered the cost of housing and thus
broadened the market, helping sales, and helping to achieve affordable hous-
ing goals. Car-sharing programs were quickly adopted: first Zip Car, then
Car2Go, followed by ReachNow, Getaround, and other brands. In 2016,
1,000 orange Biketown bicycles have been added to circulation options,
rentable by the hour or through annual subscription. Car ownership has
continued to fall, as have average miles driven for Portland as a whole.
Portland has a notoriously rainy climate for half the year, which might
be expected to undermine the virtues of a walkable neighborhood. Although
it rains often, it rarely rains heavily. Turning again to the experience of the
Northwest Neighborhood, retail and services there flourish through the win-
ter months, depending on year-round walk-in trade. Even the city’s cadre of
bicycle commuters ride year round, dressing for foul weather as necessary.
Bicycle facilities continue to improve as numbers of both commuters and
recreational cyclists increase. More of the automobile’s erstwhile unchal-
lenged ___domain is being repurposed for marked bike lanes: 350 miles of bike
lanes in use and another 50 miles in preparation. At the time of writing, over
8 percent of downtown commuters ride bicycles to work, a figure astonish-
ing to most North American cities, for which the average is 0.5 percent.2

The West End

Why didn’t the Pearl cross the road? The West End describes Downtown south
of Burnside and west of 11th Avenue to 14th and the I-405 freeway. West
Burnside Street is difficult to cross as a pedestrian, but it seems curious that
not until 2009 did major new development south of Burnside materialize. One
would think that the factors driving real estate would differ little across an
80-feet divide; that in the wake of the renaissance wrought by the Brewery
Blocks, redevelopment would spread south. A crucial difference is that there is
no Northwest Neighborhood abutting the western boundary. South of Burnside,
I-405 is in a deep trench, and although all the east-west streets connect over the
freeway, there is little to connect to—just an inactive edge of Goose Hollow
Neighborhood. The Portland Downtown Plan 1972 had marked the West End
a “Deficiency Area” on its concept plans. There are other reasons for the lack of
investment in the western edge of Downtown, but the void along its west flank,
together with a lack of supporting goods and services to nurture new develop-
ment, certainly had a negative effect. So for years, the West End has subsisted
with older buildings and a lot of parking lots.
94 The Pearl District
When the 1972 Downtown Plan designated 5th and 6th Avenues as the
Transit Malls, it did so because they ran the length of the Central Business
District. There was little expansion of the commercial core westward toward
I-405. In the late 1970s, the novel concept of mixed-use downtown multi-
family zoning was introduced in an effort to stimulate investment there.
With few exceptions, not much happened for 40 years. Some residential
towers appeared near Portland State University, and the chic Eliot condo-
miniums and row houses were built next to the Portland Art Museum, but
nothing much happened on the 25 blocks to the north and west. Somehow,
the energy of the Pearl District did not reach past the Brewery Blocks and
could not leap across Burnside Street into an area where social service agen-
cies and SRO housing were conspicuous.
When it was decided to build a streetcar line linking the River District
to Downtown, the city saw an opportunity to stimulate West End develop-
ment by aligning tracks a quarter-mile west of the Transit Mall on SW 10th
and 11th Avenues, which aligned nicely with new development in the River
District. Both tracks and stations were designed to be minimally intrusive
during and after construction. The costly relocation of utilities and services
away from the tracks that had disrupted streets and hampered businesses
for months during light rail construction was largely avoided. Ingeniously,
the track bed was structured so that it could bridge excavation beneath it
without interruption to streetcar service. The track slab was reinforced as a
continuous beam that could span a 10-foot (3 m) void.
The 2.4-mile (4 km) couplet of the initial phase of streetcar south to
Portland State University and west to Good Samaritan Hospital on NW
23rd Avenue opened for service in July 2001. The total cost, including Czech
streetcars, was roughly the same as one mile of Downtown light rail construc-
tion. Furthermore, the brightly colored cars were in scale with the streets and
looked like serious transit—not like tourist excursions, as many had feared.
The alignment of the streetcar was along the seam between the Central
Business District and the West End. The hoped for stimulus to West End
development was not immediate. It was several years later that a catalyst
appeared in the form of a high-rise, LEED Platinum certified mixed-use
building near Burnside.
The landowner, developer, and anchor office tenant for 12W (named
for its ___location at 12th and Washington Street) were variously motivated
to site their building where it would have the greatest catalytic influence
on revitalizing this moribund area. The building would be a state-of-the-art
high-performance building with active retail at street level, offices, and high-
end market-rate housing above. As originally conceived, the 12W tower
was to have a boutique hotel above the offices, with condominiums stacked
above, but when the first chill of the recession was felt in 2007, the hotel
withdrew and the condominiums were rethought as apartments. The offices
were occupied in July 2009, and leasing of apartments began in October.
Despite the lamentable state of the economy, the expected 18-month
 The Pearl District 95
lease-up period shrank to nine months. Within a year, half a dozen new res-
taurants had opened nearby. The combined resident and office populations
tipped the scales of viability for this area just a couple of blocks south of the
Pearl District and west of the Central Business District. Existing buildings
nearby were restored bringing new businesses into the West End. More new
construction is under way.
Further south, as the market for multifamily housing heated up, sites with
proximity to streetcar found ready investors. The streetcar had already been
extended to South Waterfront, giving access to the city’s largest employer,
Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU), and other destinations. In
2015, the Tilikum Crossing, a transit, bike, and pedestrian bridge, opened,
and with it a streetcar loop serving both sides of the river. Both the Pearl
District and the West End now had unprecedented transit access. As in the
Pearl District, many who lived or worked there found walking and transit
to be the most convenient means of reaching most destinations. Unlike the
Pearl, the West End did not have a virtual monopoly on new market-rate
and affordable housing in the rush that followed the Great Recession; all of
the inner neighborhoods on both sides of the river were experiencing more
construction activity than they had seen in decades. New four- to six-story
apartment buildings sprouted along transit streets, often with retail or ser-
vices fronting the increasingly busy sidewalks. Meanwhile, the West End
waited patiently for its turn.

Who Lives and Works in the Pearl?

Developers of some of the earliest housing on former rail yards vigorously
promoted the chic bohemian image of artists and galleries in nearby converted
warehouses. Paradoxically, while this gave an identity to new development
and stimulated the market for new-build condos and apartments, it also
increased demand for loft space, displacing many of the artists’ studios.
However, a new supply of apartments, condominiums, and row houses or
gnarly lofts offered young professionals enticing choices compared with the
offerings in distant suburbs. In the Pearl, they could find a place to live that
was cooler and with all the advantages of a metropolitan ___location, and no
long commute. Interestingly, housing in the Pearl also attracted many who
worked in the “Silicon Forest,” requiring a reverse-commute of a dozen
miles—made by bicycle by some of the hardier nerds.
“Retail follows roofs” is an old maxim. Large retailers with multiple
outlets have carefully calibrated criteria to identify suitable locations based
on proximity of population and average household income. Among the
first and largest stores to arrive in the Pearl District was Wholefoods, pur-
veyor of high-end healthful fresh food and groceries, and REI, one of the
Pacific Northwest’s earlier contenders to be the premier outdoors equip-
ment store. Other early arrivals in the Pearl were Patagonia, North Face,
Keen, Icebreaker—an outdoors outfitter from New Zealand—and Snow
96 The Pearl District
Peak from Japan. That these retailers continue to thrive in the Pearl District
gives a clue to the values of those who live and work there.
One of the attractions of Portland to many newcomers was and remains
a strong commitment to exercise, healthy eating, and outdoor sports. As
population grew, providers proliferated. Fitness is nowhere more conspic-
uous than in the Pearl: retailers, gyms, ballet and yoga studios, cyclists,
joggers, and walkers.
Both empty nesters and young professionals go out for food and enter-
tainment frequently, creating a healthy market for restaurants, pubs, and
bars. Portland’s reputation as a craft beer capital, and increasingly as a
center for coffee roasting, cider making, and craft distilling, attract visitors
who further support hospitality businesses. Chefs who move to Portland
cite the artisanal approach to food production nearby as a major reason
for their choice. The restaurants in which those chefs perform have conse-
quently garnered a national reputation for locavore excellence.
Visibly healthy people enjoying life in the Pearl has made it a magnet
for progressive young firms dependent on smart young employees. The fact
that the Pearl’s high housing costs remain below those of the Bay Area and
Seattle increase that attraction. Thus, the economic health of the district
grows and the balance between housing and jobs is maintained.
Conspicuous wealth in the Pearl has always drawn accusations of creat-
ing a ghetto of affluence. Yet from the outset, the city set a goal for provision
of affordable housing as development of the district progressed. As of 2015,
28 percent of housing in the Pearl was deemed affordable for those earning
80 percent or less of median income. This is below the city’s target, but has
the advantage of short and inexpensive journeys to work for most residents.
A realistic measure of housing cost includes the cost of travel between home
and workplace, and should also include the value of time spent commut-
ing. Cheap rents on the urban fringe beyond the reach of public transit can
prove to be more costly overall than relatively expensive rents in the Pearl
and close to work.
Social equity is notoriously difficult to gauge because it is a relative term.
How healthy is the Pearl in these terms? Affordable housing is one relevant
metric. Number of unskilled jobs is another, and these have multiplied with
the recent arrival of several new hotels in and near the district, and the
steady growth of food, entertainment, and retail businesses. Ethnic diversity
is not great in Portland, with 76 percent reporting as white. So what is the
healthy city status on social equity? With a recent influx of political and
economic refugees from overseas, generalizations about the role of ethnic
minorities in the economy and the life of the city tend to be unhelpful. The
prevalence of socially liberal values makes one optimistic that assimilation
of new arrivals will be relatively smooth.
The relevance of River District, indeed of the whole Pearl District, to the
notion of Portland as a healthy city is evident in the recent and comprehen-
sive statement it makes through conspicuous success as urban infill. The mix
 The Pearl District 97
of uses and architecture in the Pearl restates the values of those who choose
to live here, and the lessons learned about design of the urban environment
and how to use it. It is an affirmation of the worth of fine-grained, dense
development diverse in its uses and architecture, all structured around peo-
ple, not automobiles. If it lacks ethnic diversity, that is reflective of the city
as a whole. It is the antithesis of an affluent, socially homogenous postwar
suburb. The Pearl District encapsulates the values and resources that support
healthy metropolitan living.

Notes
1 The only explanation I know is apocryphal: a gallery owner—possibly Jameson
after whom the park is named—referred to the emerging district with its many
artists who occupied affordable older buildings as being “the pearl” in this gritty
area. For whatever reason, the moniker stuck and savvy developers promoted it,
realizing the opportunity to brand the district.
2 Bicycle Commuting: www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/407660.

Bibliography
City of Portland (1972) Portland Downtown Plan. Available at: www.portlandoregon.
gov/bps/article/94718.
City of Portland (1985) Northwest Triangle Report. Portland, OR: Bureau of Planning.
City of Portland (1988) Portland Central City Plan. Portland, OR: Bureau of Planning.
City of Portland (1992) A Vision for Portland’s North Downtown: The River
District. Portland, OR: Shiels & Obletz, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership.
City of Portland (1993) River District Development Plan. Portland, OR: Zimmer
Gunsul Frasca Partnership.
6 Past Errors and Future Options

This chapter reviews influences on the health of cities looking well beyond
Portland. Chapter 7 will look at how what we have (or should have) learned
could be applied to improve the health of the city, protecting the chosen
lifestyles of its inhabitants against a backdrop of constant change.
At the beginning of the book, the distinction was drawn between three
broad categories of urban environments: metropolitan being the densest,
most diverse, and finest-grained form; urban being intermediate; and sub-
urban being the least dense and least interconnected urban form. “What Is
the Right Size?” in Chapter 4 suggested that a 20-minute walk is a practical
gauge of how many destinations are effectively within reach. Walkability
score is a useful metric with which to compare the diversity of places acces-
sible from a given address.1
A major factor in determining the net density of a place is the propor-
tion of land used for streets and parking lots, rail tracks, waterways, and
open spaces. While these broaden opportunities, they also dilute density,
and some limit access, and in doing so limit the wealth that the land can
yield. On the other hand, a tight network of small streets, such as Portland’s
street grid or the hutongs of old China, give great permeability and can sup-
port very dense development. The biggest variable in cities today is the space
occupied by streets and parking lots. While car-dependent suburbs gener-
ate the greatest parking demand, it is central cities that must accommodate
it. Some North American cities have as much as a third of their inner-city
blocks used for parking. 45 percent of the land area in downtown Portland
is occupied by streets, while 20–30 percent of low-density suburban land
is so occupied. The reason, of course, is that the suburban land is sparsely
developed, with voids between most buildings. In such spread-out places,
there is no choice but to drive everywhere. When suburbanites get to town,
they need a place to park near each destination.
While car-dependent suburbanites are the primary generators of both
traffic and parking demand, Downtown has provided for them to enable
access to jobs, retail, and everything else. In cities such as Portland, where
inner neighborhoods are becoming more densely populated, and suburban
drivers are diminishing as a proportion of Downtown users, some of the
 Past Errors and Future Options 99
land devoted to streets and parking can be repurposed to serve other needs.
Even more parking may be repurposed if autonomous vehicles and the
sharing economy combine to reduce car ownership further. A striking dem-
onstration of the effects of reduced reliance on cars is the contrast between
Portland’s downtown waterfront today compared with the auto-centric
1960s, when surface parking occupied almost every block that does not
now support a pre-1960s building.
There is a Great American Myth that parking is free. Parking is essential
to suburban employment and retail since driving is often the only practi-
cal means of getting there. If land is relatively inexpensive and plentiful,
then surface parking can be provided at little cost—a cost that is rolled into
retail pricing or rents, rendering it invisible and thus “free.” In urban centers
where land is expensive enough to warrant underground parking, the cost
is generally too great to hide, and parking fees are enough to divert some
shoppers to suburban destinations where parking is free. The odd thing
about this is that the real costs of driving to a suburban shopping center may
exceed the parking fee. Out-of-pocket costs are somehow viewed as greater
than those that are hidden. This is the same distorted thinking that sends
people out of direction to save a few cents a gallon on gasoline, without
thought of the time and cost of making the detour.
The point here is that perception trumps fact in many human transactions.
To someone entirely dependent on driving, reallocation of road space to
another use can cause dismay. Changing a perfectly convenient parking space
into racks for a dozen bicycles, or into a temporary park or restaurant seat-
ing, seems willfully perverse. Of course, even the most progressive types resist
change. The lesson here is that perceived truths outweigh rational arguments,
especially if they involve changing the status quo.

The Costs of Sprawling Suburbs

Robert Putnam and others have observed that participation in social interac-
tion and civic engagement diminishes in proportion to the length of a subject’s
commute time. Breugman et al. have reported that stress and stress-related
disease similarly increases in proportion to the length of commute. Frumkin
and colleagues have recorded the correlation between lack of exercise and
reliance on driving for almost every trip among those who live in distant
suburbs. On top of these, outer suburbs tend to be architecturally and socially
homogenous, lacking the opportunity for interaction with others except by
driving somewhere else. Since about one-third of the population relies on
others to drive them (they are too young, too old, are infirm, or don’t own
a car), this leads to isolation, loneliness, and dependence: a chronic problem
and a strong disincentive to age in place.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we moved on from the
Industrial Revolution and the age of fiendishly complicated mechanical
devices by breaking down complex problems to their component parts and
100 Past Errors and Future Options
developing specialists in each. This enabled incisive thinking about every-
thing from watchmaking to warmongering. By the end of the Second World
War, the common soldier or sailor was a thing of the past: everyone was a
specialist in something. It was this particularization of step-by-step analy-
sis that had made Henry Ford’s 1908 assembly line possible. Specialism
became synonymous with expertise and efficiency, and curiously led to the
mass production of identical items, from toothbrushes to family houses.
Mass production of a limited range of items lowered prices and raised
profits. Harvested forest was replanted with the single species that would
yield the best and quickest profits—sugar pines or soybeans? Industrial
fishing fleets specialized in just one catch—herring or tuna? Streets were
redesigned for cars and trucks.
The flaw in this gallop toward profitable specialization is that we lost
focus on the big picture—the interaction between each specialist sector
and everything else affecting our lives. Monoculture woodlands displaced
complex ecosystems, lacked resistance to disease, and lost the systemic
resilience of mixed woodland. Overfishing brought prized catches to the
brink of extinction.
As the automobile lobby took away the rights of non-motorized street
users in the 1920s, theirs became the controlling interest in how streets were
to be used and how new streets would be designed.2 Equitable use of streets
had been curtailed to prioritize safe and swift movement of motorized traffic.
The secondary priority became convenient storage for automobiles. Other
users were to keep out of the way. The country bumpkin term “jaywalking”
was used to denigrate pedestrians who walked across the street as they had
done for millennia. Soon it became the legal name of an offense considered
dangerous to motorists and enforced with fines. This and other limits were
propagated nationally by the Model Traffic Regulations of 1928.
Usurpation of streets for motor vehicles was supported by the rapidly
expanding cadre of car owners across the country, and was energetically
promoted by car manufacturers and merchants. No effective resistance was
evident, so the rule of the automobile remained largely unchallenged for half
a century. This led to three courses of action across the nation, each with
far-reaching consequences:

1 Many existing urban street systems were converted to one-way couplets

to ease traffic congestion.
2 Major highways were incised into urban fabric and across rural lands to
provide fast, vehicle-only shortcuts.
3 All new streets were designed for safe and swift vehicular circulation—
limiting or excluding access by all other would-be users.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, each of these was executed with little consideration

of wider consequences. Specialist thinking became siloed thinking, isolated
from other interests and disciplines. Road designs were conceived, developed,
 Past Errors and Future Options 101
and implemented by traffic engineers and public works departments without
consulting anyone else. They, after all, were the specialists with the expertise,
so what useful input could others possibly have to offer? For these traffic
and transportation specialists, a car in every home symbolized achievement
of the American Dream. The imagery of the automobile advertisers became
popularly regarded as a nationally shared objective for every American. Just
Leave It to Beaver, and all will be well in the new suburbs.
This auto-centric view shaped most post-Second World War develop-
ment. Between 1950 and 1970, the US suburban population doubled from
37 million to 74 million (Jackson 1985). That is to say that over 15 million
new suburban homes were built in 20 years, almost all of them designed for
access by car. Typical densities yielded fewer than seven homes per acre,
making transit service infeasible. Part of the reason for this sparse develop-
ment was that every new subdivision needed streets, and specifications for
street design came, of course, from transportation and public works employ-
ees who understood the objectives of swift and safe automobile travel. Swift
and safe often translated to wide and straight with clear sight lines. These
are essential at speed, so for arterial and collector streets, shoulders and
verges were to be wide and devoid of hazards for motorists—so preferably
there should be no people on foot, and minimal vegetation. As with most
road building during the postwar decades, cost was rarely a consideration,
since new roads were as necessary to growing subdivisions as were sewer
and water services. The experts figured out how wide they needed to be to
provide safety and modern convenience for drivers.
For local streets, many authorities took the view that since everyone drove,
sidewalks were unnecessary. When sidewalks were required, it often fell to
the developers of individual lots to build them, so some got built and some
did not. Those that were built often ended abruptly in weeds and mystery.
The message of safety in the suburbs was underlined by offering homes
“on a quiet cul-de-sac.” This marketing ploy led to disconnected street lay-
outs in which streets branched out from a single point of entry, each branch
terminating in one or more cul-de-sacs. These rendered sidewalks of little
service anyway as there was nothing within walking distance other than
immediate neighbors and access streets.
A regular feature of cul-de-sacs is the gigantic paved circle, often required
by the fire marshal to enable emergency vehicles to turn round without
reversing. Each of these contributes 3,000–5,000 square feet (280–460 m2)
of bleak hardscape and impervious surface, adding to both heat island effect
and to capture of storm water. Despite large lots for each house, almost half
the land surface in many subdivisions is rendered impervious due to roofs,
paved parking and patio areas, streets, and pathways. Instead of soaking
into the ground and replenishing groundwater, half the rainfall is directed
to drains and ditches to be released without detention downstream, where
it joins merging torrents and raises the risk of flooding following each
heavy downpour.
102 Past Errors and Future Options
Wide streets and disconnected, dendritic street layouts have the effect of
increasing the separation between buildings, increasing the length of road
needed per house, and increasing the length of utility lines and the spread
of service districts. In many cities the additional costs of both provision and
maintenance of these utilities and services are borne unjustly by taxpayers
throughout the city, but the costs are hidden, and most people are una-
ware of subsidizing new suburban developments. Unwittingly, taxpayers
have subsidized, and continue to subsidize, unsustainable development at
the urban fringe. Western Australian studies3 in 2010 and 2016 found that
government infrastructure costs range from $55,828 per lot for urban infill
sites up to $150,389 per lot for urban-fringe greenfield sites—all borne by
unsuspecting urban taxpayers. Sums vary from city to city, but land use
policies and plans continue to encourage development of unsustainably low-
density housing with subsidies for the wealthy, on one hand, while they
struggle to find funding for affordable housing, on the other. Siloed thinking
and specialists have obscured the overall picture. Representative democracy
is supposed to put brilliant generalists in charge who have a breadth of
vision to expose such absurdities—but here is one that has evaded exposure
for a generation or more.
The biggest consequence of living in dispersed suburbs remains invisible
to many of those who do so. By living there, they have surrendered their
choice of lifestyle. Driving is the only way in or out; work and other destina-
tions are dependent on driving time and parking availability. The 30 percent
who rely on others to drive them are in effect disenfranchised. Impromptu
social engagement is rare, civic engagement is unusual, and exercise gener-
ally involves another trip by car. And then there is the daily commute, the
cost of which includes not only paying for the car, insurance, fuel, main-
tenance, and depreciation—but also the time it takes each day to earn the
money to pay all those costs and the time spent driving, which also has a
value. AAA estimates the average car owner spent $8,698 to drive a car in
2015. With an average commute time of 25 minutes each way, or 4 hours
and 10 minutes per week, and an average earning rate of $25.71 per hour
(US Census Bureau 2014),4 the average American must work 342 hours, or
8.5 weeks, just to pay for the drive to work. That amounts to 16 percent of
a working year, or of annual income. Add to that an average of 53 hours a
year sitting in stationary traffic (Arthur D. Little), and effective cost of driv-
ing alone to work increases to 395 hours, or 19 percent of annual income,
for the privilege of driving to work every day.
Lifestyle is prescribed by home ___location. Certainly, there may be advan-
tages to a suburban ___location that an urban home cannot provide, such as
a large yard, a nearby country club, or better schools. But removal from
the diversity of activities, places, and people that the city offers dramati-
cally reduces a person’s ability to choose, change, or fulfill their lifestyle.
Many people end up simply accepting or remaining unaware of the limita-
tions that their home ___location imposes on them. Passive acceptance of their
 Past Errors and Future Options 103
lot reassures homebuilders that low-density suburban homes are “what the
market wants,” and mass-produced unsustainable development continues
unabated—even now that we know how much public subsidy is hidden in
each new unit.
This may be a decisive mark of the healthy city. Although there are
sprawling suburbs near Portland, the values of the majority, as outlined
in preceding chapters, have driven Portlanders to determine their own
lifestyles, and those lifestyles require choices from an extensive menu of
possibilities. The car as default mode of transport makes sense when one
must travel to a remote destination, but not for nearby places, more easily
reached by walking, biking (your own or pick one up from the rack in the
street), streetcar, light rail, bus, Lyft, Uber, Zipcar, Car2Go, ReachNow, or
Getaround—perhaps through Maas Global and Whim. As for the trip to
work, there is the same wide range of modes, but the workplace is probably
within walking or biking distance, and the small street grid allows several
equidistant routes via one of many coffee shops, through the park, or a
short detour for a special errand. Day-to-day shopping will also be nearby,
and because so many people live and work locally, there will be familiar
faces, including friends and almost-friends—who may also show up at the
brewpub on the way home.
There is a spontaneity in this lifestyle that is denied the car-bound commuter
in a dispersed suburb. That spontaneity is key to the habitat of the creatives,
the entrepreneurs, the makers and knowledge professionals who form the
backbone of Portland’s inner neighborhoods and are becoming the engines of
new economies. These are the first adopters, and their lifestyles are harbingers
of what is likely to become the norm for inner Portland and beyond.

Street Size and Safety

A second Great American Myth is that wide streets are safer. The rationale is
that because cars can move quickly, they need clear sight lines for safety so that
any obstacle can be seen in time and avoided. Conversely, traditional narrow
streets with sidewalks are fraught with unpredictable pedestrians and don’t
have room for avoidance; they clearly court disaster. Ergo, wider streets are
safer. What this thinking failed to recognize is that a wide travel lane prompts
drivers to drive faster and assume right of way, whereas narrow roads prompt
slower and more cautious driving. Part of the reason for caution is that nar-
row roads are more likely to be used by people on foot, cyclists, and transit,
all of which are potential hazards for the motorist. Investigating this, Garrick
and Marshall (2008) compared street networks in 24 Californian cities. They
compared counts on pre-1950 streets to those on post-1950 streets, which
carried far fewer pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders.
Garrick and Marshall found that traffic fatalities on the post-1950 streets
occurred at more than three times the rate on the pre-1950 streets in the
24 cities examined. The human frame is built for speeds under 20 mph,
104 Past Errors and Future Options
Table 6.1 Wide streets allow vehicular traffic to dominate. They are faster and
more deadly than narrow streets. Narrower streets often have poor sight
lines, signaling caution to all users, resulting in fewer collisions

Who Use the Streets Pre-1950 Streets Post-1950 Streets

Pedestrians 5.4% 1.7%

Cyclists 4.1% 0.7%
Transit Riders 6.6% 1.7%
Drivers and 83.9% 94.9%
Passengers
Fatal Accidents (variable, but any (over three times as many
are too many) as on pre-1950 streets)

although Olympic sprinters have sometimes exceeded 23 mph (37 kph). The
chances of survival of an impact with a car traveling faster than that dimin-
ish rapidly as speed increases.
Older street networks tended to be simple rectilinear grids with frequent
intersections that slowed down drivers. Post-1950 street patterns tend to be
dendritic, with numerous cul-de-sacs, larger blocks, fewer intersections, and
limited direct access for pedestrians. Garrick and Marshall found a direct
correlation between the number of street intersections per square mile and
the number of traffic fatalities. A finer-grained street network with more
intersections proved much safer than the suburban alternative. Portland’s
200 × 200 foot blocks with 60- and 80-foot-wide streets in the CBD yield
about 400 intersections per square mile, compared with fewer than 80 for
most suburbs built since the 1950s.
Quite apart from the aspect of street size and safety is the question of
how much space streets occupy. With its small block pattern, 45 percent
of Portland’s CBD is occupied by streets, leaving 55 percent for potentially
developable land (39 percent and 61 percent where all streets are 60 feet
wide). For comparison and contrast, Salt Lake City, founded in 1880, with
its 10-acre 660 × 660 foot city blocks and 132-feet-wide streets devoted just
30 percent of land to streets, leaving 70 percent for other uses. However,
those 10-acre blocks were laid out with the intention that they would include
farmland to support residents. Today, many blocks are subdivided by vari-
ously configured secondary streets to enable development of the interior,
raising the total area allocated to streets. Dispersed suburbs often have as lit-
tle as 20 percent of land area designated as public rights of way, much of the
remaining land rendered undevelopable by setback requirements and other
development controls. The net land area that can be occupied by buildings
is typically much less than possible downtown; most is given over to surface
parking and high-maintenance landscaping (a gasoline-powered mower pro-
duces about as much pollution as 11 cars).
The real question is how does the public share of land get used? In the
almost pedestrian-free dispersed suburb, most of that 20 percent is vehicular
___domain. In an inner Portland neighborhood with 60 feet streets and 12 feet
 Past Errors and Future Options 105
sidewalks, 15 percent of the land is in sidewalks and 24 percent for wheeled
traffic, with 61 percent left for development, open space, and other uses.
Streets are built to standards set by the City Engineer, but in locations where
pedestrian or bicycle concentrations are greatest, a change in the share of
right-of-way space between vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians will be consid-
ered. Wider sidewalks, transit stations, special use streets with only emergency
vehicle access, or bump-outs at crosswalks can all be allowed. Each of these
increases the proportion of the public realm that is dedicated to those on
foot, and makes the city a more appealing place to walk. Traffic is slowed
and serious accidents are fewer. When these changes are made, they are direct
reflections of the electorate’s preference to walk and bike rather than drive;
something that would have been unthinkable in Portland prior to Halprin’s
walkways of the late 1960s and opening of the Transit Mall in 1977. Wide
brick sidewalks and elegant furnishings on the Transit Mall respected those
on foot as never before.
Public will has increasingly promoted bicycle use during the past two
decades. Advocates for cyclist safety and a fair share of road space have
been heard in City Hall, with a corresponding increase in bicycle facilities
across the city, as described in “Bike Culture” in Chapter 2. As protected
bike routes have proliferated, more riders have ventured out, swelling the
numbers of recreational riders, as well as the swarms of bike commuters.

Figure 6.1 The smaller intersection is typical of Portland neighborhoods

with 60-feet streets carrying two-way traffic with parking on both
sides and 12-feet sidewalks. With bump-outs at the intersection,
pedestrians have just 24 feet to cross. By contrast, at the intersection
of suburban streets with two travel lanes in each direction and a
center turn lane, pedestrians have three times as far to walk between
curbs. The intersection also occupies three times the area of the
smaller one. Faster vehicle speeds result in more fatalities at the
larger intersection.
106 Past Errors and Future Options
The interesting dynamic here is that streets that were laid out in the nine-
teenth century for people and horses have successively been adapted to cars
and streetcars; to motor vehicle dominance; to cars, light rail, streetcars,
pedestrians, and more street trees and green streets; and now with a greater
share for cyclists, wheelchairs, and those on foot. The complete street, it
seems, must be completely adaptable. Other notable adaptations have
included the summer use of parking spaces outside restaurants for tempo-
rary al fresco dining, and others for seasonal miniature parks with plants and
seating. Other parking spaces have been permanently removed to provide
bicycle parking racks. Coffee shops were among the first to recognize that
20 bike spaces were better for business than two parking spaces right outside.

Asking the Right Questions

Urbanism, as planning and urban design, is not a niche profession, but
an aggregation of all the environmental design knowledge and invention
from architecture and planning, landscape architecture, seismology, and a
dozen other disciplines. It is time to put the era of the specialist behind
us because it has led us into compartmentalized thinking, uncoordinated
investments, and some crass errors. It led, for example, to most cities
making decisions about transportation and land use planning in separate
departments—administrative divisions often characterized more by rivalry
than by communication or collaboration. With multiple design disciplines
engaged, the first order of business is to interpret the brief for a project. Is
the right question being asked? Do we have the right people at the table to
find an optimum solution?
Millions of acres of dispersed suburban development illustrate how a
lopsided solution can have a lot of unanticipated and undesirable conse-
quences. The implicit question in that case was “How can we house millions
of newly affluent citizens?” Had the modifier “sustainably” been added and
acted upon, the result would be very different. The solution may have been
an updated version of the early twentieth-century streetcar neighborhoods;
similar perhaps to the new neighborhoods built around light rail stations
such as Orenco on the Portland to Hillsboro light rail line.
A classic example of failing to ask the right question condemned to failure
design of the ill-fated Columbia River Crossing project. The question asked
was “How can freight movement in the I-5 corridor be improved?” The
question was raised by the Ports of Portland and Vancouver, and was taken
up by the state transportation departments of Oregon and Washington.
The WSDOT engineers took the lead, construing the question as a straight-
forward civil engineering problem. Reconfigured interchanges with better
gradients and improved ramp design, together with a new bridge with no
opening section, would solve the problem. Engineering was 15 percent com-
plete before voices of the many affected parties were heeded. Public meetings
were mandatory, but in order to keep things on track, only questions that fell
 Past Errors and Future Options 107
within the documented scope were entertained. The state engineers and their
consultants pursued their solution single-mindedly. The project involved
reconstruction of five freeway interchanges in addition to spanning the big-
gest river on the West Coast, the price tag was $4.5 billion, and support
lacking—much to the surprise of the hapless WSDOT engineers. The project
was abandoned after spending $200 million. Political embarrassment was
widespread and the unresolved problems will remain untouchable for at least
an electoral generation.
The critical missing step was to interrogate the question at the outset.
What contributed to truck delays other than ramp geometry and a creaky
lift section on the I-5 Bridge? First off, up to 90 percent of the traffic using
that section of I-5 had trip origin and destination within the SMA. In
other words, it was local traffic, and had no legitimate reason to use the
freeway—other than lacking an alternative means of crossing the river.
The pre-freeway era pair of bridges built in 1917 and 1958, each with a
vertical lift bridge for river traffic—the only road crossing of the Columbia
River in the Portland region—had been taken over by I-5 when it was built
in the 1970s. So building a much less elaborate bridge for local traffic
between Portland and Vancouver might have solved the freight movement
problem? It might have, but was excluded from consideration because it
fell outside the approved project scope description.
The question that should have been asked was “How can efficient move-
ment of goods and people be improved between Oregon and Washington
within the Portland-Vancouver area?” Freight movements in the I-5 cor-
ridor would certainly be addressed; so too would local traffic, passenger
vehicles, transit, rail, and river traffic. A broader range of design disci-
plines would have been engaged from the outset, and the many issues
that became obstacles in the study as it was conducted would have been
anticipated and addressed.
By framing the question so narrowly, many relevant impacts of the pro-
posed solution were not even on the table. What other uses would be affected
by changes in alignment of streets, intersections, or ramps? Would local con-
nections within communities be severed as ramps were reconfigured? Have
rail or waterborne freight routes been considered as alternatives for certain
classes of freight? Could river traffic conditions be improved by accommodat-
ing safer navigation channels? What other objectives of affected government
entities might also be addressed through collaborative design?
As recently as the 1970s, major planning decisions such as the align-
ment of new freeways were made with limited input from those affected.
Key decisions were made by politicians and technical experts. Eventually,
the public was informed of the result. Today, planning and urban design
are inclusive processes, with every recommendation or suggestion open to
public scrutiny. Consequently, the question must be framed to enable inclu-
sion of tangential issues. A disciplined scope description is still necessary
to ensure that resources are not squandered on peripheral issues, but there
108 Past Errors and Future Options
must be some room for discretion in execution. To ask a question too nar-
rowly is politically naïve. Asking the right question is a necessary precursor
to finding the right answer.

Bogus Cities
Another aspect of asking the right question is writing a complete brief: a
full and adequate description of the objectives to be fulfilled. As laboratory
specimens can be constructed to present certain characteristics and repress
others, so urban designers can, and have, produced surgically modified cities.
Disneyland, where everybody is happy and fantasy is real. Celebration, where
everyone lives safely in a picture-perfect neighborhood, and everything is pre-
dictable and pleasant. Seaside, where there is no poverty, everything is clean
and tidy, and the architecture lives a nostalgic dream of America’s golden
age. Of course, they are all bogus, yet each has the appeal of urban living
with all the unpleasant realities conveniently removed, or at least out of sight.
Think of the lofty goals behind the terrifying experiments of H.G. Wells’
Dr. Moreau. The best intentions can yield deeply flawed results if the ration-
ale is incomplete; if all of the right questions are not addressed.
Cleansing the city of poverty and inequity was the objective of Moore’s
Utopia, of planned cities of the Enlightenment, and the Garden Cities of
Ebenezer Howard and his successors. However, their objectives were very
different from the bogus cities, because each sought to complete what their
authors saw as insufficient habitats for humanity. While each has very
real physical manifestations, they strived for institutions that would bring
self-respect and fulfillment to every citizen. Sir Thomas Moore’s fictional
island community was imagined as a place where the wrongs of urban life
in England of 500 years ago were reversed, and so focused on servitude,
poverty, and moral bankruptcy as evils to be corrected. General James
Oglethorpe and his Enlightenment contemporaries were still wrestling with
substantially the same ills in 1733 when he laid out Savannah in a colony
named for George II. He banned slavery, strong spirits, and lawyers, and
shaped the town around socially cohesive multi-block wards. Each of these
models sought to improve the lot of everyman, while the bogus cities instead
exclude the undesirable elements rather than reforming them; they create
habitable theater for those who can afford it.
Many of the twentieth-century new towns of both Britain and America
apparently began on the path trodden by Moore, Oglethorpe, and Howard,
but lost their way trying to accommodate contemporary concerns. Milton
Keynes was conceived as an organic outgrowth from a cluster of exist-
ing ancient villages, not unlike the way in which London had grown over
the centuries, with adjacent towns and villages expanding and eventually
coalescing into a great conurbation. However, Milton Keynes succumbed
to a massive road grid that would speed motorists to their destinations,
but the roads segregated communities and all but denied access to those
 Past Errors and Future Options 109
without cars. Unlike the original villages, uses are segregated, so the com-
fortable muddle of village social interaction is not possible. Places of work,
residence, and recreation are all separated by distance. Reston, Virginia,
similarly suffers from separated uses and divisive streets, but is more densely
urban, appearing now more as downtown development than as a new town
distinct from nearby cities.
Other new towns, from Skelmersdale and Cumbernauld to Columbia,
MD, and Peachtree, GA, have succeeded in some respects but failed in
others. Skelmersdale got off to a bad start because housing authorities in
Liverpool saw it as a great opportunity to get rid of problem families, and
not surprisingly the rejects took their bad habits with them. Like Milton
Keynes, Skelmersdale is crisscrossed with major traffic routes, but also has a
network of tunnels and underpasses that enable pedestrians to avoid crossing
major roads.

Figure 6.2 The Romans made Corinium the second largest town in Britain.
Modern-day Cirencester is growing again, and some of that growth
mimics the organic patterns that have shaped much of the ancient town.
Nonuniform two- and three-story buildings huddle around curving
streets. The buildings use the latest technology to achieve energy and
other standards, although they look traditionally Cotswold. They
accommodate a range of housing types, and include an elementary
school as well as housing for seniors.
110 Past Errors and Future Options
An interesting variant is Poundbury in rural southwest England. Under
guidance from Leon Krier and the patronage of Prince Charles, an irregular
grid of streets extends the town of Dorchester by 400 acres (160 hectares).
Buildings and materials are modeled on West Country traditions, so that
the appearance is of an age-old town. Development is dense by suburban
standards, utilities are underground, and parking is cleverly concealed in
yards behind buildings. Strict rules govern the scale and appearance of the
architecture. Housing includes affordable and other special needs accom-
modation, and employment is close by. Although lampooned by many for
its rejection of modern architecture, Poundbury must be applauded for
achieving a rare balance of social, economic, and environmental values. It
is a small community with about 2,500 residents now, and twice as many
when the remaining phases are completed. Already it has its imitators, such
as an extension of Cirencester that includes senior living and an elementary
school, as well as a variety of housing types and retail—all with the appear-
ance of new-old Cotswold stone construction.

Wealth Through Conservation

An internationally accepted measure of success is the gross domestic prod-
uct of a country. Since its introduction in a report to Congress in 1937, GDP
has been recognized as an imperfect scale since it gives no clue to any of the
non-financial aspects of a nation. There have been attempts to add meas-
ures of happiness, but essentially the universally adopted metric of success
remains growth in GDP. Yet no known systems can sustain growth indefi-
nitely. There is another logic already at work in our economies that may
be more useful in quantifying the collective worth of financial, social, and
cultural stock. Many industries, power generation and distribution among
them, have recognized that efficient use of existing assets can be more profit-
able than the traditionally accepted dependence on growth of assets. Instead
of promoting electrical consumption and building new power plants to keep
up with increasing demand, the industry recognized that by careful manage-
ment of existing equipment and resources, growing demand could in many
cases be met without any outlay on new generating capacity. By discouraging
peak time use of power and encouraging off-peak use, market demand could
be met and net income increased.
Wealth through conservation in the context of land use suggests mak-
ing better use of land that has already been designated for development.
Oregon took a decisive step in this direction with enforcement of urban
growth boundaries that direct new development to lands already urban-
ized to some extent. Getting more out of what we have already, going
back to Adam Smith, entails more intense use of capital and labor on a
given piece of land. In other words, allowing as much development as
is compatible with the surrounding urban environment, and recogniz-
ing that what is compatible may change over time. Mixed uses would be
 Past Errors and Future Options 111
optimal, since different uses make demands on services at different times:
power, building access, parking, maintenance, etc. One might call this the
Manhattan model, since in many respects it simulates circumstances at
the metropolitan core, maximizing opportunities for business, leisure, and
residence through the number of potential destinations within easy reach,
while minimizing carbon footprint.
Just how much development and what balance of uses should be permit-
ted for each development site will differ from place to place, requiring some
flexibility in implementation. Some things, such as traffic generation and
road capacity, are relatively easy to calculate—although accepted norms
for traffic generation may change substantially as sharing supplants vehicle
ownership. Others, such as water supply and sewer capacity will change as
on-site wastewater treatment and recycling become more widely practiced.
Qualitative development values are more elusive. What, for example, is
the threshold at which a new development’s size, orientation, or materials
begin to detract materially from the desirable characteristics of the neigh-
borhood around it? Today in Portland, that sort of judgment falls to the
Design Commission since it defies calibration and comes down to a con-
sensus among the personal judgments of commissioners. To many, reliance
on discretion reeks of unpredictability, but given a framework of clear city
process and straightforward design guidelines, a developer can predict an
outcome as clearly under this model as under any other approval process.
The most practical way to implement wealth through conservation in
development may be to leave existing zoning codes in place, but remove
absolute limits on height, density, and use. Any development that wishes to
exceed what basic zoning allows may do so as a conditional use, subject to
satisfying relevant design guidelines. The effect would be to remove arbitrary
limits from existing codes, basing them instead on performance and outcomes
rather than on prohibitions. This may, however, increase the workload of
the Design Commission. Such an approach would be perfectly in tune with
Oregon’s planning laws, which are based on goals rather than preventative
regulation. Initially, this might be applied only to Downtown areas currently
subject to design review by the commission.
Something that state planning law does not yet address is prohibition of
development on sites known to be life-threateningly dangerous. Such sites
were discussed in “What Is Livability Worth?” in Chapter 3. Urban sites
prone to serious flooding, landslides, or other seismic disasters should be set
aside for non-habitable uses, but such properties are currently valued as if
free of such threats, and have zoning classifications that appear to condone
development. After a catastrophic event on the scale of Katrina or Sandy,
it is quite possible that a publicly funded program would be established to
buy the development rights for qualifying properties and set them aside as
natural areas or classify them for other low-risk uses. To propose such a
program now, before disaster strikes, would be dismissed as a distraction
from more urgent demands for public spending.
112 Past Errors and Future Options
Working in direct opposition to any such preventative legislation is the
National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), implemented by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, which effectively encourages develop-
ment in floodplains by offering insurance that is subsidized by taxpayers.
FEMA has identified 251 Oregon communities as flood-prone. Since
1978, the state has had 5,299 flood claims under NFIP, totaling over
$91 million; costs borne directly by taxpayers. The total publicly subsi-
dized liability for flood insurance policies in Oregon exceeds $7.5 billion
(Sallinger et al. 2016). Yet another example of siloed thinking, in this case
aiding and abetting risky development and using taxpayers to underwrite
it—without their knowledge.

Green Design
If flood-prone lands and areas vulnerable to extreme seismic damage
were removed from the inventory of developable lands, a great rebalanc-
ing between man and nature could be effected. Safely developable land
within the urban growth boundary would have to be used more efficiently.
Flood- and earthquake-prone land would need to be woven into the green
infrastructure of the city.
Portland already has a rich green infrastructure running through its
neighborhoods, but there are many demands placed upon it that are incom-
pletely answered. In addition to parks and trails, there is demand for more
playing fields, community gardens and urban farming, and all kinds of pro-
tected habitat for flora and fauna. Flood-prone lands tend to be connected
by natural drainages, many of which already have threads of green space
alongside streams. The dendritic pattern of waterways means that intercon-
nection of expanded natural areas into a coherent green infrastructure is
largely in place already.
Initially, only undeveloped land that has been identified as potentially
hazardous for development would be added to the green inventory. A
rational process for removing habitable development from harm would
be that when flood insurance is claimed, future flood insurance is with-
held, and aid in relocation to a safe site is offered to the owner. More
about this later.
Urban farming has a thriving following in the state, through nonprofits
such as Oregon Sustainable Agriculture Land Trust (OSALT), whose mem-
bers bring available vacant land into cultivation, sharing expertise, labor,
and produce. Oregon State University provides extensive online resources
to would-be urban farmers. Some recent immigrants in east Portland have
taken the initiative to farm ethnically important crops on vacant public land.
Meanwhile, the demand for community gardens administered by Portland
Parks and Recreation cannot be met—although availability of land is not
their only constraint.
 Past Errors and Future Options 113
Strategy for Smarter Cities
The United Nations World Cities Report for 2016 states that “Cities across
the world are sprawling, and as such, densities are dramatically declining.
In developing countries, a one per cent decline in densities per year between
2000 and 2050 would quadruple the urban land area.”5 Alas, the hard-
learned lessons of post-Second World War North America go unheeded in
the Third World. Sprawl will increase energy and water demands, condemn a
large portion of incomes to transportation, and will limit social engagement.
Meanwhile, we ponder how application of digital technology can help to
rescue us from those unhealthy consequences. Dubbed “smart city,” the inten-
tion is to move urban planning into a new era in which all the systems that
contribute to a city are seamlessly integrated through the Internet of things.
With greater coordination between all the functions of government and daily
life, and the ability to assess options in real time, we should be able to achieve
more with fewer resources (and, one hopes, minimal frustration). The key
change from traditional urban planning—apart from digital technology—
is the removal of barriers between administrative departments in local and
national governments. Human resources are as much a part of the smart city
as is land use or transportation. Smart Cities offer a holistic approach signaling
arrival of the post-specialist era.
While elements of the smart city are in use and being actively developed
in many parts of the world, the smart city itself remains a goal yet to be
fully achieved. Stockholm took a bold step toward becoming a smart city
when in 1994 it established an open access, universal fiber optic network
that it has used to implement a green IT strategy. This network allows
widespread access to improve energy use in buildings, transportation effi-
ciencies, coordination of parking usage, snow removal, and many other
things. Amsterdam offers an annual prize for the best smart city innovation.
Manchester, England, in 2016, introduced its CityVerve, an informatics
project that has engaged 22 public and private partners in one of the first
demonstrations of the Internet of things at scale. CityVerve will add sen-
sors and data analysis to equipment throughout the city, enabling real-time
data sharing in four key areas: health and social care, culture and com-
munity, energy and environment, and transportation. In the first of these,
real-time connections between hospitals, healthcare specialists, academics,
and patients hold the promise of fully integrated care and prompt treatment.

Portland’s Natural Heritage

Long before LEED was established, sustainability and harmony with nature
were central to design practice in the Pacific Northwest. Oregon’s conspicu-
ous environmental values embodied in state laws in the 1970s attracted
talented planners, architects, and landscape architects from far and wide.
114 Past Errors and Future Options
The work that they have done has attracted more of their kind. Progressive
design has distinguished the growing transit system; bicycle facilities have
grown as green streets and sustainable buildings have multiplied. Long
before that, an affinity with Japanese architecture had been evident—
matching refined domestic architecture to a rainy, forested land: sensitive to
the natural environment and to the constant but shadowy reality of earth-
quakes. Our culture is much younger and less experienced than Japan’s,
and we have been more dilatory than the Japanese in preparing for these
inevitable bouts of destruction. Despite detailed geological knowledge of
immanent threats, we explicitly allow building in places that are seismi-
cally vulnerable; places that we know will one day be devoured by tsunami,
crushed in landslides or shaken to bits where they stand. Overlaid on every
aspect of urban design is the specter of a major earthquake and the very real
need for personal safety and resiliency: the capacity to rebound afterwards.
There is a moral obligation too, since we know where we should not build.
Only in 2015 did the importance of resiliency in the wake of earthquakes
and other major disasters gain national recognition with creation of the
United States Resiliency Council. The USRC resulted from years of col-
laboration between civil and structural engineers, architects, and disaster
recovery experts. Performance standards had to be valid across a wide range
of seismic conditions, and be consistent with empirical data from FEMA
studies. Out of this exacting work came a building certification program
that evaluates safety, damage, and recovery, awarding up to five stars in
each category:

The rating considers the performance of a building’s structure, its

mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, and architectural com-
ponents such as cladding, windows, partitions, and ceilings. The
performance of these elements affects occupant safety, the cost and
time to carry out necessary repairs, and when you can begin using the
building following an event.6

Within a few years’ time, USRC certification can be expected to command

the broad acceptance enjoyed by LEED certification today. As with LEED,
achievement of a good certification rating will add a few percentage points
to the construction cost of a new building. However, the Japanese equivalent
rating has added many times as much to the value of certified buildings, since
it represents reduced risk for the building’s owner and for the businesses or
residents that occupy it.
Portland is classified in seismic zone 3, the second most severe. A 1995
survey found 1,800 unreinforced masonry (URM) commercial buildings. In
the ensuing 20 years, fewer than a quarter of them have been demolished or
upgraded. As an indication of what to expect, Chrischurch, New Zealand,
with a similar inventory of buildings, lost 7 percent of downtown buildings
in the 6.3 event in 2011, but 70 percent had to be substantially demolished,
 Past Errors and Future Options 115
being too seriously damaged to repair. Five years later, according to BBC
reports, 4,600 insurance claims remain unresolved. Perhaps prompted by
this grim prospect, Portland is considering a mandatory upgrade program
for all structures other than one- and two-household residential buildings.
Immediate threats, such as unsupported parapet walls, would have to be
braced within 10 years. Less grievous threats may take over 25 to complete.
News reports have shown us all the horrendous destruction wreaked by
a serious earthquake, but something that few have contemplated is how
long afterwards victims are left without a home, a place of work, or an
income. Stretching beyond those weeks or even months is the time taken
to fully restore services, including power, water, gas, transport, and all the
businesses and services that depend on them. The magnitude of the task
of preparedness is so great that no elected official dare broach it head-on.
However, the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management has formulated a
strategic plan and has established a large volunteer force. Informed citizens
are quietly bolting their houses to the foundations, securing water heat-
ers and heavy furniture, and making emergency stashes of water and food.
Communities are promulgating emergency plans and designating group
shelters, coordinated through the PBEM.
A major Cascadia subduction zone earthquake is either due or overdue,
and poses a far greater threat to Portland than any other conceivable event.
Unless we improve our resiliency in short order, the accomplishments of
the healthy city may be erased at a stroke. Meanwhile, every planner has
the moral duty to expose the dangers of development or reinvestment in
properties on land with documented vulnerability to extreme seismic events,
tsunami, or landslide.

Resiliency
According to the definition provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, which
is responsible for the 100 Resilient Cities project, resilience is “the capacity
of individuals, communities and systems to survive, adapt and grow in the
face of stress and shocks, and even transform when conditions require it”
(Arup 2016: 148).
A disruptive crisis can strike a city in many forms: cyberattack, extreme
weather event, industrial accident, and worse. Being prepared to rebound
from such a wide range of horrors is difficult enough, but being sufficiently
prepared on a typically modest budget requires real ingenuity. Intelligence
generated in 100 cities addressing thousands of different circumstances is
being coordinated and communicated to enable each city to become as resil-
ient as it can be. In part, that is through persuading public and private
entities of the wisdom in spending a little on prevention now versus much
more on recovery later. Practical intelligence about available resources and
coordinated responses shared among agencies and individuals is the most
valuable outcome.
116 Past Errors and Future Options
In 2015, the US Resiliency Council came into being. Many years in the
making, USRC established a universal rating system to indicate resiliency to
seismic events—a topic of existential importance in the Cascadia subduction
zone that includes Portland. Ratings for other hazards will be developed
later. The rating system uses FEMA P58 performance prediction method-
ology, quantifying fatalities and injuries, repair costs, and repair time and
red-tagging. Each of those three categories is awarded from one to five stars,
indicating its resiliency. A transactional rating service is also available to
assist in due diligence prior to acquisition of a building. In time, this may be
directly related to property insurance rates, as it is now in Japan.
Portland has so many unreinforced buildings predating current seismic
codes that it is contemplating a mandatory upgrade program in which
building owners would be required to make seismic upgrades over time,
with the greatest hazards, such as unsecured parapets, assigned the shortest
deadlines. However, costs are enormous, so the performance period is likely
to be decades long if the measure is to pass. $500,000 in federal funds were
granted to Portland for residential seismic retrofits in 2016, which indicates
that FEMA recognizes that the threat is real.
As yet, there is no law or effective inducement to discourage development
in documented tsunami zones, landslide areas, or flood zones, although
official maps delineate each. We watched with horror as apparently well-
prepared Japan suffered in the aftermath of the Tohoku Earthquake in
2011. Christchurch, New Zealand, is a city with much in common with
Portland, and we have watched as a succession of earthquakes has devas-
tated it physically and socially. Portland will certainly suffer a similar fate,
yet we steadfastly refuse to prepare for it beyond enforcement of seismic
structural codes for new buildings, and a resiliency plan for recovery after
the fact. This is a position that is ethically unsupportable. It is unaccep-
table for planners and other design professionals to ignore the dangers to
which they expose people by condoning development in documented tsu-
nami zones, landslide areas, or flood zones. At the very least, they should
warn clients of the existential dangers of these areas. This is something that
should be addressed by national professional organizations, including APA,
AIA, and ASLA. Possible initiatives are addressed in Chapter 8.

Notes
1 Walkability is variously defined to indicate the diversity, quality, and convenience
of destinations and environmental factors that accommodate those on foot.
WalkScore is an index devised in Seattle that is used to rate real estate locations
on their accessibility to pedestrians. The algorithm rates a range of destinations,
scoring those within five minutes’ walk highest, and considering destinations up
to 30 minutes away with diminishing scores. The aggregate score for any one
___location is normalized to a number between 1 and 100. Other systems consider
air quality, greenery, width of sidewalks, safety and ease of crossing intersections,
and density of people occupying a street. All seek to quantify the degree to which
all pedestrian needs are met.
 Past Errors and Future Options 117
2 Despite the deaths of over 200,000 people—mostly pedestrians—on US roads in
one decade, the automobile industry lobbied to change the law to give greater
freedoms to drivers. They promoted the adoption of traffic statutes to supplant
common law. The statutes were designed to restrict pedestrian use of the street and
give primacy to cars. The idea of “jaywalking”—a concept that had existed only
as a slur prior to 1920—became enshrined in law.
3 Design Perth: A Joint Vision for a Connected, Liveable and Sustainable Perth (see
http://greens.org.au/sites/greens.org.au/files/DESIGN_PERTH_FINAL_REPORT.
pdf). This study finds that government infrastructure costs range from $55,828
per lot for urban infill sites up to $150,389 per lot for urban-fringe greenfield
sites. The study is based on the previous study, Assessing the Costs of Alternative
Development Paths in Australian Cities (see http://bit.ly/2bGbSaf).
4 US average income 2010–2014 (see www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/income.
html).
5 UN World Cities Report 2016 (see http://wcr.unhabitat.org/quick-facts/).
6 See www.usrc.org/building-rating-system.

Bibliography
Arup (2016) Cities Alive: Towards a Walking World. London: Arup.
Jackson, K. (1985) The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United
States. New York: Oxford University Press.
Marshall, W.E. and Garrick, N.W. (2008) Street Network Types and Road Safety:
A Study of 24 California Cities. Mansfield, CT: University of Connecticut Center
for Transportation and Urban Planning, Civil & Environmental Engineering.
Sallinger, B., Houck, M., and Williams, T. (2016) “Common Sense Reforms to
Floodplain Development.” The Oregonian, July 20.
7 Corrective Measures

Transportation Equity
Philosophers have long warned against hubris. Some cultures take this very
literally, such as Japan’s most skillful potters, who would cut a “v” shaped
nick in the base of an otherwise exquisite piece just to let the spirits know
that they were not getting above themselves. Sometimes hubris takes the
form of overconfidence in governance, misleading a whole community into
making serious mistakes. The gods of the ancient Greeks tended to visit
prompt and harsh justice on those whose pride got the better of them. In the
context of city building and improvement, lacking thunderbolts, we must
rely on those outside the politics of power to watch closely and speak up
when something goes awry.
An insidious form of hubris is evident when we become so intent on one
set of improvements that we neglect others. Social injustice through neglect
is a common outcome. We know, for example, that the poor, including
many recent immigrants, rely more on walking, biking, and transit than
do those who own a car. Yet relatively little is invested in infrastructure
improvements in the poorest parts of town while we spend tens of mil-
lions on upgrading highways for the convenience of affluent car owners. Of
course, the mechanisms by which federal taxes are redistributed for trans-
portation were established at a time when the focus was almost exclusively
on highway improvements, and has changed little. Goals of transportation
equity are needed to redress the balance.
We spend much energy on exploring how more funds can be raised for
transportation, but that usually comes down to roads for vehicles. The
concept of complete streets has gained credibility; transportation equity in
funding is the next logical and necessary step. This is not just a case for
altruism; it is about making our workforce more mobile and thus more pro-
ductive, enabling people to better their lives by getting to places where they
can continue their education, removing them from poverty and improving
the economy for all of us. It is in the interests of almost everyone to help the
poor succeed, so that they can pay for their own homes and pay taxes rather
than depending, as some do, on subsidies.
 Corrective Measures 119
Half the area of the city is covered with paved streets and parking lots.
We have begun to wrest some of that space back from the automobile to
accommodate bikes, walking, and green space, but we still have thousands
of lane-miles of travel lanes, a large proportion of which is reaching—or has
already reached—the end of its design life. Roads built in the era of Model
T Fords have not stood up well to the loads and shock waves generated by
heavy freight vehicles. Costing up to $1 million per lane-mile to rebuild,
most of Portland’s 4,842 lane-miles of streets are destined to slow disinte-
gration. Priorities for transportation spending would change dramatically
if they were driven by the same three precepts as the Portland 2035 Plan:

•• education;
•• healthy connected neighborhoods; and
•• economic prosperity and affordability.

Meanwhile, car ownership will fall as ride-share systems and autonomous

cars become more commonplace. Most cars are in active use for less than
90 minutes a day on average, which is to say that they spend 94 percent of
the time parked—many of them on the city’s streets. Next to a home, an
automobile is the largest capital investment that most car-owning house-
holds make, yet the use that they derive from that investment is tiny. This is
especially true for those who live in central neighborhoods where multiple
alternatives are available. Little wonder that increasing numbers of them
are opting for a boost in their income by forsaking car ownership, finding
it both cheaper and more convenient to get around by other means—and
renting a car when necessary.
So returning to the huge burden of road maintenance and the impos-
sibly large cost of replacing roads that are beyond repair, it would seem
that the obvious next step is to re-evaluate just how much road space we
actually need. While the reduction in car ownership will be slow—most of
us resist change—we should not be building more parking. About a quarter
of street space is occupied by parking, most of it without cost to the car
owner, although the public purse must pay for maintenance and eventual
repaving. It would not be unreasonable (though politically difficult, to say
the least) to levy a universal minimum charge for parking on public streets
that reflects the annualized cost of providing that space. The immediate
effect would be to reduce parking demand, and to hasten the reduction in
car ownership, and thus the numbers of cars on the road at any one time,
simultaneously reducing congestion. Fast forwarding a decade, the com-
bined effect of the changes evident now would be a significant reduction
in vehicular traffic to the point at which selected roads and streets can be
narrowed or even de-paved, focusing road maintenance resources where
they are most needed—which would, of course, include improvements for
transit, pedestrian, and bicycle facilities in the long-neglected poorer parts
of town. This would mark a stride in the direction of transportation equity.
120 Corrective Measures
Volunteers for De-Pave Portland report removal of 139,000 square feet
(13,000 m2) of paving to create 50 new green spaces, among them com-
munity gardens, around the city. A collateral benefit is the diversion of
an estimated 3.25 million gallons (12,300,000 liters) of storm water from
drains to irrigate greenery and recharge groundwater each year. There may
also be opportunities to redefine the functions of some streets, as was done
in planning the Pearl District: to exclude all vehicular access except for
emergencies. This would create safe environments for walking, playing, and
relaxing in park-like streets, with the bonus of further reducing the inven-
tory of streets to be repaved.
According to the American Automobile Association, people spend on
average $8,485 each year on their cars, but only 16 percent stays within the
local economy—for licences, taxes, registrations, repairs, and maintenance.
A reduction of 15,000 vehicles in a city would translate into a $127 million
increase of local budget (Arup 2016). For Portland, Joe Cortright (2008)
estimated that residents saved more than $1 billion by driving 20 percent
less than in other cities. He described this as a “green dividend,” resulting in
more disposable income benefitting local businesses.
The opportunity described here is to turn the challenge of an impossibly
large cost burden of road maintenance into something manageable while
simultaneously achieving greater transportation equity, reducing storm run-
off, reducing the consumption of fossil fuels, and reducing the resultant
escalation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Portland was the first city
in the nation to adopt a carbon dioxide reduction strategy in 1993, and it
is on track to achieve 40 percent reductions by 2030 and 80 percent reduc-
tions by 2050.1 Repurposing surplus road space is not some fanciful idea; it
is a rational proposal justified by putting together the facts and trends that
are evident today in a way that will enhance the health of the city and all
whom it serves.

Affordable Housing
A fundamental need is housing, and an unacceptably large number of our
citizens are unable to afford it. The problem has been addressed with varying
success and from many directions in different communities. One of the most
successful is known as Housing First. The premise is that to get a person’s life
back on track, the first thing is to get them established in long-term housing,
and from that platform, find them whatever help they may need, including
employment. One notably successful Housing First program is in Helsinki.
In Finland, Housing First was adopted as a national policy, which,
crucially, facilitated partnerships between state authorities, local commu-
nities, and nongovernmental organizations. The program was scaled to
house not only those living on the street, but the 80 percent of homeless
people living temporarily with friends or relatives. The first requisite was
long-term housing, which the program acquired by all available means:
 Corrective Measures 121
purchase of privately held flats, co-opting social housing, construction of
new multifamily housing, and conversion of hostels and dormitory-style
shelters into independent living units; all with on-site staff oversight. As
an interesting aside, the disappearance of temporary hostels has greatly
reduced antisocial behavior among those served. What may appear to be
a costly program—and it is—has proven to be more cost-effective than
the sort of homeless management practiced by many other large cities.
Once the housing and social infrastructure were in place, an increasing
proportion of those housed have returned to employment and greater self-
sufficiency. A stable living environment and a regular job enable people
who are alone to form social attachments; they begin to belong somewhere
and develop a sense of purpose—essentials to many who are currently on
the street with mental vulnerabilities.
Victoria, BC, has pursued a different route: a policy of affordable-
accessible housing, in which affordable units with good transit access are
identified and purchased (Litman 2016). Typically, these are lower-priced
apartments, townhouses, small-lot single-family, and accessory suites
located in compact, multimodal neighborhoods. Without intervention,
many such homes would disappear through upgrades or redevelopment,
putting them out of reach of low-income working households. The thresh-
old of affordability used is 45 percent of income as the maximum paid
for housing and transportation combined. Some households need sub-
sidized housing, but most affordable-accessible housing is developed by
commercial firms and rented or sold without subsidy. This is essentially
a reverse-gentrification program that sustains the workforce and prevents
households from declining into homelessness.
Universally, there is much resistance to infill development of affordable
housing; neighbors fear that it will devalue the neighborhood and their
property, although other factors usually have greater influence. Portland
is struggling with zoning amendments to enable infill of “missing middle”
housing—duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes—in existing neighborhoods in
order to capitalize on the same advantages as affordable-accessible housing,
and to avoid clumping affordable residents together in separate districts.
Litman explores various strategies for reducing the cost of providing
affordable-accessible housing. Notable are the effects of not owning a car.
Apart from the annual costs of car ownership, inclusion of parking can
inflate the cost of a housing unit by 15 percent. He also notes a proportional
drop in the cost of managing parking and congestion on the city’s roads.
These savings, denser development of urbanized land, and other strategies
offset the public investment in acquiring housing in the first place, although
the offsets are often difficult to quantify and remain largely invisible.
A popular “solution” to provision of affordable housing is through inclu-
sionary zoning, which requires a percentage of market-rate units to be sold or
rented as affordable housing. One reason for the popularity of inclusionary
zoning is that its introduction shows the electorate that their representatives
122 Corrective Measures
are doing something about increasing the supply of affordable housing. In
Portland, the proposal is that affordable units will have to be included in
any development with 20 or more dwelling units. A predicted response is
division of projects into multiple buildings with 19 or fewer units each. Even
without this loophole, experience elsewhere has shown the requirement of
including affordable units to be sufficiently burdensome to developers to
reduce overall investments in multifamily housing. With a net reduction
in new housing units coming onto the market, scarcity increases and more
households find themselves unable to afford a place to live. Thus, the net
effect of compelling the creation of affordable housing through inclusionary
zoning is to reduce the supply. Tombari (2008) found that in Los Angeles,
the total number of affordable housing units created in a 27-year period was
6,379, and that the cost to the area economy to create each affordable unit
averaged $596,546. The need for affordable units in Los Angeles is in the
order of 12,000 annually, so the contribution of the program was slight. Los
Angeles’ experience is just one of many suggesting that inclusionary zoning
does not yield the desired results.
A frequently used policy to assure the availability of affordable hous-
ing is rent control. This too has the appeal of showing the electorate that
something is being done about the need for affordable housing, but experi-
ence has shown it to be an expensive and ineffective option. Owners are
disinclined to improve or even maintain controlled rent properties, which
consequently decline in value and in tax revenues. Even with high admin-
istrative costs, it is difficult to ensure that controlled rent properties are in
fact occupied by qualified tenants; they rarely become available for rent,
and occupants are strongly motivated to keep it that way. The National
Multifamily Housing Council (2016) stated: “From a social perspective, the
substantial costs of rent control fall most heavily on the poor . . . promote
housing discrimination and unfairly tax rental housing providers.”
An alternative to inclusionary zoning is to remove barriers to housing
construction, thus increasing the overall supply of housing to meet demand
and in the process, stabilize rents (Holland 2016). The rationale is that of
the affordable-accessible program cited above: of locating housing where it
is needed, close to transit. But in this case, additional housing development
would be enabled through relaxing zoning restrictions to enable mid- and
high-rise multifamily development in locations close to transit and to jobs—
primarily in central districts. Since infrastructure is already in place in such
locations, there is much less collateral expense to the community than
there would be for suburban or greenfield development. Using current and
recent Portland rates, Holland demonstrates that enabling additional high-
rise housing in central districts would raise substantial new property taxes,
increase employment, and substantially increase the city’s bonding capacity.
The principal effect would be to meet the shortfall in available market-rate
housing, which would slow the climb in housing costs. This in turn would
remove upward pressure on the threshold of affordability. This approach
 Corrective Measures 123
would provide the city with sufficient revenue to buy, build, or otherwise
incentivize the creation of affordable housing.
A related issue is why firms move Downtown: “Companies are choosing
walkable downtowns because that’s where talented workers want to be.
These places . . . support creativity among their employees, and help these
companies live up to high standards of corporate responsibility” (Smart
Growth America 2015).
This is vividly evident in Portland’s Pearl District, which has attracted
many small but growing knowledge industry firms. Such places also need
service industry employees, and the inclusion of 28 percent affordable hous-
ing among variously priced market rate housing has done much to achieve
a workforce balance. Holland (2016) opines:

Technology employers are in intense competition for top talent. That top
talent wants to live in an urban ___location with a walkable lifestyle. The
result is that tech companies have moved into cities like Portland, Seattle
and Denver to recruit the employees who are attracted to the lifestyles
offered by those cities. At a macro level, Portland must develop more
urban and transit-oriented housing or risk becoming non-competitive
compared to cities such as Seattle and Denver.

Charles Landry (2008) observes that today, 64 percent of people choose

the city in which they want to live before deciding on the company they
want to work for. In this context, a city’s level of creativity raises its attrac-
tiveness for skilled workers and talented students. Richard Florida notes
that the creative class looks for: “indigenous street-level culture: a teeming
blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it
is hard to draw the line between performers and spectators.” So it appears
that everyone—or at least the two-thirds of households that have fewer
than three members—have good reasons to live in compact and walka-
ble neighborhoods that include employment with a diversity of other uses
nearby. How might changing demographics affect this picture?

Improving Livable Environments

Between 2010 and 2030, the number of over-65s in Greater Portland will
double to 17 percent, while that of the nation approaches 20 percent. An
increasing proportion of these will remain in the workforce, and many more
will choose active lifestyles that would have astonished their parents when
they reached the same age. Many have no intention of changing the healthy
lifestyle that they have enjoyed for decades, if anything becoming more
demanding of the physical environment that they inhabit. Accommodation
of independence and mobility will be expected into extreme old age.
In 2006, Portland joined the World Health Organization (WHO) as the
only American city in a worldwide study into age-friendly features, removal
124 Corrective Measures
of barriers, and generating suggestions for making cities better places for
people of all ages. PSU’s Institute on Aging took the lead. In 2010, Portland
joined the Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities.2 In 2013, this culminated
in a plan: Portland Is a Place for All Generations, which offered strate-
gies and specific actions within the Portland Plan for achievement of goals
for improving physical, social, and health-related improvements to the city.
The approach was emphatically directed toward inclusiveness of all ages,
ensuring that no one is excluded from access because of age, rather that
specifying accommodation of elder citizens. An analogy is the premise of
“universal access” that shifts the emphasis from making special provisions
for the handicapped toward improving access for everyone. There is under-
standable resentment among healthy 60-somethings when they are referred
to as “elderly” with connotations of frailty, so the broader term of universal
or all-ages access is clearly preferable.
AARP has compiled a livability index that rates locations around the
country on seven factors: housing, neighborhood, transportation, environ-
ment, health, engagement, and opportunity. This too addresses all ages,
although the primary audience is clearly their over-55 membership. Each
factor is scored out of 100, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses
in each category. Housing is rated on accessibility, availability of multi-
family housing, and cost. Health considers prevalence of smoking, obesity,
and access to exercise. Opportunity looks at income inequality, jobs per
worker, and high school graduation rates. Depending on individual priori-
ties, the rating allows one to assess the adequacy of a place before moving
there, even fine-tuning the rating down to an individual address. Being a
nationwide evaluation system, it has its limitations, but is a useful baseline
evaluation tool.
Physicians have been clear about the advantages of aging in place over
warehousing the elderly, as we have tended to do in recent decades. People
who age in mixed communities have better mental and physical health
records than those in group living for seniors. Most participate more in the
life of the community, and increasingly many continue to work or volunteer
into their seventies and beyond. The ways in which the urban environment
can respond to inclusion of greater numbers of active elder citizens are both
physical and organizational. For example, Portland’s Bridge Meadows
project (see note 1 in Chapter 1) collocates independent housing for seniors
with foster family housing. The cost of housing for seniors is subsidized for
those who commit to helping the children learn to read, do homework, walk
to the bus, and all the other things that well-cared-for children might expect.
Both the physical and mental welfare of the seniors is cared for, and their
surrogate grandchildren thrive on it.
There are volunteer-based organizations such as Seniors Resource Guide3
that share all manner of useful information, such as the names and rates of
reliable plumbers, home delivery grocery services, and book club meeting
times. Anxiety is a particular problem for elders living alone for the first
 Corrective Measures 125
time, and such information can be a great relief to them. On the physical
side of elder accommodation are all the considerations of universal access
in design. Among these is detailing the ground floor of housing to be wheel-
chair accessible: an absence of stairs at an entry, and doorways wide enough
to admit a wheelchair, as well as use of lever-action door handles rather
than knobs, which can be difficult for arthritic hands to grasp. In the public
realm, there are a few special design considerations beyond those addressed
under universal design. One is frequent places to sit down: a low wall, if
not a bench. Another is to make obstacles such as bollards tall enough to be
visible to those with poor eyesight, and to make lettering that is meant to
be read large enough and sufficiently well illuminated to be seen. These last
items, along with handrails at steps and steep slopes, should be standard in
any case, but merit extra emphasis because they are so often overlooked.

Expecting the Best

The human condition is rife with mistaken beliefs and preconceived ideas
that are based on incomplete information. One of these concerns the many
predictions—notably by economists—that are based on the premise that
we will always make choices that will benefit ourselves above others (see
“Unselfish Choices” in Chapter 8). That tends to be true when knowledge is
limited; when only one voice is heard. As the National Interstate Highway
Program was being implemented, cities (through their state departments of
transportation) were offered 92 percent of the cost of building components
of the new freeway system. Most saw this as “free money” to improve their
infrastructure and, in the process, improve their economic prospects. Seen
as a “no-brainer” decision, most cities took the bait and enabled freeway
construction. Portland did too, until it came to the Mount Hood Freeway,
the westernmost portion of I-80. Portland had seen what social damage had
been done with construction of I-5. It had displaced hundreds of house-
holds and raised physical barriers that divided communities. Rather than
simply accepting the gilded federal prize, Portland took the time to examine
the probable consequences of building I-80—among them the destruction
of 1,500 homes and businesses in its path—and rephrased the question
in a way that did not make building the freeway the only logical answer.
A brave corrective measure, and a wise one as it turned out. At risk of los-
ing a massive investment in the city, the money was diverted instead to seed
the first modern light rail system in the US, and to improve existing road
networks to improve vehicular access citywide (see “People Who Shape the
City” in Chapter 3).
What Portland had done was to broaden the question beyond money and
transportation, considering the proposal in a citywide context; how it might
affect the health and well-being of established communities and of individ-
ual lives. It took a humanitarian view, then redefined the means of achieving
objectives of the federal proposal, and came up with a more comprehensive
126 Corrective Measures
solution that actually increased the return on investment. This has much in
common with “Asking the Right Questions” in Chapter 6.
Altruism has a place in making decisions that shape the city. Usually,
enlightened decision-making is the result of engaging multiple interests early
enough to define the problem or challenges being addressed in a comprehen-
sive manner. Which takes us back to James Oglethorpe and the Enlightenment:
setting out to plan a prototypical city founded on principles of justice and
egalitarianism from which a physical plan was derived (Wilson 2012).

Regenerative Development
Most large buildings constructed in Portland these days meet LEED standards,
and several architects have designed net zero energy (NZE) buildings. One
of the earliest large-scale NZE developments was a 2002 housing develop-
ment in London known as BedZED (Beddington Zero Energy Development).
This ambitious project included 82 homes and 15,000 ft2 (1,400 m2) of
workspace. It employed water recycling and many other sustainable initia-
tives beyond the net zero energy goal. Despite various technical difficulties,
BedZED has been successful in demonstrating the extent to which energy use
can be reduced without compromising living standards. Other EcoVillages
have since been developed in England, and the 200-acre (81-hectare) Sonoma
Mountain Village north of San Francisco. SOMO will house 5,000 peo-
ple and support 4,400 jobs in a net zero energy community that targets a
65 percent reduction in water use and an 82 percent reduction in transpor-
tation emissions. Two-thirds of their food will be locally sourced. Another
such development is planned for 2,000 acres (800 hectares) at Whisper
Valley outside Austin, Texas. No doubt more will follow as Tesla Roofs and
their imitators capture more of the housing market.
Each of these projects strives toward self-sufficiency; the biomimicry
model is a wild plant that uses solar energy, water, and nutrients to grow,
and is 100 percent recycled when it dies. NZE buildings generate as much
energy as they use, often feeding surplus power into the grid by day and
drawing power at night. Those that put more power into the grid than they
take out are termed regenerative. A fully regenerative building would be
one that matches the biomimicry model more completely: not only gen-
erating a surplus of power, but also recycling more water and waste than
it generates. A regenerative building achieves the 100 percent recyclability
of the wild plant, but goes further to replenish resources that mankind has
overexploited in the past. Just as an EcoDistrict or EcoVillage achieves at
scale what a sustainably designed building can accomplish, so a regenerative
district would restore the resource base on a districtwide scale.
Regenerative design has few realized examples in architecture, and to
most seems a distant goal, yet we have the technical means to achieve it,
and no doubt some genuinely regenerative buildings will be realized soon.
But as with any prototype, those first models will be test beds for designs
and equipment that will slowly be adopted more widely, as the benefits are
 Corrective Measures 127
able to justify the costs involved. Already we have “living machines” that
recycle black water (raw sewage along with other wastewater) using plants,
bacteria, and filtration media in a series of tanks to produce potable water.
This is a technology that requires intelligent care, lending itself to large-scale
buildings and district-wide applications. It might well be teamed with urban
agriculture: irrigating conventional raised beds that use composted organic
solid waste from the regenerative development. The benefits of teaming
urban agriculture with buildings goes beyond food production—which for
herbs and greens can be productive at a rate of an ounce per square foot
per week. Located on the south and west sides of buildings, especially if
terraced, evapotranspiration from the plants will improve the microclimate
and reduce cooling loads in the building. The planted beds attenuate noise,
shade and insulate the building, and of course confer the biophilic effects
of well-being and improved productivity on those exposed to them. It is the
holistic and collaborative effects of symbiotic design that make the goal of
regenerative buildings and districts so rewarding. Mimicking nature, each
component supports other aspects of the whole. There is a poetic efficiency
in the system, a productive harmony that achieves much more than could
the component parts on their own.

Notes
1 City of Portland CO2 Reduction and Energy Policies (see www.portlandoregon.
gov/bps/article/430946).
2 Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities (see www.who.int/ageing/projects/age_
friendly_cities_network/en/).
3 Seniors Resource Guide Portland (see www.seniorsresourceguide.com/directories/
Portland/websites.html).

Bibliography
Arup (2016) Cities Alive: Towards a Walking World. London: Arup.
Cortright, J. (2008) The Green Dividend. Available at: http://old.relocalize.net/
portlands_green_dividend.
Holland, C. (2016) “Alternative Strategy for Producing Affordable Housing.” PSU
Real Estate Quarterly, 10(1), Winter.
Landry, C. (2008) The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators, 2nd ed. New
York: Routledge.
Litman, T. (2016) Affordable-Accessible Housing in a Dynamic City. Victoria, BC:
Victoria Transport Policy Institute.
National Multifamily Housing Council (2016) The High Cost of Rent Control.
Available at: www.nmhc.org/News/The-High-Cost-of-Rent-Control/.
Smart Growth America (2015) Core Values: Why American Companies Are Moving
Downtown. Available at: https://smartgrowthamerica.org.
Tombari, E. (2008) Research on State and Local Means of Increasing Affordable
Housing. Washington, DC: National Association of Home Builders.
Wilson, T.D. (2012) The Oglethorpe Plan. Charlottesville, VI: University of Virginia
Press.
8 Improving the Health of the City

Portland became a healthy city for all the reasons rehearsed in the opening
chapters; notably because of the values of people who chose to live here,
enabled by favorable geography, climate, and historical happenstance.
Change is inevitable and ongoing, and the preceding chapter has outlined
both opportunities and threats to maintaining the qualities and infrastruc-
ture of livability necessary to maintaining the physical, economic, and
social health of Portland’s denizens.
This chapter takes a closer look at regulations and attitudes that shape the
fabric of the city at a time when population is growing steadily and Malthusians
worry about when new arrivals will overwhelm the very qualities that attracted
them here in the first place. Some fundamental changes are called for in the
ways in which we decide where to develop and how to allow development to
proceed. Part of the problem is that we have lost sight of why development was
regulated in the first place; we need to take a step back and review the purposes
and possibilities before us, then take some bold and original moves—much as
Oregon did 40 years ago with its landmark state lawmaking.

Development Regulation
Many cities had banned “noxious uses” before New York introduced a
zoning ordinance in 1916. A decade later, a growing number of munici-
pal authorities had mandated exclusionary zoning, and thereafter land use
zoning became widely adopted across the United States. Portland’s first
zoning code was adopted in 1924, untypically, by a vote of the people.
Although the building code had required permission for siting certain uses
since 1918, building height was only regulated for reasons of health and life
safety: fireproof buildings were limited to 12 stories or 160 feet, and other
construction types to lesser heights to enable occupants to flee before the
structure became unstable in a fire. The main thrust of the 1959 code was to
correct the balance between land availability and demand by use, but was
later considered too permissive, and numerous downzones were enacted
after its adoption. Not until 1979 were height limits imposed on the CBD1
as part of the implementation of the Downtown Plan.
 Improving the Health of the City 129
It became increasingly apparent that the Central City needed its own
special set of rules. Planning Guidelines—Portland Downtown Plan 1972
was the result of a 15-month effort prompted, some would say, by construc-
tion of a Los Angelino corporate ego tower in 1969, originally named for
1st Interstate Bank, now known as the Wells Fargo Tower. The shock of
this impudent upstart towering over the modest but gracious City Hall was
more than citizens could tolerate. Steps should be taken to ensure that no
further affront of this nature could be visited on the city. Rather pointedly,
in the section entitled “Central Office Corridor,” the plan states: “Avoid
‘fortress-like’ walls along sidewalks and open space,” pointing an accusing
finger directly at the east block of the 1st Interstate development with its
imperforate walls of rugged granite glowering over Terry Schrunk Plaza.
In due course, the first set of Downtown Design Guidelines was published
in 1980. Maximum building heights and densities, however, were mapped
in the zoning code. Building heights stepped up in tiers like a wedding cake
from 75 feet near the river to 460 feet along the CBD spine, 5th and 6th
Avenues, with modifications here and there to accommodate public view
corridors. This produced some odd jumps in scale from one block to the
next, fueling the fury of those opposed on principle to tall buildings. That
fury was largely misplaced since the vast majority of downtown property
has been developed with buildings much lower than the permitted heights.
Many sites support buildings from an earlier era in which height was limited
only by cost and then-current technology.

Performance-Based Zoning
The Zoning Code that began as a simple way to encourage compatible
development, and protect residents from unhealthy industrial neighbors, has
become a hugely complex set of rules and regulations that differ from block
to block. A developer needs to know what will and will not be permitted on
a given site, and the Zoning Code purports to provide that predictability.
In reality, there are so many other factors to consider—environmental qual-
ity regulations, and in much of Portland, the unknowable conditions that
may be imposed by the Design Commission, composed of citizen volunteers.
Predictability remains elusive.
Another shortcoming of the existing Zoning Code, referenced in the
preceding chapter, is that zoning limits height and density regardless of
changing use demands, technology, and market conditions. There may
have been some logic in development of those standards in the first place,
but once adopted they are generally regarded as eternal and unchanging,
whether relevant today or not. Typically, zoning is good at protecting
established buildings and districts, but is unable to respond to new oppor-
tunities, even in places where there is nothing to protect: no historic
streetfronts or communities to be safeguarded. Many are places that need
something different.
130 Improving the Health of the City
A wholesale change of zoning from today’s massive codes to a simpler,
performance-based system of development control would be a daunting
undertaking. However, something of the sort could be introduced in areas
where a more progressive approach might be accepted. This has a sound
precedent in enterprise zone overlays. There is a case for creating designated
areas in which more density or height (or both) would be allowed than the
base zone would permit. Urban brownfield sites and districts that have failed
to attract investment for many years may be among suitable candidate areas.
Districts given a performance-based zoning overlay would allow appli-
cants to apply for development permission either under the conventional
zoning code, or by satisfying applicable performance standards. Some
of those standards would relate to the capacity of public infrastructure,
establishing thresholds for such things as vehicular trip generation, water,
sewer use, etc., and requiring upgrade fees if existing capacity is exceeded.
Other standards would relate to thresholds for noise, air quality, glare, and
shadow. A third set of standards would complement the building codes,
addressing resiliency, and use of sustainable materials, systems, and prac-
tices. Importantly, none of the performance-based zoning standards would
limit height, density, or use unless there was some site-specific reason to
do so. If, for example, a district satisfied designation criteria, except that a
public view corridor crossed part of it, then a height limit might be imposed
on structures that fall within the defined view corridor.
Those who object to tall buildings might be concerned that without
enforced height limits, performance-based overlay zones would spawn a pro-
liferation of tall towers. That may be true in the world’s largest cities, but in
a city of Portland’s scale, the market can support only a limited number of
such giants. In the core of Downtown Portland, buildings up to 460 feet tall
have always been permitted. Only four have exceeded the 416-feet PacWest
Tower in height. The rush to build seven tall residential towers in South
Waterfront oversupplied the market and resulted in wounding losses to the
developers—a mistake that will not soon be forgotten by either developers
or their lending institutions. In fact, the reaction can be seen in more recently
developed housing in South Waterfront, which achieves the same densities,
but in stockier mid-rise buildings.
An opportunity presented by performance-based zoning is that uses and
market sectors that are not adequately served under conventional zoning
would be able to locate within the city, near the workforce and services that
they need. This would make more efficient use of the huge investment that the
city has in its infrastructure, and would generate new revenue. Many assume
that all property would be built up to its permitted capacity, yet we know
that to be untrue. Historic buildings, inertia on the part of many owners—
especially those who will never think of redevelopment, limitations of market
absorption, and of the investment capacity of property owners—all of these
things account for the fact that Downtown development has never exceeded
much more than half of its theoretical capacity, and is unlikely to do so.
 Improving the Health of the City 131
Thus, there is ample infrastructure capacity to serve extra density where it is
wanted. Or to put it another way, we are only getting about half of the return
on investment that our infrastructure could provide.
Some hybrid industries that are more office than maker space may find their
best fit in the Central City. Such developments might include apartments for
long-stay global market partners, as well as uses that have no place in existing
codes. There would be no limit on the mix of uses under performance-based
zoning—provided that health and safety standards are upheld. Currently, we
impose constraints on innovative development mixes for no good reason.
There will be a tendency for well-intentioned bureaucrats to hedge about
a simple performance-based overlay zone with extra requirements that cloud
predictability of timing and entitlement. Somehow, we must keep it sim-
ple and learn to regulate development in a way that encourages innovation
and improvement rather than trying to prevent bad design. New configura-
tions of uses and architecture within a framework of simple and clear urban
design guidelines should be welcomed. This approach would enrich the city
with more choices and enable innovation.
A city evolves much as any multicellular organism does: keeping and
enhancing successful changes and suppressing or eliminating those that are
retrograde. A city for healthy lifestyles needs the capacity to explore new
and better ways of living together. Our current development control model
effectively prevents evolutionary change, except through tiny variances. If it
were aspirational rather than preventative in its structure, greater progress
could be made.

Design Review
Camillo Sitte in 1889 reminded his readers that: “The ancients did not
conceive their plans on drawing boards. Their buildings rose bit by bit in
natura.” Elsewhere, he wrote:” Why must the straightedge and the compass
be the all-powerful masters of city building?” His entire thesis was based on
the precept that “the old masters wrought miracles without the assistance
of aesthetic rules . . . they were not given to the excessive use of symmetry.”
He went on to demonstrate the design principles—not rules—that can be
found by careful observation of successful urban open spaces throughout
Europe, but principally in the ancient cities of Italy.
If one applies Sitte’s empirical principles to modern city squares and pla-
zas, many are found wanting. Often squares enlarged and streets widened
to accommodate vehicular traffic are the reason for loss of engagement
between buildings, space, and the people who experience them. He notes the
modern (and persistent to this day) tendency to make monumental build-
ings freestanding, and the spaces around them symmetrical. Yet in many of
the finest examples that Sitte documented, the church or other monumental
building is either embedded in the side of adjacent development, or used as
a mediator between two separate and dissimilar urban spaces.
132 Improving the Health of the City
This is a place where the orthogonal grid of streets that gives Portland
and many other North American cities their form moves them away from
Sitte’s aesthetic. The ancient towns and cities of which Sitte wrote had
grown organically, each building huddling close to the next, not wasting
a scrap of space. Long straggling terraces line irregularly winding streets.
Plazas and lanes seem hollowed out from a solid mass of buildings. Rome
from above looks like a great slab of rock with irregular cracks and fissures
its streets. This is an urbanism of attachment, whereas Portland’s grid is one
of separation. Buildings cannot coalesce into masses greater than 200 feet
long. Consequently, buildings of civic significance typically stand alone on
a block with space all around them. Most urban open spaces are similarly
ventilated on all sides by regularly dimensioned streets; the park’s scale typi-
cally in multiples of a city block. Thus, we lack the element of surprise that
Nolli’s map of the public realm reveals, and in which Sitte delights in his
exploration of unexpected angles, spaces, and juxtapositions.
Like Nolli before him, Sitte recognized the public realm as the principal
experiential element of the city, the mass of largely undifferentiated buildings
providing form and edges to the complex of interconnected open spaces. Far
from being simply open space between buildings, the public realm is the city
as all of us experience it. Each component of the public realm merits as much
attention to design as any of our public buildings. The architect’s greatest
opportunity is to capitalize on the dimensions, orientation, and intended uses
of an adjacent plaza, street, or intersection. Interplay between the users of
the public realm and the buildings that define its edges determine what is
appropriate in designing and placing paving, street trees, lighting, public art,
and street furniture.
The term “outdoor room” has become a cliché, but each space should be
designed as if it were a great public room. And as with a room in a building,
an important decision is what uses are appropriate and inappropriate there.
As a public room, how shall principles of equity inform the design? We have
been slow to learn that unrestrained access for vehicular traffic not only
clogs up the public realm, but deprives it of the vitality that is the lifeblood
of the healthy city. Comfortable coexistence is possible with restrained
vehicular access that leaves room for bikes and walkers. Sometimes restraint
works best by time of day, allowing unlimited access for service and delivery
vehicles to a shopping street before the shops open, but excluding them as
pedestrians arrive in force.
Important as the public realm is as the outward expression of a city, its pri-
mary function is to provide access to the nexus of activities that are the very
reason for the city’s existence. The buildings that accommodate these activities
lend character to the public realm, but are designed around the interactions
between interior spaces. Each building in a street is in this sense a private
entity with a public face. For some, the public face is important, perhaps
engaging the street in a way that invites people to enter. Sometimes privacy
and security concerns present a bland frontage to the street. In Portland, per-
mission to build is withheld until the city is satisfied that the architecture
 Improving the Health of the City 133
is appropriate to the context of a proposed building. Each is judged on its
contribution to the public realm—the building’s place in the skyline, as well
as the ways in which it addresses its neighbors.
Perhaps it is due to dominance of the specialist in the twentieth cen-
tury that those cities that venture to maintain the quality of design in their
built environments evaluated buildings on the basis of plans and elevations.
These are useful technical descriptors of a building’s parts and pieces, but
have little to do with how a building can contribute to the composition of
city’s spaces and places. Rarely does one see any building in elevation. The
top of the building is generally foreshortened as seen from the ground. The
details that dominate are contrasting lines and features, as the unbroken
line of a roof or parapet against the sky, the relative scale of juxtaposed
masses, and most of all the details close to eye level. Elevations give lit-
tle clue to these. “Artists’ renderings” were often prepared to overcome
this gap in comprehension, but generally provided only carefully selected
viewpoints—and more than a modicum of artist’s license. Today, digital
design has freed us from those limitations. Accurate perspectives and ani-
mations can simulate an unbuilt structure in the context of the buildings,
spaces, and vegetation around it.
It is time for the design review commissioners to send elevations back to
their technical functions and to focus instead on the holistic effect of each
proposed building in situ, focusing on the proportion and quality of spaces
around the building, and the relationship in scale, materials, and color to
neighboring structures. Building designs are often presented for review with
little or no reference to the buildings and spaces around them. As such, they
are presented as singular monuments, which they rarely are. Had the Wells
Fargo Tower in Portland been reviewed in its context, it would never have
been admitted in its present form. In isolation, as no doubt it was presented
to its investors, it may have appeared singular and heroic, its contextual
irrelevance remaining unknown, but the unfortunate contrasts that it strikes
with urban spaces and architecture around it continues to jar. Thirty years
later, the chair of the Design Commission2 would regularly admonish appli-
cants to “look three blocks in each direction” to understand the context
within which a building is to stand.

Corrective Measures
Forensic examination of the healthy city has turned up some useful empiri-
cal data: things that work, as well as some that do not; the latter merit a
thorough overhaul. In too much of urban America built since the Second
World War, we have managed to squander land, invest too much in roads,
and force people into driving to work in cars they can’t afford. Without
compelling reasons, we will resist change and continue to make the same
mistakes because there is tremendous inertia in both government and the
development industry. More of this later, but now let’s look at the capacity
of the planners to accommodate healthier lifestyles in the future.
134 Improving the Health of the City
The current decade may become known as the age of the makers: a new class
of land uses that fills headlines and confuses development control officers. What
the makers signal is the reinvention of the artisan, who is both designer and
manufacturer, and often inventor and entrepreneur too. A similar renaissance
is overdue for planners, architects, and engineers. Their silos of specialization
need to crumble into open fields of collaborative design. The productive out-
come of intellectual integration has a parallel in the senior common rooms of
the better universities, where for generations ideas from different disciplines
have collided, each disruption resulting in a new direction of inquiry, and
occasionally a Nobel Prize.
The opportunity for planners is to cultivate a rich environmental design
ecosystem nourished by the confluence of disciplines among collaborating
design professionals. As the makers carry an idea from concept through man-
ufacture and marketing, so should every design professional awaken to the
full reach of his or her work: from concept through design and implementa-
tion to collateral influences on the health and well-being of everyone affected.
To be effective in this open design environment, every planner must know
enough about architecture, landscape, engineering, hydrology, and geology,
and much more besides, to ask the right questions and formulate a com-
prehensive response. Operating inside an airtight planning department has
proved to be ineffective, as demonstrated by soulless places in almost every
conurbation across the country. In the first of his Ten Books on Architecture,
Vitruvius expounds on the education of an architect, emphasizing deep
knowledge of philosophy and the natural arts, in addition to mathematics,
proportion, materials, and technical matters. As the architect’s work affects
the lives of all who encounter his buildings, so the architect must be sensi-
tive to all that art and science have to teach. Though Vitruvius did not use
the term, he suggests that the architect must be a renaissance man. The same
breadth of interest and knowledge are required of every man and woman in
each design discipline involved in creating urban environments today.
What is highlighted by the new horizons charted by the makers is a dis-
juncture between what is going on in the real world of urban design, and the
policies and rules that we devised decades ago to steer urban development.
Far from leading development toward enlightened urban place-making, out-
dated zoning codes reinforce past mistakes. If a new use does not conform to
an old list of uses, it is disallowed. Where single uses are mandated, mixed
uses are banned. The irony is that what set out to be a rational and straight-
forward means of regulating development has become far more complex
and difficult to administer than the patterns of organic urban growth that
zoning codes replaced. It has also come, to varying degrees, prescriptive.
We have built complex rules for development out of fear, not reason.
There were no height limits until pundits imagined inevitable forests of
towers and gloomy street-canyons as fearful prospects. Instead of calmly
agreeing to limit heights next to sensitive features or where tall buildings
would block important public views, finite limits were enacted everywhere.
 Improving the Health of the City 135
As recently as 1979, there were no limits on building height in Portland
except those relating to health and life safety. Prior to that, the emphasis
was on an adequate supply of land for each set of land uses, and limits on
density of development related to the capacity of the streets, sewers, and
other infrastructure. Today, we use that infrastructure very differently, and
having largely escaped the tyranny of single-use zoning, at least in the city
center, place very different demands on the city with each new development.
It is time to take a fresh look at what we have, what we need, and how to
optimize use of our resources.
If we were able to start over again today, we might set bounds on where
development can occur, but allow great freedom within those boundaries.
When London’s Docklands Development Corporation got underway with
rebuilding huge tracts of land that had been bombed to rubble during the
Second World War, there were two rules that largely governed residential
redevelopment between the harbor basins in Wapping and Limehouse: walls
were to be of yellow London Stock brick and pitched roofs were to be of slate.
The result is a diverse architecture and an intricate and original public realm.
Conformance with building codes ensured health and safety. Choices abound
in the style, configuration, and price of the resulting housing. All this was
achieved without hundreds of pages of zoning codes, or the hundreds of hours
of both public and private time that it takes to interpret, apply, and enforce the
complexities of code language as lengthy and detailed as that used in Portland
and most other municipalities. The Docklands urban designers recognized that
there was no need to restrict architectural expression beyond the simple rules
for walls and roofs.
The underlying principle in a fresh approach to development control
would be to impose as few limits as strictly necessary. In 1991, my col-
leagues and I were involved in replanning an area just north of Denver’s
Lower Downtown, the Central Platte Valley, that had for a century been
dominated by rail yards. Much of it was to be redeveloped. We knew that
the city wanted to encourage early and productive redevelopment, and that
views across this land to Pike’s Peak and the Front Range of the Rockies
were universally valued. Our proposed development regulations imposed
height limits that would preserve public views yet permit substantial build-
ings; disallow noxious uses and auto-oriented uses; and require zero lot-line
development. Otherwise, there would be no limits on the uses, heights, or
densities of development allowed. Although tempered as it made its way
through the approval and adoption processes, the basic simplicity of our
proposal survived, and in its application, development has flourished. There
are no signs of anything untoward among the resulting buildings and spaces.
Organic development, uncorseted by zoning codes, would nevertheless
be capable of producing sterile and unfriendly places. Affronts such as blank
walls can be prevented by enforcing design guidelines, but these too must
be kept simple. The Downtown Design Guidelines adopted by the City
of Portland in 1980 filled a slim volume, with just 20 brief statements on
136 Improving the Health of the City
design, but over the years, with the aid of well-intentioned bureaucrats,
these blossomed into a 177-page volume of Central City Fundamental
Design Guidelines adopted in 2001 and updated two years later. As the offi-
cial point of reference for the citizen-volunteers who comprise the Design
Commission, this lengthy and complex package gives them license to raise
almost any issue in reviewing architecture and urban design, lengthening the
process and losing focus on what should be the main design issues of con-
text, scale, and orientation. Along the way, design guidelines have collected
such phrases as “orient design elements to the river,” which can be inter-
preted to call almost any aspect of a submission into question. By all means
begin with a long list, but to be clearly understood and usefully adminis-
tered, design guidelines should be winnowed down to a few unambiguous
statements. The Ten Commandments provide a good model. They do not
cover every eventuality, but all of the really important stuff of morality and
social behavior is addressed.
The recommended tools for regulating development are threefold:

•• defined development areas;

•• a simple permissive development code; and
•• a set of basic design guidelines.

Figure 8.1 In the 1980s, Houston was proud of the swift efficiency with which
Downtown coped with rush-hour traffic. It achieved this by reducing
its streets to stark, multi-lane trafficways with minimal provisions for
pedestrians. Outside rush hours, it was a desolate place.
 Improving the Health of the City 137
These address the discretionary side of urban development. They are
already complemented and enabled by design standards—measurable cri-
teria governing building construction, transportation, and infrastructure.
However, there will always be friction at the interface between qualitative
and quantitative evaluations. While the transportation engineer will quan-
tify the success of a street by its LOS (level of service), its traffic capacity,
the urban designer will look at quite different things to decide on its overall
success and shortcomings. Numbers are more compelling than descriptors,
so the engineer often wins.

Urban Design Quotient

Numbers are always more persuasive than qualitative evaluations, and we
lack an urban design quotient; a way of quantifying the sum total of fac-
tors that make a place attractive to people. That quotient would take into
consideration overall appearance of the street, the transparency and activity
of uses fronting the street, the quality, features, population, and activities of
the sidewalk, as well as the scale and speed of vehicular traffic. In the case
of a park or plaza, the ingredients change, but the conclusion is the same: Is
this an attractive place, a place conducive to peaceable human interaction? If
not, what are the flaws and how might they be corrected? What would make
this a good place to pause for a chat? How could it be more accommodating
to a café table and chairs? Perhaps the biggest obstacle to formulating an
urban design quotient is that we lack a vocabulary for the parts and pieces
of the built and natural environment that constitute each place in the city.
Having no name for them, we fail to recognize them; they remain invisible
and unquantifiable.

Vocabulary for the Public Realm

In his book Landmarks, Robert MacFarlane has collected from around his
native British Isles dialect words for details of the natural world that were
given precise definition by those who depended on them. From just three
villages on the Hebridean Island of Lewis, his colleagues collected over 120
terms for peat and other features of open moorland; words devised over the
centuries by those who wrested a living from what an untutored eye might
dismiss as featureless wilderness. As we have left an agrarian life behind,
so those precise words have disappeared from usage. MacFarlane observes:
“It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are
disappearing; rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that
once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen.”
One could add that at the same time, we lose our sense of wonder for
nature in its myriad tiny details; the moors are perceived once again as just a
wilderness. The blàr mònach (field of peat banks) and carcair (turfed surface
of a peat bank) go unnoticed. Two other names that caught my attention are
138 Improving the Health of the City
Smeuse, a Sussex word for a gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular
passage of a small animal, and Blinter, a Scots word for a cold dazzle, as
of winter stars on a clear night. Each named feature becomes real by being
named, firing a curiosity that leads to better understanding of the place that
we inhabit. How many more intimate details of the Pacific Northwest forests
were known to the generations who labored in them every day? Was there a
word for a break of salmonberry that might conceal an elk through the heat
of the day? And without the word, how many of us notice such a thing?
Although we have been building towns and cities for millennia, we have
yet to develop a vocabulary sufficient to communicate with precision the
many aspects of the public realm necessary to articulate an urban design
quotient. And because we cannot name them, those features tend to go
unseen—as much by urban designers as by everyone else who inhabits
public places. Take the grassy strip outside my house between sidewalk
and curb, made just the right size for a cord of firewood. If it were named
a Cordle, for example, then one would recognize it immediately, and see
others throughout the city’s neighborhoods. But lacking a name, those
spaces are just undifferentiated grassy strips, their purpose long forgotten,
like the iron rings in the curbs, no longer used to tether horses.
Each part of streets, sidewalks, parks, and plazas that make up the public
realm has the potential to serve in different ways. By naming those opportu-
nities, the potential of the place can be made evident. Along the sidewalk of
a shopping street, each patch has its own characteristics. At corners, there
may be a constant moyle of people entering and leaving a corner doorway,
waiting to cross the street, and arriving on the curb. By contrast, at another
place clear of building entrances and uncluttered by street furniture, there
may be a quiet eddy where a café table and chairs would not be out of place
or in the way. Naming of such places would help us to recognize them and
begin to parse the ways in which the public realm could be better used.
“Holly” Whyte (1980) gave us a clue to this in his observations on how
people behave in public spaces, but so far we have failed to take the next step
and construct a vocabulary and grammar that make usability of the public
realm explicit. There should be a name for a low wall that is convenient to
sit on in sun or shade according to the time of day and year. Wordsworth’s
Cumberland Beggar found a rural equivalent in his “low structure of rude
masonry,” but still no precise word for it.

Sensory Urbanism
MacFarlane talks about being able to “see” the natural landscape through
subtle sensory perceptions, such as tiny sounds that one interprets uncon-
sciously, or the feel of mist on one’s skin. Anyone who has walked in the
woods of the Pacific Northwest knows the variable texture of duff beneath
one’s feet or the grapefruit scent of grand firs or an abrupt change in air tem-
perature signaling a change in topography. Some of these immediately burst
 Improving the Health of the City 139
upon the conscious mind, but there are many more that inform anonymously
about the place that one is navigating; presumably an instinct acquired over
millennia of evolution to collect and interpret data.
We have had less time to “see” the city in this sense, and yet there is
no shortage of sensory information in the built environment. The reflected
sound of one’s own footfall offers a whole spectrum of information, from
the ringing ricochet of each step as one walks through a stone tunnel to the
yielding crunch of sea-sorted gravel on a footpath. The faint but distinctively
nutty whiff of coffee beans being roasted several blocks away, or the telltale
stink of burnt milk that pinpoints a careless kitchen. There are subtler clues
such as the effect of lighting in making an alley feel inviting or scary, or
something in between. Blank walls that make one feel isolated and vulnera-
ble, hastening one’s step, versus varied and active storefronts that encourage
dawdling and engagement.
Many of the urban environments that we choose to inhabit—the sort of
place that you would choose to explore on vacation—when time is more
generously available than on workdays—have evolved to their current state
through successive small changes; Camillo Sitte’s buildings “rising bit by bit
in natura.” The survival of cobblestone paving for a century or more sends
a message through your feet that helps to inform you about the place. The
rippled reflection of light off old glass confirms antiquity of the windows—
even if you do not consciously notice it. Other features are purposeful: the
style and ___location of signage, the placing of a streetlight, the arrangement of
tables and chairs. This all adds up to an environment rich in sensory infor-
mation about the place and your situation within it. The interaction between
the features that send us multiple sensory messages become amalgamated as
an overall sense of place: Am I comfortable and safe here, or not? Is this a
place where I am inclined to linger, or should I hurry elsewhere?
Designing an urban space is not very different from designing a room or
a stage set. On the stage, lighting is often the most crucial variable. Yet in
an urban place, lighting is often predetermined, unrelated to the design of
buildings or public realm. In most streets, standard light fixtures are posi-
tioned at regular intervals by a public works agency, the effects of lighting
on sidewalk users and buildings unconsidered. When mercury streetlights
were favored by public works departments, streets became zombie stage sets
with color drained away and underworld shadows disguising familiar faces.
Today, with LED streetlights, colors gleam in midday brightness. Rarely
does the urban designer have control over the ___location, height, or quality
of street lighting. Instead, whatever the public authority provides is a given,
and must be supplemented or screened to create an appropriate ambience
in the subject space.
During the day, places with direct and reflected sunlight have different
potential, shifting light influencing how everything in the public realm is
arranged: trees, signs, seating, and other furniture. There is a place near
St. James Palace in London where a massive brick wall is heated by the sun,
140 Improving the Health of the City
and in the evening offers such a radiant embrace of warmth that pedestrians
visibly slow their pace to enjoy it for as long as they can. On hot summer
days in Portland, there is a plashing fountain and a low wall in Pettygrove
Park that seduces passersby to sit and be silent for a few minutes, losing the
sounds of the city in the falling water and enjoying the cool shade beneath
the trees.
All too often, both architect and the permitting authority will be more
concerned with elevations of a building than with the views from inside
looking out onto the street, or of the influences of scale, material, and color
on the quality of the public space around it. Permitting of design tends to
rely on a static, two-dimensional world; an abstract that has little relation to
the sensory environment by which we navigate. A positive dialogue between
indoors and outdoors is enabled or denied by the size and frequency of win-
dows, the height of sills, ___location of doors, and other details. In this sense,
each building frontage is a frontier between public and private space. It can
be gregarious or standoffish; it can embrace the space outside or ignore it.
But rarely are those the relationships by which it is permitted or refused.
Outside, there are more frontiers to encounter: as between a pedestrian-
dominated plaza and an arterial street where a confining stream of vehicles
dominates. Another kind of frontier depends more on sensory perceptions:
arrival in a place that is abruptly different from the rest of the city. The
Vatican City within Rome is an extreme example. One senses a strong sen-
sory difference stepping into a churchyard, or a small park, or a place as
distinctly different from its surroundings as is the Grassmarket in Edinburgh,
or crossing Market Street into the South Auditorium District in Portland.
As each frontier is crossed, a different set of sensory perceptions is engaged.
We know this instinctively; can we use those sensory differences to design
healthier urban places in which we feel more comfortable, in which we per-
form more effectively?
One very particular frontier is that which divides indoors from a gar-
den or wild landscape. Affinities between hilly wooded landscapes in the
Pacific Northwest and those of Japan have made it easy for the Cascadian
latecomers to learn from centuries of refined building. Japanese architecture
has given us engawa: a sheltered extension of floor space beyond a room
creating a place that is neither indoors nor outside, and usually just above
ground level and devoid of any railing—an infinity floor, one might say.
When weather allows, screens can be rolled back so that inside and out-
side become a single space; nature is invited into the living space. Engawa
enables enjoyment of the natural world while sheltered from rain or hot
sun; biophilic engagement from the comfort of one’s home. By effectively
dissolving the boundary between indoors and outdoors, scents carried on
the breeze, quotidian changes in daylight, the sounds of leaves ruffled by
wandering air—all of these things enter the sensibilities of occupants of the
indoor space. But there is more. Those sensations are layered on top of sen-
suous appreciation of the architectural space: the scent of new-mown grass
 Improving the Health of the City 141
mingles with the smells of cedar wood and tatami, the resonance of sounds
around the room, the rich depths of color and texture visible in polished
floorboards and ceramic cups.
To be exposed to a full range of sensuous experience is to interpret the
richness of a place, and in such places one finds the inspiration to reach fur-
ther in one’s endeavors. This is a clue to the power of biophilia to improve
recovery rates among patients and performance among students and profes-
sionals. It expands the range of available sensations and “raises one’s spirits”
in a palpable and useful way. To be useful, an urban design quotient would
somehow have to register the extent of sensuous opportunities provided
by any given place. Efforts to quantify such qualities are doomed to fail-
ure against the engineer’s LOS, but the elements of a sensory environment
can certainly be named. There are both good sounds (birdsong) and bad
sounds (heavy traffic); good smells (baking bread) and bad smells (carrion);
yet somehow one needs to reach beyond those to a collage of sensations that
is positive or negative in its effect on the whole person. Perhaps the urban
designer should simply strive for multiple positive sensuous stimuli in a place
and a minimum of unpleasant ones. The engawa circumstance described
above is certainly uplifting, and is memorable; two worthwhile aims in the
design of any urban space.

Unselfish Choices
A common error among theories in economics during the past century
has been the assumption that people will tend to do what is in their own
best interest, financial or otherwise. This should have been suspect from
the start, unless one believes altruism to be disguised self-interest—as
certain acts of philanthropy certainly are. Ingenious thought games have
been devised to test the self-interest theory, and time and again results sug-
gest that we often make quite conscious decisions that will benefit a stranger
rather than act selfishly. Economic models that depend upon their subjects
acting in their own best interests hold true some of the time, but fail as rules
because there are far too many exceptions. However, the basic assump-
tion persists because it is a simple and convenient premise with so many
applications. One such application is in the formulation of development
regulations. The assumption is that the applicant will always put personal
gain ahead of the interests of others. Consequently, regulations—including
design standards and guidelines—tend to be written with the intention of
preventing bad things from happening rather than encouraging good things
to happen. A relevant exception to this is Oregon’s planning law, which is
phrased in aspirational terms. Each topic is presented as a State Planning
Goal. The critical virtue of this approach is that instead of setting limits to
what can be done, it encourages innovation toward achieving stated goals.
Development regulations that are aspirational rather than limiting surely
belong in an environment where livability goals are a driving force; in the
142 Improving the Health of the City
healthy city, that can be responsive to change rather than struggling in a
carapace of regulation that no longer fits.
People make unpredictable choices for all sorts of reasons, and some-
times for no reason at all. However, the presumption persists that whatever
choice is made is rational and self-interested. All too often such “choices”
are in fact default positions arrived at without any rational process, or at
best a near-term, partial analysis. An example is why local governments
continue to encourage low-density commercial and residential development,
which thorough analysis would expose as fiscally unsustainable. On the one
hand, elected officials hear no complaint from constituents, so “it must be
what people want.” On the other hand, there are two immediate rewards:
signs that the elected are creating economic development, social infrastruc-
ture (what we used to call jobs), and new sources of taxes. On the first
point, as remarked in an earlier chapter, households buy or rent what is
available, and developers see that as evidence that the market wants more
of the same. The increased time and cost associated with travel as the sprawl
sprawls further are never considered—although during the Great Recession
there was found to be a direct correlation between long commutes and
houses foreclosed upon. On the third point, the city counselors charged
with approving development are rarely aware of the huge, unfunded main-
tenance burden that they are assuming as roads get wider and sewers reach
further. In many postwar suburbs, the infrastructure is beginning to fail
and there are no funds to fix it. Backlogs of “deferred maintenance” (such
a wonderful euphemism for unfunded commitments; it makes them sound
like somebody else’s fault) grow year by year with no plan to address them.
While individuals may be forgiven for making supposed choices through
inaction, that is not acceptable in government. The whole purpose of gov-
ernment is to put the best minds to work on matters of public interest. But
governments, just like individuals, are resistant to change. There is com-
fort and security in doing things the way that we have always done them.
Therefore, many of the reforms suggested in this book—removing devel-
opment from floodplains and seismic danger zones, making development
regulation aspirational rather than limiting—will be difficult to enact, how-
ever much sense they make. It is easier to expand the massive zoning code
with yet another band-aid ordinance to take care of any anomaly that may
arise than to think again about the overall purpose of the document: promo-
tion of public health now long forgotten.
One inducement to government that is effective at every level is the
levying of fair taxes that have broad public support. A recipe for quenching
the spate of low-density suburban development may therefore be introduc-
tion of realistic system development charges on every new home. SDCs
(Systems Development Charges) are already levied on developments in
Portland. These are one-time fees based on the proposed new use or increase
in use of a property. They apply to both new construction and residential
projects that increase impact to city infrastructure, from parks to pipes.
 Improving the Health of the City 143
For an affordable home in the city, such charges should be small as the
infrastructure is already in place and maintenance costs are shared among
the thousands of homes that benefit. A new home with a big yard in a low-
density suburb, on the other hand, is currently subsidized handsomely by
taxpayers citywide, a regressive tax.3 It is here proposed that those costs for
infrastructure and services be levied in full directly on each new home, along
with a contribution toward future maintenance of the infrastructure. Part
of this system development charge could be attached to the purchase price
of the home, the balance being paid over time as raised property taxes. Of
course, this would spark a revolt among homebuilders—as did introduction
of Portland’s urban growth boundary—but the ultimate defense is that it
is a fair levy directly calibrated to the costs generated by each new home.
Furthermore, it is a progressive tax. Its application to existing homes would
amount to an updating of the basis for property taxes, which would face
some hurdles because of existing property tax limitation measures. It could
be levied on the assessed value of each property under the current method,
or could be formulated on a combination of built square footage plus site
area. The latter would favor apartments, condominiums, and small houses
on small lots—which includes most affordable and workforce housing—
and would be greatest on large homes that occupy large sites. The net effect
would be to shift homebuilding away from sprawling suburbs and toward
the small lot housing seen at Orenco and in older parts of central Beaverton,
Gresham, and elsewhere.

Evading Natural Disasters

A property-related levy would be a direct disincentive to development in
areas liable to flood or seismic damage. However, further additions to prop-
erty taxes—beyond those suggested above—would be disallowed by law, so
instead the levy might be made through insurance. This would be simplest
in the case of flood insurance, for which the state could add a sum to each
annual premium to underwrite its own risk; currently about $7.5 billion
statewide. Spread over several years among the 31,600 National Flood
Insurance policies currently in place in Oregon, the increase in annual pre-
mium would be small, but significant enough to be avoided if possible.
As suggested in “Resiliency” in Chapter 6, properties within a docu-
mented floodplain or floodway should be able to claim compensation for a
loss only once, but upon payment would qualify for assistance to relocate to
a safe site. Relocation assistance may be supportable from funds collected
by the state to underwrite its flood insurance liability. In return for reloca-
tion, development rights on the vacated site would revert to the state and be
extinguished—effectively placing a conservation easement on the property.
A management plan would prepare for non-habitable uses for the vacated
sites. These may include agriculture, natural open space, playing fields, or
parking lots; uses for which flood insurance would be limited.
144 Improving the Health of the City
Inducements to avoid seismic dangers are more complex. There are three
separate categories of hazard, each meriting a different approach:

•• properties in designated tsunami zones;

•• properties in identified earthquake and landslide areas; and
•• all other properties likely to be subject to seismic damage.

Properties in tsunami zones number tens of thousands, including parts of

most coastal communities, many of them long established and understand-
ably resistant to disturbance. Thus far, improvements have been made to
increase and identify escape routes for people to reach safe, higher ground,
assuming that tsunami warnings are responded to and buildings are evac-
uated immediately. This is unlikely if the warning comes in the night or
during a storm. Enhancing and identifying escape routes is an imperfect
but essential first step. Ultimately, the goal is to remove the threat of death
or serious injury from a tsunami, and that can only be achieved by remov-
ing development to safe locations. Assuming that the federal government is
unwilling and the state unable to finance such a massive relocation, a means
must be found to induce incremental removals. The first priority should be
those buildings in which many people congregate frequently, such as hospi-
tals, schools, and colleges, and those whose funding includes public money,
which can be used to leverage relocation, such as municipal offices and
subsidized housing. Other homes, retail, and commercial properties have
strong motivation to stay, although some may be excluded from further
flood insurance as outlined above. In any case, following relocation, devel-
opment entitlements on the vacated site would revert to the state and be
extinguished. Over time, voids in the town’s structure and absence of many
of its institutions would reduce property values and induce more to relocate
to the new safe site.
Before any tsunami-threatened community can contemplate relocation, it
will need somewhere to relocate to. Since relocation is likely to take years
or even decades to accomplish, that site needs to be on high ground close
by—as near as possible to the original site so that distance interferes as little
as possible with day-to-day activities during the years of transition. In the
case of Astoria, only a few properties are affected,4 whereas all of Seaside
would have to relocate to be safe.5 The opportunity is to correct the planning
deficiencies of each community in designing the configuration and adminis-
tration of the new town or village. Fundamental goals of social, economic,
and developmental sustainability should be established. An aspirational
development code should be adopted for the new site and an equitable bal-
ance between the needs of people and vehicles established. Goals, codes,
design standards, and guidelines should flow from the State Planning Goals:
aspirational, not based on limits, and tempered by what we have learned
about sustaining urban health in its broadest sense. Development of a tem-
plate for relocated communities should be undertaken by the state to ensure
 Improving the Health of the City 145
consistency. One hopes that the first tsunami to strike is small, so that the
real and present danger of a major tsunami is impressed on everyone, moti-
vating them to act upon relocation. That might, for example, stimulate
government to subsidize the cost of relocating buildings to the new site.
The owners of properties in identified earthquake and landslide areas
will probably continue to ignore their plight until a sufficiently powerful
event occurs to gain their attention by inflicting damage on buildings and
equipment. Public properties and uses that require an operating permit
could be given a multi-year deadline to relocate to a safe site. Over time, US
Resiliency Council6 risk assessment may become a standard component of
property evaluations, and classification may be reflected in insurance pre-
miums as they are in Japan, but that will take years. Probably the only
practical step to be taken in the meantime is for the state to devise a pro-
gram for subsidized relocation of persons and property to safe locations,
and to apply to FEMA for funding to implement a pilot program. FEMA
may be prepared to do this just as it has begun to assist with residential seis-
mic upgrades in Portland. FEMA is the agency that will be called upon when
a major seismic event strikes Oregon, and a few millions invested now could
avert expenditure of billions in post-disaster recovery, not to mention the
lives saved by relocations in advance of the disaster. As with the proposed
tsunami program, development rights to evacuated properties would pass to
the state and immediately be extinguished.
“All other properties” includes everything not located within a defined
flood or seismic hazard zone, but nonetheless prone to serious damage in a
major seismic event. That is to say everything west of the Cascade Range,
plus a few hotspots in south-central Oregon.7 The vast majority of affected
properties are timber houses, which are relatively simple to secure against
collapse or serious damage. Bolting the house to its foundations and secur-
ing or removing brick chimneys are the biggest tasks. Fitting gas cutoff
valves and securing hot water tanks in place are also important. The scale
of investment for larger unreinforced masonry buildings is much greater. In
Portland, a program of required upgrades by property owners is currently
being negotiated. The greatest hazards, such as unsecured parapet walls,
will have the shortest deadlines of 5 or 10 years, while more invasive and
expensive upgrades such as installing diaphragm walls may have deadlines
as much as 25 years or more into the future.

Addressing the Sensuous Environment

Are there ways in which Portland’s sensuous environment can be more finely
tuned to harmonize with livability values? First, there are still wounds in the
urban fabric that need to be healed. They were inflicted when the freeways
were incised: forbidden pedestrian crossings, missing sidewalks, curbs with
radiuses designed for fast vehicles that expand the roadway and displace
the sidewalk. Those need to be restored to an equitable design. But there
146 Improving the Health of the City
are many more directly sensed qualities to be explored and refined. Most
sidewalks are cast-in-place concrete, older examples imprinted with the year
in which they were cast, and often the mason’s name, and sometimes the
contemporary name of the street, since changed. Those details contribute to
the identity of a place: something that people often register unconsciously,
but which contributes to a sense of wayfinding. Sometimes the curbs are
of granite, invisible in dusty summer but bright as an agate found on the
beach when it is raining. If you walk in the South Park Blocks, you may
feel a softer footfall as you tread on asphalt tiles. On the light rail streets,
there is the warm color and human scale of brick paving, as there is across
Pioneer Courthouse Square. An unfamiliar texture and brighter reflection
from white granite paving across Director Park and its flanking streets.
Rough cobbles underfoot when you cross one of the older streets, or send-
ing a tangible warning when crossing the light rail trackway downtown.
These differences may not be things that one thinks about consciously, but
as with the inscriptions in concrete sidewalks, they inform the senses about
the place and its qualities. An abrupt change in paving material can signal
crossing into a different place—as when one steps from the sidewalk into
the plaza that separates Portland Art Museum from the Mark Building, the
former Masonic Temple. There is the distinctive sound of walking on the
Pearl District boardwalk that reaches north from Jamison Park. The differ-
ence in sound distinguishes the place and perhaps recalls other places with
the same remembered sounds, enriching perception of this place.
Sounds inform the sensuous environment in many different ways: the rag-
ged honking of geese far overhead signal seasonal migrations across a vast
land, while the mellow hoot of an antique steam train echoes from a distant
past—in sharp contrast to the aggressive howl of freight trains waking the
whole town with prolonged nocturnal blasts. Then there is the incessant
hum of freeway traffic a mile away, a quiet mumble after midnight but an
urgent scramble by day, peppered with the staccato of air braking trucks.
At certain places along the MAX line, the rattling clackety-clack of wheels
crossing other tracks. Along the streetcar line, the characteristic whirring
crescendo of an approaching car, and sometimes its grumpy bark as some-
one or something strays onto the tracks ahead. When the wind blows, a
swishing of trees as calming as a waterfall pervades the air, but close to
flagpoles, there is the irritating clank of halyard against metal pole. At a
more personal level, there is the sound of one’s own footfall, distinguishing
hollow paving from solid gravel from grass, and the warning squeak of an
approaching bicycle breaking, the swish of someone sweeping or the hellish
sound of a leaf blower. Each of these contributes to instinctive wayfinding
and to the identity of each place where a sound is heard or a texture felt.
Scent is said to be the most memorable of the senses, and one does not
have to be a Proust scholar to be transported back in time by the whiff of
Daphne Odora or some other flower from childhood. Whether pleasing or
just distinctive, recognized smells are powerful stimuli: hot asphalt, newly
 Improving the Health of the City 147
cut grass, roasting coffee, baking bread, and the emanations of a nearby
brewery each lodge in one’s memory to identify a place. At various stages
of demolition and construction, a building site will send out a succession of
distinctive odors: musty cellars and ancient timber; damp earth and fresh
sawdust; brick dust and wet mortar; plaster and pitch; paint and varnish.
These, like seasonal plants, mark time as well as place.
Color and light also register both time and place, changing with time
of day, with the season and with weather. At the crudest level, they com-
municate drab or attractive, safe or scary. We spend about a quarter of our
waking lives without natural light, yet most urban places are designed to
be seen and used in daylight. The ways in which we light the environment
at night are often crude, nominally designed for safety and wayfinding,
but most usually the result of standard street lighting regularly spaced and
clustered at traffic intersections. There is rarely coordination between street
lighting and other sources such as storefront windows, and when there
is—for example, in the original 1983 design for Denver’s 16th Street Mall—
building uses change and maintenance of public lighting takes unexpected
turns. Sidewalks and other pedestrian spaces usually depend on light spilled
from fixtures directed at the roadway.
The realm of the pedestrian after dark is generally inconsistent in illumina-
tion and color rendition; at its worst when sodium or other color-distorting
light sources are used. Where personal safety—or more accurately the sensa-
tion of personal safety and security—is important, such as shopping malls
and other places of public congress, the tendency is to saturate everything
in bright light. Colors sparkle, every detail is visible, but there is something
amiss. Actually, two things are amiss: such bright lighting tells your body
that it is midday and is out of sync with circadian rhythms; and at the
edges of the illuminated area, the contrast with dark spaces beyond sends
warnings of potential danger: places where villains could lurk. Thoughtful
design of any urban place will address these concerns, and will modulate
light intensities and temperatures as is fitting to each function of the space.
Always enough light to recognize a face at a few paces’ distance, but no
dazzle and no pockets of inky darkness. A new generation of OLED light
sources can revolutionize urban spaces for people after dark, with light
emitted uniformly across a surface, controllable by color temperature and
brightness with no dazzle. These will enable precision in designing safe and
comfortable nighttime environments. But even with today’s equipment, the
night environment is much easier to control than daylight, which constantly
changes in quality and direction.
Places by day mostly depend on random factors for the quality and suita-
bility of their lighting. Apart from seasonal changes in the color and intensity
of light, the angle of the sun changes too, and its color and direction also
change continuously between dawn and dusk. Consider the effects of this on
any street. How tall are the buildings that contain the street, and how reflec-
tive are they? How reflective is the paving? Are there trees, utility poles, or
148 Improving the Health of the City
other things in the street that will absorb light and create shadows? The
problem of daylight design of a public place is that it is dynamic and largely
uncontrolable: a stage that never looks exactly the same twice. This is where
color and reflectiveness of materials become so important. Street furniture
such as shelters for transit patrons that encourage use in rain or shine, in
bright or murky light—and by night. Will the trees cast dense shadows that
are welcome in the heat of summer but forbidding in chilly weather, or will
they cast a dappled shade? Does a tangle of overhead cables give a tawdry
appearance to the street or are they camouflaged by street trees?
The whole street cannot be optimally tuned, but following Eero Saarinen’s
advice to always look to the next largest and next smallest things for design
advice, the focus should be on the aisle between curb and building and
from paving to the underside of the street tree canopy. This is the primary
pedestrian realm in which light and color have the greatest influence on the
quality of a place. The other places where light and color are important are
those in which one can sit—whether public or private, or lodged in an uncer-
tain place between. In the “theater of the street,” it is the actors who are the
main attraction, but the staging is what draws them there in the first place.
The great sweep of the grand staircase in Garnier’s Paris Opera, displayed
the arriving public so that, as Walter Benjamin (1969) put it, “Imperial Paris
could gaze at itself with satisfaction.” Common sidewalks fulfill a similar if
less lofty function, and deserve careful attention to color, light, and tactile
materials by day and after dark. This is especially true of retail and other
active “storefront streets” in which businesses and gregarious people find
one another to their mutual benefit.
The last component of the sensuous environment is motion. Each of the
senses is experienced at a discrete moment in time, but it is the interaction
between the sentient body and the environment through which it moves
that builds a coherent experience. Time and motion are implicit in deciding
how to use or interact with the environment. This decision is the interface
between livability and the places that one chooses to inhabit: acceptance of
the places that fit one’s particular set of values; rejection of places that do
not. A central thesis of this book is that in Portland, purposeful steps have
been taken over time to create a physical environment that fits the set of
values behind a consensus on livability. The task before us is to continue to
enhance the sensuous environment, attuning it more closely to the objectives
of the healthy city. To do so, we need to be clear about what those objec-
tives are, and we need to correlate those priorities with others in the daily
activities of the city.

Updating Livability Expectations

To many, livability is a suspect term because it defies universal definition. It
is a portmanteau for all the positive things that contribute to a desired and
achievable lifestyle—all that we hold valuable and worthwhile in our lives.
 Improving the Health of the City 149
What we have described as “the healthy city” is a physical manifestation
of this, not modeled on everybody’s values, but on those of active, civic-
minded, often early-adopter members of Portland’s population. The city is
not without its faults in architecture, urban design, social equity, and a host
of other subjects. However, there is a cohesion among the physical features
of central Portland and the inner neighborhoods that is unmistakably rec-
ognizable by visitors and residents alike. It is the anatomy of this physical
city that this book analyzes from a broadly drawn perspective of planning
and urban design. But this is a snapshot taken in 2016. What are the critical
steps to ensure that positive progress to date will continue into the future?
That is a vital question for everyone who cares about this unusual place, and
especially to those whose work will influence the outcome.
An immediate call to action is to address the real and present threats to
our livability enumerated in “What Is Livability Worth?” in Chapter 3. If we
fail to address climate change, seismic hazard, unsustainable use of natural
resources, political polarization, and ever-present poverty in an affluent soci-
ety, then the dystopia presented in Chapter 9 is likely to ensue. The problem
is that the structure of government—jurisdictional boundaries, the length of
elected terms, a focus on issues of the moment—conspire to make these ques-
tions unpalatable to those in the strongest positions to address them.
For a century and a half, Portland’s population has gone about its daily
business as if seismology were some obscure technical term with which they
had no need to be concerned. Now we are slowly coming face to face with the
probability of a major event within current lifetimes, and we are beginning
to do something about preparing for it. There is some parallel to the ways
in which we respond to climate change. Although much in the news, it has
yet to change people’s lives to any substantial degree, and until it does, there
are a lot of more pressing issues to deal with. There is a steady in-migration
from states to the south, none of whom would label themselves “climate
change migrants,” but that is certainly a factor in their decision to move, and
in their chosen destination. Even in Oregon, water shortages are occurring,
causing real hardship to some while others continue to squander it. Perhaps
the most important thing that Portlanders could do to protect the future of
their livability is to design and act on initiatives that directly address the five
too-big-to-solve problems of climate change, seismic hazard, unsustainable
use of natural resources, political polarization, and ever-present poverty in
an affluent society.
To bring about fundamental changes in the way that things get done
between politics and commerce, either serious disaster or great wealth is
usually necessary. Disasters tend to occur unbidden and without notice.
Wealth we have some ability to control. In this chapter, we have outlined
reforms to development regulation that would diminish the damage from
disasters, protect valued components of the city, and expand the potential
for wealth generation across the urbanized landscape. As never before, we
are equipped with massive amounts of data with which to compare and
150 Improving the Health of the City
verify plans before enacting them, and this alone should make the steps to
reform easier to understand and more palatable for our leaders to enact.
This would amount to a broadly based initiative to address all of the five big
challenges. We should begin with the modest steps of removing populous
uses such as schools, hospitals, and government offices from places that we
know to be potentially fatal to the occupants—from floodplains, tsunami
zones, and landslide areas. By demonstrating firm but fair processes in such
obvious cases, broader approval can be gained for equally important but
legally or financially more difficult relocations. Scope for achieving safety
relocations within the city of Portland may be relatively limited in compari-
son to places such as Pacific City and Seaside, but they will gain statewide
attention and set precedents for action.

A Grammar of Place
All of our senses are constantly at work providing both conscious and
unconscious feedback about the places that we inhabit as we move through
each space and each day. Only a few senses are consciously employed in
designing the public realm because most remain unnamed and elusive. We
have no names for their manifestations so we do not see them. Put another
way, design decisions tend to be more visceral than rational since our analy-
sis of place tends to be superficial, so many of its features being unnamed
and unseen. We know instinctively when we find a special place, but lack
the vocabulary to explain why it is special. Designers need a bigger vocabu-
lary that includes precise words for sensory perceptions of place. We also
need a grammar to help parse complex places.
As well as a grammar and syntax of place, we need greater discipline in
responsible use of land and development. Finding a politically palatable way
to do this and an equitable way to implement it will be difficult, but this is
a responsibility that planners and their colleagues in the design professions
cannot shirk. There is no one else to whom the problems can be passed.
The responsibility is as existential as the risk of devastation from impending
natural disaster.

Notes
1 Prior to 1979, the zoning code did not address building height, as the Scenic
Resources Protection Plan, City of Portland, 1991, shows.
2 Mike McCulloch AIA, Chair of the Portland Design Commission, a panel of
volunteers appointed by the City of Portland.
3 Assessing the Costs of Alternative Development Paths in Australian Cities (see
http://bit.ly/2bGbSaf).
4 Dogami Tsunami Inundation Map, Astoria (see www.oregongeology.org/pubs/
tim/p-TIM-Clat-04.htm).
5 Dogami Tsunami Inundation Map, Seaside and Gearhart (see www.oregongeology.
org/pubs/tim/p-TIM-Clat-08.htm).
 Improving the Health of the City 151
6 US Resiliency Council (see www.usrc.org/about-us).
7 Earthquake Hazard Map of Oregon (see www.wou.edu/las/physci/taylor/g473/
seismic_hazards/gms100_EQ_maps_OR.pdf).

Bibliography
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Bruegmann, R. (2005) Sprawl: A Compact History. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
City of Portland (1972) Planning Guidelines – Portland Downtown Plan 1972.
Available at: www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/94718.
City of Portland (1980/1983) Portland Downtown Design Guidelines. Available at:
www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/102045.
City of Portland (1990/2001/2003) Portland Central City Fundamental Design
Guidelines. Available at: www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/102045.
Denver Central Platte Valley Comprehensive Plan Amendment; Planning and
Community Development Office, City & County of Denver, 1991.
Ellard, C. (2015) Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life.
New York: Bellevue Literary Press.
Frumkin, H. (2006) Cities and the Health of the Public. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt
University Press.
Garrick and Marshall, Traffic Safety and the Smart Growth Street Network.
Glaeser, E. (2011) Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us
Ricker, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. London: Macmillan.
Keefe, L.T. History of Zoning in Portland 1918–1959: City of Portland. Available
at: www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/147441.
Krugman, P. (1996) The Self-Organizing Economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
MacFarlane, R. (2015) Landmarks. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Putnam, R.D. (1995) Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Sitte, C. (1889) Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen. Reproduced
as The Art of Building Cities (2013). Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing.
Vitruvius, M.P. (1960) The Ten Books on Architecture. Dover Edition.
Whyte, W.H. (1980/2001) The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. New York:
Project for Public Spaces.
Zipf, G. (1949) Human Behavior and the Principle of Last Effort. Cambridge, MA:
Addison-Wesley.
9 Look Back in Anguish

A Backward Glance from 2050

A dystopian backward glance from 2050 serves as a warning of what can
go wrong if planners, elected decision-makers, and those who depend on
them do not use their knowledge responsibly. Widely shared values in the
1970s set cities throughout Oregon on a trajectory of increasingly health-
ful environments. As our preferred lifestyles assume a more metropolitan
focus, a fresh consensus around healthy lifestyles is emerging. There is a
coherent plan for Portland’s future, but political will can be fickle. How can
the design profession—and planners in particular—become more effective
voices as the formwork for the future is constructed? The question is urgent
for every city—for the cities of the future will be adaptations of those that
we inhabit now.
Today in 2050, we look back in astonishment at what appears to be
willful ignorance with which the Pacific Northwest mismanaged planning
and development. How they could compartmentalize full and detailed
knowledge of the inevitable destruction and loss of life that has scarred our
communities so deeply is hard to understand.
To be fair, it was not until the late twentieth century that the probable
consequences of a major seismic event—or its immanence—were prop-
erly understood, and by that time land uses and property ownerships had
been long established and most of the city had been built out. Tank farms
had been built on land liable to seismic liquefaction, whole towns had
been built within tsunami zones, unstable hillsides, including hundreds
of former landslides, had been crowded with homes. What is difficult to
comprehend is that nothing was done to move people and property out of
harm’s way.
Cascadia was created by violent earthquakes and massive floods, as every
schoolchild knows. Each feature of the landscape speaks of it: the towering
Cascade Range and the Columbia Gorge carved through the mountains by
the Missoula Floods over 12,000 years ago. Yet in Portlanders’ experience,
prior to the “Event,” as we now refer to it, nothing much had ever happened
except for floods before the rivers were dammed, and some minor quakes.
 Look Back in Anguish 153
Throughout the region, buildings, roads, rail tracks, pipelines, and cables
were set down wherever convenient and practical—but generally without
considering the effects of an earthquake. Most houses were built with noth-
ing more than gravity holding them down to their foundations. To their
credit, in Portland, the natural gas company had completed replacement
of cast-iron lines with flexible plastic and had installed thousands of cutoff
valves. Those initiatives undoubtedly saved hundreds of lives and averted
massive property losses to fire.
Meanwhile, geologists, oceanographers, and other scientists were decod-
ing the history built into Cascadia’s rocks and shorelines. They calculated
the massive pent-up seismic forces accumulating far underground. They
calibrated the clock of past earthquakes, great and small. They identified
hillsides where substantial landslides had occurred, noting the devastation
that they had caused, and the likelihood of repetition.
The immediate hinterland of coastal beaches had been particularly
revealing of the history of tsunamis tied to major seismic events. Ponds and
wetlands formed behind beaches generate organic, peaty sediments that
accumulate in layers during quiet times—often lasting a century or more,
but each major tsunami shifts a hefty layer of sand and gravel from the
beach and deposits it over the wetlands. By cutting a section through this
layer cake, and by dating entrapped plant material, each event can be dated
and quantified. In some cases, the date can be cross-referenced with other
data. Thus, we can pinpoint the preceding major tsunami (an event rated at
about Magnitude 9) to have struck at 9 p.m. on January 25, 1700. This pre-
cision is due to the diligent record keeping of Japanese harbormasters who
documented the time and date of tsunami damage in their harbors along
the entire southeast seaboard of the Japanese islands. From those records,
Earthquake Magnitude

9.01 9.01 8.94 8.97 9.09 8.90 8.87 9.00

9 8.67 8.66 8.8 8.7
8.35 8.41 8.41 8.34
8.17 8.15 8.23 8.24 8.25 8.19
8
Today

7
6
-2500 -2000 -1500 -1000 -500 0 500 1000 1500 2000
Years 1700

Figure 9.1 Graph showing historic occurrences of Cascadian earthquakes

greater than magnitude 8. The average interval between these events is
225 years; the last one occurred in 1700. The Moment Magnitude Scale
measures the energy released in an earthquake. It is a logarithmic scale
in which each magnitude increase represents 101.5, or approximately 32
times the energy released. Thus, M7 releases 1,000 times as much energy
as M5, and M9 releases 106, or 1,000,000 times, as much energy as a
magnitude 5 event.
154 Look Back in Anguish
the epicenter of the event could be mapped and timed, and from the depth
of the sandy deposits behind Oregon’s beaches, the magnitude of the event
could be estimated.
This unsettling history was widely published, complete with disquieting
numbers describing the likelihood of recurrence and the extent of probable
damage. But too much was invested in the status quo. Progressively greater
investments had been made in property and development—some of it in
eminently vulnerable locations—to the extent that the entire regional econ-
omy depended upon it. Business had a vested interest in carrying on without
regard to all that alarmist nonsense about earthquakes and melting ice caps.
Politics followed suit—so there was tacit agreement among leadership to do
nothing; to continue to live, work, and prosper just as we always have done,
eyes to the future firmly closed.
On the national level, this same tacit agreement to ignore what we knew
but found inconvenient persisted. As late as 2016, there were senators who
dismissed climate change as partisan (or Chinese) propaganda, the pros-
pect of rising sea levels as fantasy. For over a century, we had built most
of our oil refineries at sea level for the convenience of ocean-going tankers
and built rail lines along the level margins of waterways. We ranged high-
value buildings along waterfronts, and on lands that have flooded since
time immemorial, including four-fifths of Florida. Early warnings, such
as Hurricane Sandy in 2012, inflicted serious damage along the eastern
seaboard, and confirmed earlier predictions of the ___location and extent of
flooding—damage was estimated at $75 billion after the event. Yet little
was done to discourage redevelopment on properties known to be vulner-
able to flooding. National Flood Insurance paid up and the claimants rebuilt
in the same flood-prone locations again.
The first West Coast wake-up call came with the coincidence of a strong
El Niño, unprecedented ice melt in Greenland and across the Arctic, and a
huge storm. Exacerbated by high tides, coastal communities and maritime
industries from San Diego to Anchorage were inundated, battered by heavy
flotsam, and lost utilities for weeks, and in some cases months. So great
were the claims for losses that insurance companies began to demand higher
premiums, little guessing what lay ahead. A news report from 2033 summa-
rized the national effects of this catastrophe with a focus on Oregon:

Climate change was never taken very seriously at the beginning of the
century. Hard to believe as tens of thousands of “climate refugees”
from Arizona, Texas, and Southern California crowd into the Pacific
Northwest every month. The political perspectives that they brought
with them tipped the balance of values and majorities to the right.
Out went Oregon’s 1970s land use laws; urban growth boundaries
are a thing of the past. Fortunes were made as the barriers to develop-
ment came down and a huge development boom solved the longest
economic downturn in Oregon’s history—or so it seemed at the time.
 Look Back in Anguish 155
The Willamette Valley has become a linear city (mostly sprawling
suburb) from Eugene to Portland and north to central Washington.
The only things that prevented the same massive growth between
Vancouver, BC, and Olympia were the combined effects of ocean rise
and catastrophic flooding. It began with destruction of Olympia’s
sewage plant and the Mount Rainier mudslide that all but erased com-
munities between Seattle and Tacoma 30 miles to the south. On the
eastern seaboard, Hurricane Sandy of 2012 had been the first of many
“superstorms.” After the Arctic oil fires and the subsequent blacken-
ing and melting of the Greenland ice, the oceans rose an average of
5 feet. Every high tide brought destruction to the island communities of
Puget Sound, and coastal communities from Alaska to Chile and from
Newfoundland to Tierra del Fuego. When high tides coincided with
major storms inland, whole riverside communities were swept away.
Births of mixed ethnicity exceeded all others for the first time last
year. Paradoxically, as our community has become more diverse, it
has become more polarized and less tolerant—especially of seniors
and vets who together make up half of our population; a burden that
we cannot afford, as spreading poverty shows. Some blame the “New
Twos”—those who rode the boom years of unfettered development in
Washington and Oregon to join the wealthiest 2 percent. Throughout
Cascadia, blame is laid on 3.5 million climate refugees who sacked
long-held environmental values and ditched 1970s Oregon state plan-
ning laws that had for 50 years contained urban development.
(by our special correspondent, Boffin News Media  2033)

Once the development boom was over, massive unemployment returned.

There were fewer taxpayers to support a growing legion of retirees and
veterans. Congestion increased as funding for transit was withdrawn and
new development sprawled thinly across farm and forest land. Many
municipalities went bankrupt, and few were able to expand infrastructure
into new developments. Groundwater became contaminated, but munici-
palities could not afford to treat it. Large sections of the utility distribution
systems have been damaged or destroyed by flooding and erosion. E. coli
outbreaks are still common.
Since 80 percent of the nation’s oil refineries are on coastal or waterway
sites, flood damage has permanently reduced gasoline production by at least
a third. Across the country, the effect on food distribution has been devas-
tating, with produce that has survived annual drought now spoiling in the
fields for lack of transport. Washington and Oregon are luckier than most
because there is still water for irrigation—west of the Cascades at least—
and enough productive land escaped boom development. Prices have made
food the number-one expenditure for most households. At least obesity is
in retreat. People are walking more and eating less—though not by choice.
*****
156 Look Back in Anguish
After almost three and a half centuries of relative calm, the earth spoke in
a voice so mighty that none could ignore it. The shaking seemed mild at
first, and people were slow to react. Along the coast, the tsunami warning
system howled its message, but gave precious little time for those who were
vulnerable to gather their wits and move to higher ground as they had been
instructed. The fact that the alarm came in the small hours of the morning
and during a heavy rainstorm has led to speculation that many dismissed the
warning as either an error or a badly timed exercise; in any event, few made
it to their designated safe assembly points.
Such unwisely sited towns as Pacific City and Seaside simply disappeared,
as did Long Beach in Washington. More surprising was how far inland the
devastation reached. The advancing wall of water entering the Columbia
Estuary was pinched as the channel narrowed, and soon reared up as a fear-
somely mountainous bore, gathering speed and stripping away everything
in its path. Like a high-speed glacier, it carried a massive load of flotsam
before it: trees, buildings, boats, trucks, bridges. Massive and unstoppable,
this roaring monster could be heard 50 miles away like brooding thunder.
Those in its path were still scrambling from shattered buildings, many in
Clatskanie half-buried by a massive landslide. Longview and Kelso were
swept by a massive tide of spreading and roiling waters. Pinched again by
the narrowing gorge at Kalama, the advancing torrent rose 70 feet, scarring
the rockface with the wreckage it hurled before it. At St. Helens, the river
began to flow upstream, then a rush of debris followed, crushing moored
boats and jetties, the water that bore them along invisible beneath the chaotic
jumble of wreckage.
Apart from a scattered chorus of alarms sounding, Portland was strangely
quiet. On the Willamette, a huge slick of oil and industrial chemicals from the
tank farms contracted slightly, then spread again as it began to move upstream,
the breeze coaxing wisps of corrosive mist from the smooth surface. On the
banks, the same breeze randomly cleared a fog of dust to reveal tumbled build-
ings and knots of people gazing distractedly about them. The sky was a dirty
brown, much like the aftermath of a forest fire.
Portland had been set back a century in just 173 seconds of shaking that
seemed to those who experienced it to last a lifetime. Unknown to them,
communities up and down the West Coast had been decimated. Despite the
barrier of the San Juan Islands, the combination of earthquake and tsunami
had completely destroyed the oil refinery at Anacortes, and Puget Sound
was ringed with rubble where thriving cities and productive industries had
stood minutes before. Vancouver’s misery was compounded by waves of
mud swept into the city by the last burst of tsunami.

Advance Precautions to Be Taken Now

All this is predictable in 2016. Seismic building codes have been enforced
since 1974 to ensure that occupants could escape serious injury when an
 Look Back in Anguish 157
earthquake strikes, but the majority of buildings downtown and elsewhere
predate these codes. Efforts to encourage seismic refits seem doomed to fail-
ure, since they require owners to forego years of income to repay upgrade
costs—for something that many believe will never happen.
Vested interests in property have led owners to develop in places known
to be threatened by flood or worse. Reasoning is simplistic: that if develop-
ment is permitted, then the permitting authority has by implication declared
it a safe place to build. Neither owner nor developer is required to look any
further for permission to build. Intervention by national or local government
would be viewed as unwarranted interference; a “taking” if it prevented
or even reduced permitted development, requiring payment of compensa-
tion to the property owner. The very suggestion of limiting development
rights because of seismic or flood risk would foment far more outcry than
any elected official cares to contemplate. Banks continue to extend loans
to houses built on steep slopes over crustal faults, and to provide loans for
industrial facilities on land prone to liquefaction in an earthquake. Society
has chosen to ignore the risks, encouraged in their belief by the fact that the
city has never yet sustained serious earthquake damage.
One profession that operates at the intersection of these conflicting inter-
ests and is in possession of the facts has chosen to do nothing: the planners
who formulate and enforce development regulations. Elected leaders are
their bosses, and property owners and developers are their clients, both
committed through self-interest to maintain the status quo. Planners alone
have the knowledge and the moral duty to intervene.
This is a heavy charge to lay upon planning professionals, but initiative
to realign development regulations to safeguard the public at large remains
their first responsibility. The hazards that make development unwise: fault
lines, landslide risk, liquefaction risk, and floodways are all mapped. Such
well-documented facts cannot be ignored by a professional entrusted with
regulating safe and orderly development. There would be concerted resist-
ance to any change that is seen as downzoning or otherwise reducing the
potential value of property, but that is no reason to acquiesce, to accept the
certainty of injury and loss of life.
We must find a way to stop development in locations threatened by natu-
ral disasters. The financial implications are huge, but tiny in comparison to
the losses that will be sustained when “the big one” hits. It will take an Act
of Congress to defend public agencies from “takings” lawsuits, but without
meaningful action now, we know with absolute certainty that massive losses
of life and property will occur through flood- or earthquake-related damage.
Action that every planning department could undertake immediately is
the creation of a “natural hazard” overlay zone. This would reproduce on
the zoning maps the outline of areas documented by FEMA and the Oregon
Department of Geology and Mining Industries (DOGAMI) as hazardous
due to potential flood, landslide, or seismic damage. The explanation of
“hazard zone” would advise that development of habitable space is strongly
158 Look Back in Anguish
discouraged. In an area of less extreme hazard, where lives would not be
endangered, lesser restrictions might be recommended: in an area liable to
seismic liquefaction, for example, light construction may be permissible.
In 2016, many jurisdictions have resiliency plans in place or in prepara-
tion. These acknowledge the reality of dangers due to natural events, but in
most cases operate within established planning regulations. In other words,
they do not address permitting development in places that are known to be
potentially dangerous or even fatal to occupants. Wherever these dangers
are well documented, the planners responsible for regulating development
are failing to take these facts into land use regulation, even in an advisory
sense. That they prefer not to anger their bosses and elected representatives
is understandable, but knowing what information we possess, it has to be
said that their failure to do so is tantamount to gross negligence as it will
lead to serious injuries and fatalities. So what steps should planners be tak-
ing now? As a first step, zoning maps should be marked with the mapped
extent of the natural hazards to which vulnerable sites are prone. This can
be justified as an element of the resiliency plan, providing advance warning
of places where recovery efforts will likely be needed. Even without change
to underlying permitted land use regulation, natural hazard mapping would
guide intelligent siting decisions; for example, ensuring that a school is not
built in a high-risk ___location.
*****
If planners are to tackle existential threats head on, what actions are neces-
sary to minimize injury and loss of life in a major flood or earthquake? First,
a commonly agreed set of thresholds is needed on what constitutes vulner-
ability to natural hazards. We learned from Japan’s magnitude 9.0 Tohoku
Earthquake in 2011 that mapped tsunami zones can be woefully optimistic,
yet some universal standard of vulnerability is clearly needed. Federal map-
ping by FEMA and state mapping by DOGAMI would seem the best places
to begin. Independent researchers have in some cases supplemented FEMA
flood mapping by projecting the effects of increasing sea level and mapping
the extent of events such as Hurricane Sandy inundations. The difficulty
here is to agree nationally on units to be used: should we map the effects
of a 6-inch increase in global seal levels—or half a meter? The combined
resources of the National Hydrographic service and NOAA may be able to
provide an appropriate threshold rise on which to base projections.
Equally difficult is the determination that seismic risks in a given loca-
tion are sufficient to deny development of habitable space versus simply
indicating that a hazard exists. The hazard may be a combination of fac-
tors, including possible landslide on or near the site, soil liquefaction if
certain conditions of frequency of vibration are met, flood in the event of
an upstream dam being breached, etc. It may be possible to compile a list of
critical hazard factors, any one of which would automatically place a site in
a “highly vulnerable” category. In time, these would be tested in the courts
 Look Back in Anguish 159
as property owners seek to avoid limitations on the development capacity
of their land. From this, a consensus would form around definitions of each
stipulated category of risk.
Established limitations of development within the 100-year flood zone
mapped by FEMA provide a useful precedent for regulation of development
within zones identified as highly vulnerable to natural hazards. A federal
entity should be keeper of criteria and standards for definition of such zones.
Then local planning authorities could proceed to classify their vulnerable
locations without immediate threat of legal challenges.
However, action at the federal level remains unlikely because powerful
vested interests will oppose it, and political leadership has nothing immedi-
ate to gain from challenging those interests. Thus, initially, responsibility
will devolve to individual planning professionals who are charged with local
regulation of development. At the very least, it is incumbent upon them to
establish “advisory” indications on zoning maps of areas that are vulnerable
to natural disaster. An advisory zone does not carry the onerous determi-
nation of thresholds of significant danger; simply a reflection of variously
mapped data on seismic fault ___location, soils prone to liquefaction, landslide
and flood risks, etc. These may also include special local circumstances such
as proximity to a dam, which would itself be vulnerable in a strong seismic
event, or independent and credible projections of inundation due to rising
global sea levels.
Boundaries of “natural hazard advisory” areas would be dependent on
the judgment of the planner who identifies them if they deviate from state
mapping. This would not be an exact science, but that should not deter
professionals from redrawing boundaries where evidence suggests that the
previously mapped boundary is inaccurate. A useful precedent is the iden-
tification of natural buffer areas around waterways. Typically, these were
created by drawing a freehand line on an aerial photograph, responding to
approximate distance from the waterway and the appearance of nearby veg-
etation. This was a very rough-and-ready method, and plenty of revisions
were made upon closer examination of circumstances, but the result is that
we now have useful and enforceable protections of vulnerable natural areas
in place. A similar approach should be taken to designating “natural hazard
advisory” areas.

Before the Event

Thus far in our backward glimpse from 2050, we have looked only at
the immediate effects of the magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami, but of
course there were many other far-reaching consequences. Some of these
could have been averted by strategic planning, while others resulted from
unrelated factors.
In the lean years of the early 1980s, Portland lost major companies to
other parts of the nation, and more people left than moved into the city.
160 Look Back in Anguish
Slowly, the tide turned, and though the influx of population was small and
diverse, after the millennium, the most conspicuous fraction was of young,
well-educated people moving in not to take a job, but because they wanted
to live in Portland. Attracted by liberal and progressive values, a lively arts
scene, and a growing reputation for food, wine, and brewing, the city was
gaining a reputation as a great place to live. Pundits tagged Portland as the
place to which young people go to retire. In fact, most of them were smart
and resourceful, and either found work or invented it for themselves, with
“maker” businesses, IT start-ups, or as yet unnamed pursuits.
Less conspicuous was another growing cohort: of climate refugees mov-
ing north to escape ever-hotter days and nights in Arizona, droughts in
California, and intensifying hurricane seasons elsewhere. Even less conspic-
uous was their politics and their wealth. They contrasted with the young
imports in both respects.
Oregon had long maintained a close party-political balance, with a
majority of Republicans east of the Cascades and a Democratic majority
in the more populous Willamette Valley. There had been multiple chal-
lenges to Oregon’s state planning laws, especially by those who believed
that the urban growth boundary stultified economic growth. Each challenge
had been narrowly defeated, continuing protection of farm and forest lands
from sprawling development. But the margins had been small, and the grad-
ual influx of wealthy Republicans from the south narrowed and ultimately
extinguished that majority, as referenced in the extract from Boffin above.
Again, Senate Bill 100 was on trial in the 2024 elections, and this time
it fell. Metro, the regional government responsible for three counties and
24 cities, including Portland, was deeply wounded in the process, its elected
leaders openly attacked in an aftermath of libertarian fervor. As guardi-
ans and evaluators of the urban growth boundary, they were portrayed as
redundant, as was their regional planning role. Eager to begin collecting
new tax revenues, counties and suburban communities were quick to permit
development along highways outside the former urban growth bound-
ary. Large, unincorporated settlements spread quickly through the fertile
Willamette Valley, fueled by out-of-state money on the promise of quick
returns. Existing utilities and services were stretched to the limits of their
capacity. When pent-up demand for space was satisfied, the building boom
rolled on. Unemployment was at an all-time low, taxes came rolling in, and
everyone benefited to some degree from the newfound wealth.
Of course, such a massive building boom must come to an end eventu-
ally, but no one anticipated such an abrupt reversal of fortunes. As the now
famous 173 seconds of shaking began, sewer lines and water pipes began
to fail. Bridge decks and ramps skewed awkwardly, leaving gaping cracks.
Overhead power lines began to swing like skipping ropes, spitting sparks
when they touched. Cars and trucks veered unsteadily to the side of the road
while a few dashed on, unheeding. But the shaking continued. Buildings col-
lapsed in clouds of dust, and flames bloomed randomly among the debris.
 Look Back in Anguish 161
Natural gas lines and gas stations contributed more impressive sights and
sounds. When the shaking stopped, everything was eerily quiet, like the
morning after a heavy snowstorm. Lack of movement on the freeways and
rail tracks spoke of severed connections and presaged isolation from the
outside world.
Seasonal flows in the Willamette River and its tributaries had long
been managed by a dozen dams. Those built in the 1940s and 1950s were
the first to fail, unleashing millions of acre-feet of water, which combined
into a massive silty torrent, reaming out riverbanks and creating new
streams as it rushed downstream. Buildings old and new within reach of
the engorged river were erased in an instant, lost from view in a thrashing
turmoil of mud, timber, and battered steel. Flood and tsunami merged in
Portland, the river rising above flood stage in minutes before rushing east
and west through downtown streets and turning low-lying suburbs into
dirty lakes.
Streets climbing the West Hills had wrinkled and cracked as the ground
beneath them slid off its rocky base. Severed pipes protruded here and there,
dribbling their dregs. Some houses had toppled whole onto those below
them; others had divided as half their foundations slipped, leaving the
intimate details of bedrooms and bathrooms exposed. Here and there, a
building stood strangely untouched by the chaos around it.
Weeks after the earthquake, a second round of disasters struck Portland.
Shaking had weakened the grip of land on steep inhabited slopes. Heavy
rains provided the lubrication needed to trigger deadly landslides that bur-
ied hundreds of homes as their occupants slept.
So widespread was damage to infrastructure that emergency services
could do little more than airlift in medical supplies, bottled water, and food.
It had soon become apparent that attempts to drive out would be futile, since
every road was blocked or breached. Understaffed health facilities struggled
to help those brought into such buildings as remained standing. Millions of
survivors up and down the West Coast faced the choice of attempting to
walk east toward an unknown place of safety, or hunker down for weeks or
months until some semblance of normal life could be restored.

Aftermath
Minutes after it happened, everything was strangely still and quiet—muffled
by dust and debris, the omnipresent hum of the freeway silenced. In towns
and cities across western Oregon and Washington, knots of people drifted
together, all clearly in shock, assessing who has been seen and who might
be missing. Along the coast, survivors searched frantically among the sod-
den wreckage looking for signs of life and dreading the possibility of another
deadly wave. Most had read about the terrible destruction of the 2004 Boxing
Day Tsunami in Sri Lanka and many had seen videos of the 2011 Tohoku
Tsunami in Japan–but having this scale of devastation right here in the Pacific
162 Look Back in Anguish
Northwest and not knowing who survived, who is injured, how rescue work-
ers could possibly reach them . . . this was entirely unexpected; how could
such a thing happen in Oregon?
After weeks and months of cleanup, most lives remained broken. Many
sat for days in the emergency shelters, moving little and talking less. The
mental trauma of losing family, friends, home, livelihood—in fact, every
point of reference to the normal, ordinary lives they had had—had left
them without compass or purpose. Meanwhile, those who were functioning
struggled to prove who they were without documents or data files. Banks,
insurance companies, and other agencies recognized a huge opportunity
for identity theft, and tightened their procedures accordingly, delaying and
sometimes denying rightful claims.
Even now, in 2050, years after the Event, few have collected on their insur-
ance claims. Ironically, it was those who had the foresight to take out flood
and earthquake insurance who have fared worst. Their policies had been
reinsured through a global network of financial institutions that buy and sell
risk, most far removed from the claimants and focused on their own finan-
cial performance and stockholders. The web of approvals that are required
before a claim is honored is worldwide, and in most cases companies are
motivated to delay outlays for as long as possible. Most were oblivious to
the misery that such delays caused, having heard of the earthquake some-
where in the distant US as a news item. To them, it was a matter of making
good business decisions, there being no direct connection to the claimants or
their parlous circumstances.
The federal government, through FEMA, has belatedly funded state pro-
grams in Oregon and Washington for voluntary buyouts of all properties in
floodways, tsunami zones, landslide areas, and other areas documented as haz-
ardous in a seismic or extreme weather event. These rely on mapping done in
advance of the Event, with post-Event updates where available, by DOGAMI
and Washington Division of Geology and Earth Resources (DGER). The state
will pay half the assessed value of the property (pre-Event) with additional
increments linked to the ___location selected for redevelopment, the energy rating
and resiliency rating of new construction, and the infrastructure sustainability
factor. With a high score on all four factors, up to 100 percent of the assessed
value of the surrendered property can be claimed up to a maximum of
$1 million. Buyouts are voluntary to begin with, but as soon as more than
50 percent of the properties in a defined hazardous area (or of a quarter sec-
tion within it) have volunteered, state buyout becomes compulsory. This last
provision precipitated an avalanche of lawsuits, many from unaffected states.
However, courts in both Oregon and Washington found that the taking was
justified by the “existential threat to life and well-being” and by payment of
up to the full assessed value prior to damage of the property taken, together
with material assistance with relocation and redevelopment.
One of the more interesting parts of the program is the infrastructure
sustainability factor. While older city centers around the country have faced
 Look Back in Anguish 163
massive costs associated with failing sewer lines and road repairs, the cost
per taxpayer is tiny compared with those faced by dispersed suburban com-
munities. Even before seismic damage occurred, the burden of maintenance
on sprawling postwar streets, sewers, water, and stormwater systems was
unsupportable. The effect of the infrastructure sustainability factor is a
sliding scale of SDCs: zero compensation if a very low-density ___location is
chosen, or full compensation if a compact neighborhood is selected.
Oregon state planning law was amended to require every jurisdiction to
update its zoning maps and regulations to disallow development of habit-
able structures within the DOGAMI designated hazardous areas. This too
was challenged in court, but was found to be constitutional for the same
reasons that involuntary buyouts were declared legal by the Supreme Court.
There remained numerous holdout areas in which more than half of the
property owners chose not to sell to the state. Many high-end residential
neighborhoods in Southwest Portland fell into this category. Despite severe
damage, they reasoned that there will not be another major earthquake for
a very long time, so the smart money is to rebuild where they are—especially
as state funding is limited to $1 million. Real estate prices largely supported
this view, and although new developments could not be permitted in such
areas, rehabilitation of existing structures could not be prevented.
After an initial slump, real estate prices in the rest of Portland recovered,
and even rose in “safe” areas to which buyout volunteers relocated—or
at least bought property. The construction industry was stretched to the
limit with emergency demolitions and cleanup for months after the Event,
then the demand for repairs and reconstruction of properties grew beyond
capabilities, even with the enormous influx of construction workers and
materials from other states. Building of new homes for those displaced
was further delayed by backlogs in building permits, government transfers,
insurance claims, and financial authorizations. Even now, years after the
Event, 80 percent of those who were displaced remain in temporary accom-
modation or have left the region.
An outcome that nobody saw coming was a surge in self-sufficiency.
Urban agriculture has taken off, commandeering plots of land from which
buildings have been cleared, and on which habitable development is now
prohibited. The downside of this popular initiative is that land set aside for
ecological conservation or public open space is often pressed into service too,
the responsible authorities unable to enforce recovery of so many scattered
plots. Produce feeds the informal barter economy that emerged as people
dispossessed of their homes, belongings, and jobs began a new and unwanted
life of survival while they waited for recovery resources to reach them.
To someone returning to Portland for the first time since the Event, per-
haps the biggest changes are to be seen downtown. Almost mirroring the
results of the magnitude 6.3 earthquake that shattered Christchurch, New
Zealand, only 7 percent of the buildings collapsed, but over 70 percent had
to be demolished because they were too badly damaged to be rehabilitated.
164 Look Back in Anguish
West of the Willamette, every road into Portland was blocked by rockfalls
and landslides. Only Tilikum Crossing and Sellwood Bridge remained usa-
ble, but a rockfall on Route 43 made the Sellwood Bridge inaccessible from
Downtown. Debris from the I-5 Marquam Bridge blocked the river to water
traffic. Miraculously, the hospitals and their emergency systems survived
largely unscathed, since so many of their buildings postdated the updated
seismic structural codes.
With the benefit of hindsight, how much of the destruction and misery
described above could have been averted? The political shifts that accom-
panied the migration of climate refugees to Portland was beyond control.
The dams were known to be vulnerable, but business and political priorities
directed funding elsewhere rather than to avert a disaster that many thought
would never happen. Much of the newly developed Willamette Valley was
destroyed with considerable loss of life. Had the urban growth boundary
been preserved, the outcome would have been very different. “Future-
proofing” our habitat and our lifestyle with it may be the biggest challenge
facing the healthy city in the decade to 2060.
The 173 seconds of the Event have changed our city and our state
beyond recognition. It will take many more years before we recover fully.
That natural forces could bring about such fundamental changes to how
we live and govern ourselves has without doubt strengthened the respect
that Portlanders have long held for their environment, both natural and
man-made. We have learned just how much each is dependent on the other,
and have looked with greater focus at what is most important in our values,
our livability, and the physical environment that we are rebuilding around
them. Issues of climate change, seismic hazard, unsustainable use of natural
resources, political polarization, and ever-present poverty have ceased to be
abstract and unchangeable. Instead, they have become central to the ways in
which we have reformed governance. Gradually, we are restoring the vigor
of this healthy city.
What will continue to distinguish Portland as a healthy city is the fact
that so many of its surviving citizens have recognized that they have chosen
a place to live where important things can be optimized—seeing through
the haze of issues made topical by the media. You do not have to live far
from your workplace, and while that may be more expensive than a distant
suburb, precious hours are not squandered on commuting. For many, car
ownership has ceased to be necessary, offsetting the higher cost of close-
in housing. All modes of transport are available to be chosen at will and
according to need. Living near your workplace allows work and social orbits
to overlap so that familiar faces multiply and circles of acquaintances and
friends widen, and with them networks and knowledge grow. In this way,
a compact urban mixed-use environment provides intellectual and social
enrichment, and choices abound. Most of the more recent buildings in the
Pearl District survived with little damage, having been designed to meet cur-
rent seismic codes. Life and work there recovered surprisingly quickly, so it
 Look Back in Anguish 165
became the model for districts that had not fared so well. A metropolitan
lifestyle began to look very attractive as the full weight of the suburban infra-
structure sustainability factor sliding scale took effect.
Collectively, those who tend to choose a metropolitan lifestyle attract
employers in the knowledge industries—those that drive the mid-century
economy. It is these “metros” whose values influence the continuing organic
growth of Portland around its formal structure of 200-foot city blocks. It is
due to their exercise of informed choices that Portland’s social, economic,
and physical anatomy is in such robust good health once again.

Bibliography
FEMA P58 (2012) Next-Generation Building Seismic Performance Assessment
Methodology. Available at: www.iitk.ac.in/nicee/wcee/article/WCEE2012_4156.
pdf.
Glaeser, E. and Gottlieb, J. (2009) “Wealth of Cities: Agglomeration Economics and
Spatial Equilibrium in the United States.” Journal of Economic Literature, 47(4).
Johnston, W.R. (2005) What if All the Ice Melts? Available at: http://www.johnston
sarchive.net/environment/waterworld.html.
US Resiliency Council (n.d.) About the USRC. Available at: www.usrc.org/about-us.
Index

2040 9, 29, 69 Eastside Esplanade 23

20-minute neighborhood 58, 64, 76, 84 EcoDistrict 77–80, 126
engawa 140–1
aerial tram 33, 58
affordable housing 14, 51, 95, 102, Fields Park 25, 92
122, 127 Forest Park 10, 16, 18, 73
age-friendly 123, 127 Frasca, Robert 2, 97
annexation 14, 69
gentrification 12, 13, 121
Belluschi, Pietro 2, 3, 39 George, Henry 15
Bennett, Edward H. 17, 39 Goldschmidt, Neil 21, 46
Bicycle Transportation Alliance, Greater Portland Plan 17
BTA 32 green dividend 35, 120
bike storage 36 green infrastructure 38, 75, 112
Biketown 32, 93 Green Loop 26–7, 38, 76
biomimicry 56, 127 green streets 16, 26, 77–9, 106, 114
biophilia 43, 73–5, 141
bottle bill 11, 12, 45 Halprin, Lawrence 23–5, 105
Brewery Blocks 60, 90–4 healthy lifestyle 12, 37, 40, 46, 50, 52,
Brown, Thomas 19 83, 123, 131, 152
Holland, Clyde 122–3
Capability Brown 15 Housing First 120
Central City 1988 Plan 37, 82, 97 Howard, Ebenezer 5, 11, 15, 16, 34,
Central City 2035 Plan 4, 38 37, 108
City Greenways 75 human scale 54, 57, 146
CityVerve 113 Hurricane Sandy 48, 154, 158
climate migrants 45
complete streets 26–7, 69, 75, 106, 118 I-80 30, 41, 125
Comprehensive Plan 9, 38, 75–6, inclusionary zoning 121–2
80, 151
Jameson Park 24, 88
demographics 1, 45, 53, 123 jaywalking 70, 100, 117
Director Park 26, 146
DOGAMI 47, 150, 157–8, 162–3 LCDC 35
Downtown Plan 37, 42, 82, 94, 97, level of service, LOS 27, 70, 137, 141
128–9 livability 1, 2, 44–7, 89, 111, 124, 128,
Dreiseitl, Herbert 25, 90 141, 145 148–9, 164
drive to work 103 livability index 124
 Index 167
MAX 31, 34, 77, 147 sensible city 57
McCall, Tom 2, 42–6 sensible places 54
messy vitality 28, 70 sensory environment 140–1
Metro 28, 30, 35, 160 Sensory Urbanism 28, 73
Model Traffic Regulations 100 sensuous environment 145–6, 148
monoculture 34, 60, 63, 100 Singer, Dick 85
More, Thomas 66 Sitte, Camillo 54, 131–2, 139
Moses, Robert 3, 20 smart city 113
Mount Hood Freeway 20, 30–1, Smith, Adam 60–4, 110
41, 125 social friction 8, 65, 72
South Auditorium District 12, 23,
net zero energy 126 41, 140
NFIP 112 streetcar 7, 13, 20, 31, 34, 36, 64, 70,
Nolli, Giambattista 71–2, 132 76, 87, 89, 92–5, 103, 106, 146
NORM 78–9 system development charges, SDCs
Northwest Neighborhood 5, 13, 64–5, 142, 163
83–94
Tanner Springs Park 25
OCC 77–8 TPR 35
Office of Neighborhood Involvement 42 Transit Mall 12, 20–31, 41, 75, 94, 105
Oglethorpe, James 66–7, 108, 126
OHSU 33, 50, 95 universal access 124–5
Olmsted 16, 17, 73–4 urban design quotient 28, 70, 137–41
Oregon 2050 Alliance 49 urban farming 112
Oregon Bicycle Bill 32 urban forest 19, 37, 64, 73–7
Oregon Senate Bill 100 14 urban growth boundary, UGB 14,
Orenco Station 7, 35 28–9, 35, 60, 76, 112, 143,
Orloff 16 160, 164
Oso 47 US Resiliency Council, USRC 48–9,
114, 116, 145
Park Blocks 19, 21, 25–7, 73–6, 82, 86,
90, 146 Vanport 13, 43
Pearl District 4–7, 15, 19, 24–5, Vision Zero 8
36, 59, 60, 65, 82–97, 120, 123, Vitruvius 65–6, 134
146, 164 VMT 35–6
performance-based zoning 129–31
Perrin, Bob 21 walkability 6, 9, 56, 58, 60, 98, 116
Phillip II of Spain 65–6 walkability score 9, 57
Pioneer Courthouse Square 22, 146 Walker, Pete 24, 88
population 1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 28, 45, 57, WalkScore 9, 59, 80, 116
84, 92, 101, 128, 149 Waterfront Park 22–3, 42
Portland Bureau of Emergency Wealth of Nations 60
Management 115 Whyte, William Holly 71, 138
Portland Winter Light Festival 52 Willamette Greenway Trail 25
Willamette Light Brigade 20, 32, 52
R/UDAT 83, 86, 92 World Affairs Council of Oregon 52
rent control 122
resiliency 47–9, 78, 114–16, 130, 143, Yellow Bike Project 32
145, 158, 162
River District 31, 82–97 ZGF 39, 77
Zipf, G. 60, 80
Savannah 66–7, 108 zoning codes 2, 6, 7, 33, 61–2, 111,
Senate Bill 100 14, 44–5 134–5