Fall/winter 2013: The City

Oregon communities, forty years after Senate Bill 100

Imaginary cities and overpopulated ones, too

Mitchell S. Jackson, Brian Doyle, Bette Husted, Debra Gwartney, and Monica Drake on why they live where they live

The CityFall/Winter 2013

Oregon Humanities2

editorKathleen Holt

a rt Dir ectorJen Wick

com m u n ications coor dinatorBen Waterhouse

copy editorAllison Dubinsky

editorial advisory boardTom BoothBrian DoyleDebra GwartneyJulia HeydonGuy MaynardWin McCormackGreg NetzerCamela RaymondKate SageRich WandschneiderDave Weich

Oregon Humanities is pub-lished triannually by Oregon Humanities, 813 SW Alder St., Suite 702, Portland, Oregon 97205.

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3 Fall/Winter 2013 The City

One outcome of Senate Bill 100: more density in Southeast Portland (see page 12). Photo by Tim LaBarge

Cover photo by Kurt Hettle

Departments

4Editors Note

6Field WorkWilliam Stafford centennial Governor and First Lady at Idea Lab Oregons Kitchen Table Author! Author! OH News

11From the DirectorAdam Davis on what brought him to Oregon a second time

40PostsReaders write about The City

Features: The City12This Land Planned for You and Meby J. Dav i d S a n t en J r .Pho t os by T i m L a b a rgeWhat do Oregons communities look like forty years after the passage of Senate Bill 100?

22Imaginary Metropolis by Da n de w eeseOur perfect cities, like our perfect selves, will never be built.

27Design for a Crowded PlanetInterview by J i l l Ow ensCurator Cynthia S. Smith on some of the innovative solutions by and for city dwellers featured in the exhibition Design with the Other 90%: Cities.

City, Suburb, Town, Woods, NeighborhoodFive writers on why they live where they live.

31What It Means to Say Portlandby M i t ch el l S. Jack s on

33In-Between Placeby br i a n d oy l e

35Belonging and Connectionby bet t e Ly nch H ust ed

36On the Riverby Debr a Gwa rt n e y

38Why We Stayby Mon ica Dr a k e

44Read. Talk. Think.Inside Oregon State Hospital by Diane L. Goeres-Gardner Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson The Meek Cutoff by Brooks Geer Ragen The Illusive State of Jefferson by Peter Laufer Here on the Edge by Steve McQuiddy Toro Bravo by John Gorham and Liz Crain

46CroppingsCrows Shadow Institute of the Arts Biennial at Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University

Oregon Humanities4

On the coverA 1:600 (one inch equals fifty feet) scale model of downtown Portland with removable buildings, originally built in 1971. The model was refurbished in 1984 and, starting that year, developers seek-ing to build in the area covered by Portlands Cen-tral City plan were required to submit cardboard models with their proposals. If a proposal was accepted, a wooden miniature would be added to the downtown model. The model is no longer used as a planning tool, and is now long out of date, but is still on display in a meeting room on the second floor of the Portland Building.

CorrectionIn the Summer 2013 Skin issue, we incor-rectly identified George Washington as George Washington Bush in the photo on page 23. We apologize for the error.

In the Welter

T here are 242 cities in Oregon. 242. If you believe national media, youd think there was just one: the one sitting fat and smug up on the northern edge of the state at the crux of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. But there are many more, and not just the handful that line interstate highways and that popu-late the Willamette Valley. Not just the ones marked with large yellow stars on accordion-style road maps or listed in boldface in travel guides.

Technically, there are 242 incorporated cities, each with its own urban growth boundary. Those UGBs, required by state law to preserve the natural areas beyond, are fluid, contestable things. Residents of some of these places might even bristle at the term city, might prefer, instead, town or suburb or commu-nity. Regardless of what these places are called, they are home to people and ideas and values, all clashing and smashing against one another.

I think of myself as a city girl, though Ive only spent a third of my life living in one (the fat, smug one mentioned earlier). So far the pattern of my life mirrors some of the data out there about when people live in cities and why: I grew up in a rural commu-nity and, as soon as I was eighteen, moved first to a bigger city

then to a smaller one to go to college. I lived in the woods for a few years (learned to build a fire, marveled at salmon spawning and eagles hunting) but moved back to the city for work and to start a family. Studies say that Ill leave the city at some pointIll either head to the suburbs so my kids can go to better schools or, after the kids leave, my husband and I will get tired of urban life and settle in a smaller town.

I can almost imagine this, leaving the welter. Almost. Point is, there are a lot of data out there and a lot of opinions about what it all means. It just adds to the noise. But data arent peo-ple; data are just ways of understanding how many, when, what kind. Heres what else the data dont show: cities are more than just places. As the articles and essays in this issue suggest, cit-ies are plans, efforts, dreams, problems, solutions, and stories. And, most remarkable, no matter how large or small, cities offer possibilities for grand-scale collaborations: people aspiring to live among one another, layered self upon layered self. In close proximity, we explore our armors, test the strong and weak spots, build resolve, acquiesce to fragility, and submit our humble selves to a noble experiment: life together instead of apart.

k ath leen Holt, [email protected]

Editors Note


News seven days a week.

Well even read it to you.

opb.org

ORHumanities.indd 3 10/28/13 3:23 PM

Oregon Humanities6

Reading Stafford at One HundredThe Oregon Library Association invites Orego-nians to read the works of one of the states great-est poets.

I n 2014, poetry lovers across Oregon will cel-ebrate the centennial of the birth of William Stafford, the prolific writer, teacher, and paci-fist who served as Oregons poet laureate from 1975 to 1989. Events include a symposium at Lewis & Clark College, an anthology of student writing in response to Stafford from Ooligan Press, and the Oregon Library Associations 2014 Oregon Reads program, which will center on six books by and about Stafford.

More than ninety libraries around the state will participate in Oregon Reads, through com-munity reading programs and public events. OLA has assembled a group of speakers to pres-ent library programs about Stafford, including current Oregon poet laureate Paulann Petersen and her predecessor, Lawson Inada.

Oregon Humanities, in partnership with OLA, is offering a series of Conversation Proj-ect programs that relate to recurring concepts in Staffords writing, such as the costs of war and the meaning of place. The discussion series includes Life After War: Photography and Oral

h u m a n ities across or eg onField Work

Above: William Stafford with a guitar at the Los Prietos, California Public Service camp for World War II conscientious objectors.


Want to keep up with the humanities in Oregon?

Visit oregonhumanities.org to sign up for our monthly enewsletter.

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Histories of Coming Home, led by Jim Lom-masson; A State of Change: Oregons Evolving Identities, led by Richard W. Etulain; Your Land, My Land: Using and Preserving Oregons Natural Resources, led by Veronica Dujon; and

Toward One Oregon: Bridging Oregons Urban and Rural Communities, led by Michael Hib-bard, Ethan Seltzer, and Bruce Weber.

More information about Oregon Reads 2014 may be found at oregonreads2014.com. For a list of William Stafford centennial events all over Oregon, see stafford100.org.

Ben Wat er house

The Business of HappinessGovernor John Kitzhaber and First Lady Cylvia Hayes urge Oregon students to work to make the world a happier place.

O n July 26, Governor John Kitzhaber and First Lady Cylvia Hayes delivered a chal-lenge to an audience of Oregon teens and teachers at Oregon Humanities 2013 Idea Lab Summer Institute: strive to create a soci-ety in which happiness is valued as much as

financial gain.Economic growth and social well-being are

not the same thing, necessarily, Kitzhaber said. Economic growth should be a means to an end, not an end to itself.

In a shared address, titled Global Well-Being: Innovating Beyond GDP, the governor and first lady shared what they learned on their recent trip to Bhutana nation that mea-sures its economic progress in terms of Gross National Happiness, rather than gross domes-tic productand their vision for the economic future of Oregon.

At Idea Lab, a three-day summer program produced by Oregon Humanities, Oregon teens and teachers use the humanities to explore the pursuit of happiness and how it shapes our culture. In 2013, 168 students and twenty-four teachers from thirteen communities participated.

The most fundamental purpose of our gov-ernment here in the United States is to secure the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap-piness. And to me that means a nation built on equity and opportunity, Kitzhaber said.

Kitzhaber and Hayes traveled to Bhutan

Governor John Kitzhaber at Idea Lab 2013

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in April 2013 to attend the Global Wellbeing Lab, a conference on alternative measures of prosperity. The trip was paid for by the Ger-man Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, which helped to organize the conference.

The governor and first lady argued that gross domestic product, which is a measure of eco-nomic activity alone, can give the impression of progress even in times of calamity. The BP oil spill was great for GDP, Kitzhaber said.

Hayes emphasized a need for reinvention. Asking how we get to economic recovery is ask-ing the wrong question. Recovery has a sense of going back to the way things were, of returning, she said. I think you probably realize we had problems with this economic model before the onset of the Great Recession.

Hayes encouraged Idea Lab students to pur-sue economic reinvention.

The economy is not a force of nature or an act of God. It is a human-made system. We cre-ated it, and we can re-create it, and weve done so over and over again, Hayes said. I dont think it matters what field youre headed into. You will have an opportunity to help create a new economic system.

The governors and first ladys complete remarks are available for streaming at oregon-humanities.org/programs/idea-lab.

Ben Water house

W ELCOME, DENISE R EED The Oregon Humanities board elected one new member at the autumn 2013 meeting: Denise Reed is musical director of Astorias North Coast Chorale, an instructor in music appreciation and history at Tillamook Bay Community College, a private voice instruc-tor, and a steering committee member for the Lower Columbia Diversity Committee.

THINK & DR INK 2014: PR IVATE O r e g o n Hu m a n i t i e s 2 014 T h i n k & Drink series, Private, will kick off Wednes-day, February 5, 2014, with William T. Vollmann. Vollmann, a National Book Awards-winning novelist, journalist, and essayist, will talk with Adam Davis, execu-tive director of Oregon Humanities, about his discovery that he has been under sur-veillance by the FBI, who suspected him of being a domestic terrorist.

H A PPY HOLIDAY R EA DING Me e t s om e o f O r e g on s b e s t-k n o w n writers, celebrate the humanities, and get last-minute holiday shopping done at Ore-gon Humanities Holiday Party. Join us on Tuesday, December 17 from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. at the Cleaners, 403 SW 10th Ave., Port-land. Attending writers include Brian Doyle, Gregory Nokes, Monica Drake, Paulann Petersen, and Mary Szybist. A suggested donation of $5 supports Oregon Humanities.

BOA R D MEMBERS WA NTED O r egon Hu m a n it ies i nv it es nom i n a-tions for its board of directors. Candidates must be nominated by someone other than themselves. Letters of nomination should include the candidates name and address; a brief description of why this person should serve on the Oregon Humanities Board of Directors, including his or her experience and interest in the public humanities. A curriculum vitae or resume should also be included. Please send the above information to Oregon Humanities, Attn: Nominations Committee, 813 SW Alder Street, Suite 702, Portland, Oregon 97205.

Oregon Humanities News

Governor John Kitzhaber at Idea Lab 2013

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A Seat at the TableA Portland State University project connects elected officials to their constituents.

A t t he k itchen t able ( i n ou r i m ag i n a-tions, if not always in reality), families talk through the issues they face. Oregons Kitchen Table, a project of the Policy Consensus Ini-tiative at Portland State University, offers an online platform to let state and local leaders hear constituents perspectives on Oregons challenges.

When leaders ask for feedback on a conten-tious issue, Oregons Kitchen Table surveys Oregonians who have signed up on its website. Wendy Willis, who directs the project, says a rigorous, inclusive process seeks to keep the questions unspun. So far, Oregons Kitchen Table has tested opinion on the governors budget in 2012, county services and funding in Curry County, and a proposed off-road bike park in East Portland. (Results are available at oregonskitchentable.org.)

The project is timely because Americans mistrust of government is at an all-time high, says Willis, who is also an Oregon Humanities Conversation Project leader. People wonder whether the government is doing the peoples business the way theyd like it to be done, she says. People have a deep wisdom about whats happening in their communities.

Nearly 4,700 Oregonians have already joined Oregons Kitchen Table, though the project is just out of its pilot stage. The Internet offers the potential to reach far beyond urban centers, Willis says, but technology alone is not enough. An online tool is a little bit arms-length, she says. It really needs to be com-bined with relationships.

Er ic G ol d

$10 per monthThats all it takes to cover the annual cost of Oregon Humanities magazine for five peoplethe local librarian, a state representative, a favorite neighbor, your sister, and you.

Now everyone has a copy. Cue conversation.

Set up your monthly gift today at oregonhumanities.org.

FRED JOE

Oregon Humanities10

From Page to StageAn OH-cosponsored liter-ary series brings well-loved authors to Bend

Oregon Humanities is pleased to cosponsor Deschutes Public Library Foundations second annual Author! Author! series. Revenue from ticket sales will support library services and programs. The programs all take place at the Bend High School Auditorium.

January 24, 7 p.m. National Book Awardwinner Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Blasphemy, and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

March 16, 4 p.m. Oregon Book Awardwinner Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, Tiny Beautiful Things, and Torch

June 19, 7 p.m. Pulitzer Prizewinner Geraldine Brooks, author of March, Calebs Crossing, and Year of Wonders

For more information about this series, please visit the Deschutes Public Library Foundation website at www.dplfoundation.org.


T H E FI R ST T I M E I CA M E TO OR EG ON, I came for nature. To do my work I carried a Pulaski and a crosscut saw. At night I lay down in the Mount Hood Wilderness, Three Sisters, the John Day.

This time aroundalmost twenty years laterIve come to Oregon for the culture. I work with words and ideas, with my ears and my mind instead of my hands, legs, and lower back. I worked for the US Forest Service then. Now I work for Oregon Humanities. Nature is easier to point at and describe: peaks, streams, wildflowers. But culture has even more to do with how we live.

Why come to OregonOregon, of all placesnot only to live in a city but also to spend days in an office, evenings in crowded rooms? Because of the people. Because of what they are making. Because of the culture.

There have already been moments, many moments, when it strikes me that in Oregon, more than in any other place Ive been, people are trying to live thoughtful, beautiful, sane lives together. I have no idea whether the trying is working, and Im not sure how that could be measured. I know its too soon for me to come to any conclusions.

I also know, almost four months in this time around, that Oregon feels different from every other place Ive lived. The mountains and the rivers and the coast and the trees are the smaller part of whats different, although I have to imagine they have something to do with it. The bigger difference is the culture, the ideas that human beings here are dreaming up, expressing, and trying to grow.

Oregons culture has a real ambition to ita deeply aspirational character, an unusual

Once More to OregonThe new executive director of Oregon Humanities on what brings him back to the Northwest.

FROM TH E DIR ECTOR

optimism about peoples capacity to shape their own lives so that they include decency, balance, and beauty. This ambition strikes me as real in that it is lofty and modest at the same time. It shows up in a bus driver yielding to a cyclist, a video projected on the outside wall of an Oregon City elevator, two kids on a street corner talking about whole new paradigms, or a small group of legislators gathered around a dining room table and the food that they share.

So Ive come to Oregon once again, this time with my small family and too many books. I look forward to seeing my kids get to know the mountains and the coast, but more than that, and even more than I expected, I look forward to the many ways, in the woods and in the crowded rooms, that this place will cultivate them.

A da m Dav is, Executive [email protected]

Oregons culture has a real ambition to ita deeply aspirational character, an unusual optimism about peoples capacity to shape their own lives.

KIM

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Oregon Humanities12

This Land Planned for You and Me

J. Dav id Sa n ten J r .

photo essay by tim l a b a rge

What do Oregons communities look like forty years after the passage of Senate Bill 100?


V IRGIN I A LEE BU RTON S 1943 CHIL DR EN S CL A SSIC Katy and the Big Snow is set in the fictional town of Geop-polis. On an illustrated map we see a grammar school and a library and a church. Geoppolis has an uptown and a downtown, bus and train service, and an airport. It has a piggery and a dairy and a chicken farm. And, of course, the highway department where Katy the tractor stays until her command performance in clearing the roads and rescuing the city.

For what we want in a community, this seems like a pretty good start (as long as you live upwind of that hog operation)a compact town, with all the amenities that day-to-day living requires. Maybe the icehouse property could be redeveloped into artist lofts or a climbing gym. And that oversize post office site just south of downtown? How about a new hotel and convention center?

If Geoppolis were in Oregon, it would have a comprehensive plana road map for the citys future to ensure that Geoppolis could meet its housing and transportation and infrastructure and economic development needs for the next twenty years. This plan might be stashed in a city hall filing cabinet, untouched for a decade or two. Then one day, city planners and eco-nomic development types, eager to expand the citys urban growth boundary into outlying farmlands for a potential industrial or resi-dential development, would drag the plan out and begin the grueling process of updating it according to Oregon law.

This update might spark a decade-long

Happy Valley: Workers lay out the infrastructure to support a new batch of half-million dollar homes. The property sits adjacent to a street featured in news articles in 2008 because one of every five homes was in foreclosure.

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tussle between planners and citizens and spe-cial-interest groups that would tumble through layers of bureaucracy before crashing through the doors of the Oregon Court of Appeals, where it might then be rejected. Tens, maybe hun-dreds of thousands of tax dollars later, city offi-cials and lawyers might begin the tedious and uncertain updating process again, hoping to have a final decision in the next couple of years.

Forty years ago, Oregon passed a landmark legislation that shaped the state in ways no other legislation has since. It established a national model for statewide land-use plan-ning that preserved high-value farmland, contained cities periodic fits of sprawl, and, in short, codified Oregonians values into plan-ning approaches.

Happy Valley: Utilities, street lights, and stairs connecting streets were complete when work stalled on this would-be neighborhood.

Thats the legend of Senate Bill 100, the 1973 Oregon Land Conservation and Development Act. Thanks to the efforts of a Willamette Valley dairy farmer and state senator, a Teamsters rep, city folks and associates, and Governor Tom Bottle Bill McCall, Oregon has enjoyed the emergence of viticulture, a blooming food-shed robust enough to feed the 100-mile loca-vores, and an international case of Cascadia envy. We dont sprawl, not like California or Idaho. We build cities up, not out. We protect our farms. We protect our forests. We have a plan. Every one of our 242 cities has a plan. So do the counties.

And where did these plans come from? The answer, set to the tune of a Woody Guthrie song, is that they came from you and me: Oregonians from every corner of the stateurban and rural, east and west, coast and desertin conversations at public meetings with Department of Land Conservation and Development rep-resentatives who tooled around in vans like country preachers (along ridges and rivers) for fifteen months (through fields and


forests) in 73 and 74, asking people what exactly it was that they liked so much about (the hills and hamlets) where they lived. Ore-gon, planned for you and me.

It was an era described by landscape architect Ian McHarg in his 1969 book Design With Nature: It is not a choice of either the city or the countryside: both are essential, but today it is nature, beleaguered in the country, too scarce in the city, which has become precious. We imagined our own precious land, right here with the Jory soils squished between our toes. But we also saw worn farmers stepping down from their tractors at twilight and imagining in their furrowed fields the tracts of new homes and paid-off bank loans. And in this setting, storm clouds gath-eredleaded exhaust from the tailpipes of station wagons and moving vans filled with Californians, fleeing their own fallen paradise to our Canaan of the north.

So Oregonians told the state officials of their concerns and worries, and the officials listened. From these talks they crafted

fourteen official state planning goals in 1974 that every city and countys future comprehen-sive plan would need to achieve, beginning with Goal 1: Citizen Involvement, concluding with Goal 14: Urbanization, and acknowledging other issues with every goal in between: pres-ervation of farm- and forestlands, adequate housing, economic development, clean air and water, transportation, and so forth. By the end of 1976, all nineteen goals that exist today were in place: Goal 15 dealt with the greenway along the Willamette River; Goals 1619 concerned coastal and estuarine areas, including dunes and beaches, as well as ocean resources. From then on, every Geoppolis across Oregon would use these goals to craft its own comprehensive plan that would presumably account for that citys current and future needs, including the establishment of urban growth boundaries.

This legacy has established Oregon as a kind of planning paradise, with smartly designed, compact cities; verdant fields and pastures; magnificent timber stands; and unparalleled vistas. Its also a legacy at middle age, one that has weathered the uncertainty of natural haz-ardseroding slopes of litigation, economic fault-lines and ballot boxinstigated tremors, the tsunami of property rights proponents, the silent, toxifying radon of apathy. Forty years constitutes three generations of net migration spilling across Oregons borders, of rural com-munities losing resource-based economies largely because of recession and federal forest policies, salmon runs declining. Old jobs disap-peared in one place; new industries emerged in another. Demographics changed, and two mil-lion Oregonians are now nearly four million.

These Oregonians? They still get involved.

We dont sprawl, not like California or Idaho. We build cities up, not out. We protect our farms. We protect our forests. We have a plan. Every one of our 242 cities has a plan.

Oregon Humanities16

They still take an interest. But things can get complicated. The 127-page manual Putting the People in Planning: A Primer on Public Par-ticipation in Planning, produced by Oregons Citizen Involvement Advisory Committee, warns: Today, the citizen who wants to par-ticipate in planning needs to understand basic land use procedures and rules. You might say the price of admission to the planning arena is informationand the price has gone up. That She flies with her own wings spirit of SB 100 has devolved into a technocratic merry-go-round of estimates, guesstimates, amendments, remands, litigation, appeals, acknowledgments, expansions, and reserves.

Jeffrey Condit, a partner at the law firm of Miller Nash, has spent three decades working on various aspects of land use and represents both municipal and private interests. He sees a grow-ing futility in trying to parse increasingly com-plex land-use regulations. Yet, he concedes, Its achieved protection of valuable forest and farm resource lands, and its done a pretty good job [of] encouraging compact urban development within urban growth boundaries. But now what?

For too m a n y communities, Ore-gons land-use system offers too few concrete answers to that question. Consider Coos Bay: The Coos Bay estuary is one of only three deep-draft estuaries in Oregon, meaning that it

maintains a jetty and a main channel deeper than twenty-two feet. The recently reestablished Coos Bay Rail Link connects the port and nearby communities to rail hubs in Eugene. With no major highway access to this southwestern corner of the state, rail service and a port are critical for the regions agricultural and timber industries.

But the best use for waterfront property may not always be as a launch site for logs headed overseas. The region is littered with closed mills and industrial sites that will require cleanup. This is the case throughout the South Coast region. In nearby Reedsport, American Bridge Manufacturing announced in October that it will lay off all fifty-one employees at its manu-facturing facility.

New economic development is critical to attracting new residents and retaining the more than fifteen thousand who call Coos Bay home. To take advantage of these potential develop-ment sites requires upfront investments that are challenging

Division Street in Southeast Portland: Construction continues on several mixed-use buildings and the infrastructure that goes with them. With hundreds of new units being built and little to no additional parking, density and congestion will continue in close-in Portland.


enough to acquire even before tackling the requirements of the states coastal goals (Goals 1619). Oregon land-use rules pre-serve, but they dont make it easy to adapt to changing econo-mies. The coastal rules add another layer of cost and complexity: What about landslides and floods and sensitive habitat areas? What about tsunamis? Show us the plan.

Were not just talking about changing land-use designa-tionwere talking about changing infrastructure, says Coos Bay Mayor Crystal Shoji. She is currently optimistic about a modest mixed-use redevelopment in the Empire District in con-junction with the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, as well as a potential seafood-products facility that was competing for the same land.

The world wants energy, and were a shipping port, says Shoji. Our options point in the direction of our assets. Thats code for the phrase liquefied natural gas terminal at Coos Baya proposal for which is currently wending its way through

regulatory approval, though a gauntlet of per-mits and environmentalists remains to be run.

Shoji also has a planning consultancy, work-ing primarily in rural southern Oregon. She wasnt a planner by trade; rather, she learned the trade on the job in the mid-70s: I was an educatorin rural areas they went out and found people who could explain things and work with other people.

Community planning in rural areas at that time meant people coming together to share ideas about what mattered and staying until one in the morning if needed. But somewhere along the way, [Planning] got hard for people to understand and get their hands around, Shoji says. The technicalities of planning just arent the sort of thing that people want to go study just

Oregon Humanities18

to get involved. Even the graduates dont like it. Community spirit manifests in other ways:

organizing the annual Oregon Coast Music Fes-tival, high school sports tournaments, and other efforts to draw visitors to town. Without a nearby urban area that can use this as a playground, says Shoji, Coos Bay and other South Coast com-munities have to work that much harder to fill motel rooms. Its amazing what we pull off, she says.

Over in Central Oregon, the early 2000s were a good time to swing a framing hammer. From 1999 to 2009, the Bend metro area population exploded, with much of the growth happening inside the urban growth boundary established back in 1981, when the citys population was a mere 17,425 (compared to 80,000 within city limits today). The only thing growing faster was the number of new homes being built as Bends real estate market shifted from a fevered pitch to fever dreams: new developments, golf

courses, and even The Shirea proposed subdivision inspired by the Lord of the Rings movies. To accommodate the site plans, in 2006 the project developer purchased a former mobile home park with eighty-two spaces and gave residents a years notice to vacate.

And then the bubble burst. Plans fell through. The Shire went into foreclosure, mostly unbuilt, and is now on the market as Forest Creek. One of its properties, Thatchers Cottage on Ring Bearer Court, sold for $650,000 in 2007. It sold again in 2011 for the hobbit-size price of $227,000. The mobile homes remain in place for now.

When the real estate market was going gangbusters, there was economic and political pressure just to expand the bound-ary, versus doing redevelopment and infill, says Damian Syrnyk, a senior planner with the city of Bend. But local pressure has not translated into success in navigating the complicated nuances of Oregon land-use planning. Bends latest effort to amend its urban growth boundary revises portions of the plan first approved by the city in 2009 that called for an expansion of 8,500 acres. The state, in a 150-page response, rejected several pieces of the plan in 2011. With a committee at the state level rewriting

Sauvie Island: School groups from the region arrive on Sauvie Island in droves during the weeks leading up to Halloween. Just ten miles from downtown Portland, Sauvie Island is a weekend refuge for Portlanders seeking a touch of rural hospitality and scenery.


That She flies with her own wings spirit of SB 100 has devolved into a technocratic merry-go-round of estimates, guesstimates, amendments, remands, litigation, appeals, acknowledgments, expansions, and reserves.

some specifics of the planning rules, Syrnyk doesnt imagine hav-ing a new proposal in place before 2016. We got more out of the boundary than we thought we would, he says.

Oregons land-use system contained the Bend implosions blast radius. It could have been a lot worse, says author and emeritus professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State Uni-versity Carl Abbott, who has written extensively about land-use planning in Oregon. He sees successes in places like Bend, par-ticularly when compared to other Western states, in preventing development such as that along Colorados Front Range, which was made up of seemingly endless five- and ten-acre tracts that spread, Abbott says, like smallpox. In Oregon, Abbott says, weve curtailed that peripheral sprawl while keeping high-value farm-land in production. More filberts and wine for us.

The last go-round at boundary expansion drew mostly people such as developers and homebuilders, who had economic inter-ests, and environmental groups opposing them. Now Syrnyk sees emerging interest from a more muted, moderate faction. The League of Women Voters held a forum in October where panelists reflecting a range of interests engaged one another and the audi-ence in what Syrnyk described as collegial dialogue around the

limits of Bends urban growth boundary, popu-lation forecasting, water, climate change, and public involvement around planning.

in 1982 , mon ths beFor e succu mbing to terminal cancer, Oregons land-use cham-pion Tom McCall stepped into the limelight to successfully stave off a ballot measure that would have repealed Senate Bill 100. Later, a series of measures in the 2000s sought to com-pensate landowners for value lost due to land-use regulations. Voters approved (even if the courts did not). Economic value trumped Ore-gon values. Individual rights would come before the collective good. Out of that decade emerged Oregons most infamous planning exercise and what may become one of the states shortest-lived cities: Damascus.

A semi-rural community, Damascus sat at ground zero of an 18,867-acre urban growth boundary expansion in 2002 by Metro, the regional planning body that oversees a single boundary around much of Multnomah, Clacka-mas, and Washington Counties and the cities therein. The expansion was necessary to main-tain the twenty-year supply of developable land for future housing and industry needs in the region, as mandated by Oregon land-use law. 12,500, or two-thirds, of those acres were around Damascus.

Urban growth boundaries expand first to adjacent areas that are not designated as high-value farm- and forestlands. In 2002, much of unincorporated Washington County, west of Portland, was high-value agricultural area. Damascus, in unincorporated Clackamas County to the east, was not.

Many of the ten thousand residents of the Damascus area worried that this expansion would change their bucolic exurban existences. The population of ten thousand would grow to

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thirty thousand in the coming decades. Life inside an urban growth boundary meant den-sity, apartments, rules, and expenseslike the $3.5 billion needed to upgrade infrastructure to support a city of thirty thousand. In 2004, Damascus voted to incorporate as a city, the first community in Oregon to do so in twenty-two years. This, residents reasoned, would give them control over the growth being forced on the area, while generating funding for new infrastructure and a downtown.

State planning guidelines offer no real blueprint for creating a new town from scratch, so planners seized the opportunity to build a truly intentional community from the ground up. They explored new approaches to managing the future citys water and sewer needs with systems that would capture storm-water runoff for reuse, as well as potentially compensating landowners for ecosystem ser-vices, such as water quality protection, that their properties provided. Working with plan-ners and Damascus farmer Larry Thompson, University of Oregon students proposed ways to integrate commercial agriculture and food production into various sustainable village concepts. Planners rounded up residents for community ecology planning, where partici-pants gathered around maps and placed mark-ers labeled with community assets and needs: Community Energy Production, Trans-portation, Market, and a handwritten addi-tion, Golf Course.

At the same time a steady undercurrent of anti-government, anti-growth, anti-consultant

sentiment tugged at this optimism. Comprehensive planning effortsrequired by state lawbogged down as conserva-tive groups saw the new city as an opportunity of their own: local ballot measures passed in 2008 required a popular vote for any new taxes or fees and struck down the citys ability to claim eminent domain in condemning properties.

The reality was that few people stood to gain much from urbanization. The majority of properties were too small to sub-divide and sell off as additional lots, and some that were large enough had instead been identified as greenway spaces, meaning they couldnt be developed at all despite now being in an urban area. Public meetings devolved into shouting matches and had to be policed by armed deputies.

Nearly a decade after its incorporation, and seven city man-agers later, Damascus still has no comprehensive plan; voters shot down the last proposal in 2011, 65 percent to 35 percent. The November 2013 election included the ballot-box equivalent of a poison pill: disincorporation of the city of Damascus. Pro-ponents of disincorporation argued that the city has become so politicized as to be completely ineffectual, with millions of dol-lars in taxes and grants squandered since forming in 2004. Oppo-nents claimed that city status was needed to protect Damascus from any assortment of the following: stack-and-pack apart-ments, heavy industrial projects replacing residential areas, higher taxes (or not-that-much-lower lower taxes), loss of law enforcement protection and local control, and so on. As one argu-ment in the voters guide claimed, If the City disincorporates, outside, unknown forces of county and state government and Metro will determine our taxes, our density and zoning, our level of police protection, where new roads and parks will go, how and where development occurs, and whether we protect our natural resources.

In the dysfunctional world of Damascus politics, yes votes outpaced no by a two-to-one margin. But for the disincorpo-ration measure to pass, yes votes were required from at least half of all registered voters; with too few votes cast overall, the measure failed. The city lives on, for now.

Anita Yap served as Damascuss community development director from 2007 until her resignation in 2011. For two of those years she engaged in what she describes as intense com-munity outreach as the nascent city worked to establish its path forward. In that time she regularly encountered twenty-year residents living on five-acre tracts at the end of long drive-ways who did not even know their immediate neighbors. Politics became partisan and extreme, and, she says, when things got a little dicey (meaning, in this case, threats of violence and intimidation), the moderate middle of this emerging commu-nity disengaged from the planning discourse. Yap was threat-ened by consultants and stalked by a former elected official against whom she filed a restraining order. Shes moved on, but she harbors hopes that the planning work done in Damascus will contribute to the successes of some future communities or com-prehensive plans.

One way to define a community is by the values its residents

Damascus: The residents of Oregons youngest city voted recently to remain incorporated. Strip malls and farm stands sit blocks apart in this place that struggles with zoning, development, and growth.


share. Hubs for these commonalities can be its schools, its busi-ness community, even its fire district. Damascus instead reflects the fractured social structures around which it incorporated: portions of five school districts, two separate fire districts, two different water districts. Its commercial sector is a collection of remote outposts of much larger entitiesMcDonalds, Safeway, Dollar Tree, Key Bankwith managers who often transfer out after a few years, taking with them whatever goodwill or civic sweat equity they had established. The ties that bind most tightly are those cinched against change.

Our land-use system used to reflect what we loved about Oregon. Now what does it reflect? Have we changed? The 2013 Oregon Values & Beliefs Survey affirms that Oregonians still care deeply about those issues that inspired Senate Bill 100: the environment, protecting productive farm- and forestland from development, finding common ground and working together. But those tasked with protecting these values? We believe they (collectively known as the government) are wasteful and inef-ficient and cant be counted on to make good choices. Seven out of eight Oregonians agree that taxes are necessary to pay for the common good. But a majority also feels that our tax system is unfair and too complicated. Survey says. Maybe our values havent changed so much as multiplied.

Were Oregonians. We arent afraid of the fast-moving cur-rent of conflict. Were well-intended. We get involved. But todays planning waters can seem too cold, too deep, too wide to cross. The moderate middle of our electoratewith our shared values and good intentionswishes that Strategic Blue Ribbon Reset Analysis Commission well with its study and recommendations.

Fix that system! Well sign the petition. Well come to the meeting. But follow-up meet-ings every third Tuesday evening for eighteen months? Good intentions dont get dinner made or kids to school or dogs walked or aging parents cared for or the clock punched on a first or sec-ond (or third) job. The solutions to these chal-lenges seem perpetually out of reach: a lawsuit, a legislative committee, another day away.

In Katy and the Big Snow, a blizzard shuts down the city. A house is on fire. A woman is in labor. A plane circles the airport, unable to land. The highway departments trucks are stuck. But Katy, the red crawler tractor with the big snow plow, comes to the rescue. Follow me, she says, and clears a path. Here in Oregons Geoppolis some of us are digging out. Others are digging in. Katys nowhere in sight. And the big snow, still falling, obscures our vision of the place we loved, this place planned for you and me.

J. David Santen Jr. wrote about Oregon water issues for the Summer 2012 issue of Oregon Humanities. He lives in Porltand with his family and likes his neighbors, but wishes he had a small farm instead.

Tim LaBarge is a freelance editorial photographer in Portland.

I M AGIN E THE MOST BE AUTIFU L BR IDGE YOU CA N. IT should span a body of water to connect two cities. Make it carry cars, trains, bikes, and pedestrians, all comfortably. It should be a marvel of engineering and an aesthetic feat. If you like spires, give it spires; if you like cables, give it cables. Let the bridge do everything you have ever wanted a bridge to do, be everything you have ever wanted a bridge to be. Fix it in your mind. See it.

You cant have it. Your city cant have it. Your city doesnt get to look like that. You dont get to move in, through, or

out of it on that bridge. It costs too much, so slash the cables and spires. Its not efficient, so get rid of the trains and bikes. Substitute concrete where you had metalwork; put straight lines where you had curves. Revise your imagination and adjust your dream. Youre not selling anybody that bridge.

Thats what the states of Oregon and Washington have been doing recentlyarguing over a bridge. Oregons legislature agreed to pay for half the budget of a new I-5 bridge spanning the Columbia River. Washington declined. The bridge, though it may never be built, exists nonetheless. It has been a sketch

ImagInary metropolIs


with soft edges, a model with moveable pieces, an absent center around which multitudes are employed studying and planning, a stack of papers distributed in two state capitals for review and response. It is a figment, but with real effects. In some peoples minds it is a vision that majestically connects the cities of Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington. In others minds, that vision is vigorously erased. Their vision is not of a different bridge, but of a different future. They see different cities.

The stakes and emotion behind civic arguments like these are not difficult to understand, because these are the cities most

of us live in: speculative cities. There is an actual, built city, of course, but we cant see it. Were limited by our routines or by our experiences, both remembered and unremembered, which take the place of any objective sense of the city. Visitors and tourists note details invisible to us, delight in locations we find mundane, or raise an eyebrow at institutions in which we take pridethey see a different city than the one we experience. When they leave, we return to using the city our usual way, but the office workers city is not the city of the student, the fireman, or the shopkeeperthere is no single experience of the city, so

Our perfect cities, like our perfect selves, will never be built.

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no single city. Some find a city livable because they use only its most livable aspects, or because they have shaped their lives to fit the city rather than the opposite. Some find the same city boring and make sure always to compare it to some better, more festive cityperhaps because they are frustrated personally and project this onto the streets. Others find that city dangerous. Maybe they are frightened of change and feel the city is always changing. Or maybe they want change, and at some level are looking for dangerbecause danger is sometimes a door to change.

In other words, our lives are stories, stories bound up in the cities where we play them out. We live in speculative cities, because our lives are speculative lives. The proposed bridge, the new grocery store, or the disappearance of the hardware store our parents used to go to strike us with the force of doom or revelation, because when the city changes, it alters who we might become. And because we maintain a belief that there are ideal versions of ourselves somewhere out there, waiting for us to find them and assume their shape, its important that the story of our city be that it was a place where we became our happiest or most powerful selvesthe city of our personal victory. The belief that a better life is possible becomes inextricable from the belief that a better city is possible.

T H I S L I N K B E T W E E N S T O R I E S , L I V E S , A N D C I T I E S explains the broad cultural power of the two speculative cities that most affect us: the ones city officials and planners try to con-vince us will lead to our happiness and should therefore be built, and the ones storytellers try to convince us are nightmares to be destroyed. These cities have broad areas of overlap; sometimes they are even exactly the same.

In the offices of urban planners, the idea of the totally planned city and the careful studies and models created to depict it are presented as progressive and freedom-oriented. Drawings appear in newspapers and magazines alongside charts, graphs, and thoughtful discussions. We see these presentations and agree it is smart to plan the city, so that we can control itbecause who doesnt want control over their life? Storytellers have a tradition, however, of approaching the same speculative cities from the opposite perspective. The big secret of the totally planned city, storytellers have long suggested, is that it has been planned so that we can be controlled. (The fact that in real life control is rarely a secret is inconvenient to drama, so control must be presented as a conspiracy. If someone reminded

everyone that the Decepticons presented their evil plan as a ballot measure thirty years prior and it was passed, so that what theyre doing is actually perfectly legal, the movie would devolve into a discussion of government and zoning laws, and youd lose the youth audience.) Audiences see these movies and agree it is smart to defy the city, because the city is an attempt to control usand is a life in which others control us really a life at all?

The world of film has answered that question with a resounding no since the mediums early days, when Metropolis (1927) established the pattern of presenting the idyllic, totally planned city as always being established on the backs of a hidden underclass exploited for labor. In Metropolis, the effete rich folks live in skyscraper gardens while the proletariat shuffles through shadowy, subterranean German Expressionist neighborhoods. The narrative follows a young man and woman whose lives play out in the pleasure gardens but who try to help the workers, amid complications that include a fancy robot and a dancing harlot. Because audiences have responded positively to depictions of planned cities as sites of oppression, filmmakers have been happy to continue producing them. Forbidden Planet (1956) presents a city that outlives the plannersthe planet has the remnants of some vast, mysterious power system, but the makers are gone, the planet empty. Most films keep the narrative less psychological, more sociopolitical: the cities have crystal skyscrapers and glass transportation tubes and people walk around in odd robes, all while repressing some unpleasant social secret. This is not always subtleLogans Run (1976) depicts a society whose only plan is that on your thirtieth birthday you dieand not always science fiction. Tim Burtons Edward Scissorhands (1990), for instance, takes a particularly aggressive tack in that it doesnt locate the city-planning oppression in a speculative future city, but instead in a caricature of a post-war American suburb. The film suggests Metropolis isnt a German future-nightmare embodied by a robot, but a contemporary American soporific purchased at a Tupperware party.

This is not a pattern limited to film. The literary tradition of critiquing the city-state is vast. Brave New World and 1984 were books many of us were made to read in schoolnovels that teachers suggested were critiques of government or about totalitarianism, but which most students (because young people have limited experience with government) understandably read primarily as depictions of weird, awful places to live. If they are asked to read Shakespeare, they may discover that we have Et tu, Brute? in part because some of the guys in togas had


visions for the city that involved getting Caesar out of the way. Further back, we find Plato, in The Republic, depicting Socrates as primarily interested in critiquing how the city was run. Some read Socrates suggestion that poets should be banished from the city as earnest, others as Socrates maintaining a straight face while shining on his interlocutorsthe equivalent of suggesting at a cocktail party that the homeless should be given free bus tickets to other cities, waiting to see who agrees with you, and making a mental note. Though Socrates was killed for corrupting the youth, it seems clear that it was his constant critiques of the city that really got him in trouble. Nowadays, there are bloggers and tweeters in every major city who are far more derisive of their citys leadership than Socrates ever was. If current city councils commanded all of their critics to drink hemlock, there wouldnt be enough mortars and pestles to mash the necessary amount of poisonous leaves.

To be fair, urban planning has its own narrative tradition, in which the planners are not the heavies. The field suggests that if Scissorhands-esque cookie-cutter subdivisions and HOA lawn standards are all thats oppressing you, then youre doing wellits uncontrolled growth that leads to real problems. In film, this is the Robocop argument: if we dont plan cities, chaos and crime will grow, criminals will take over the streets and, contra Metropolis, well eventually need a robot to clean up. The origin of this tradition is the Westernwhether in film or in its

earlier, James Fenimore Cooper fiction incarnationsin which you have to have (law and) order if you want to have a city. The new sheriff in town is essentially a heroic urban planner: he has a vision for the city. Contemporary planners and politicians often speak about managing growth, but growth is an abstract concept. What is being managed is the behaviorthe livesof people. It would be considered poor form for a mayor to openly report frustration with the citizens of a particular neighborhood and tell them the city will soon alter their lives. On-screen, though, Clint Eastwood shoots as many people as he needs to in order to reclaim public space, and we find it galvanizing.

These diametrically opposed takes on speculative cities each feature a repressed counter-truth. Urban planners, though they lobby for what amounts to broad powers of social control, are, for the most part, earnest civil servants who dont have massive power and who often operate from a belief in liberal humanist individualism. Planners want the city to work so that its citizens can thrive, usually because the planners sit in the same traffic jams we do and dont like them any better. Hollywood studios, on the other hand, craft narratives that suggest they stand for the rights of the heroic individual who stands out from the citys crowdbut the studios are mostly owned by massive corporations and demand from their filmmakers movies that fit a narrative template and contain elements drawn from market-researched demographic checklists. Urban planning is

Our lives are stories, stories bound up in the cities where we play them out. We live in speculative cities, because our lives are speculative lives.

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an attempt to tell a story of the city, but it is a failure if that story does not resonate at the level of individuals. What we see on the screen are attempts to tell the stories of heroic individuals, but the makers need those stories to appeal to entire cities. So which groups speculative cities are built to liberate the individual and which are built for social control? Like a Mbius strip, one side seems to become the other. Perhaps our cities are Mbius cities: when we attempt to follow the story of the city, we end up confronted by the stories of individuals within it, but when we follow the route of an individual, at some point it becomes the story of the city.

Both groupsthose making city-level plans and those individually resisting themwill fail, for the same reason that we cant build our dream bridges: ideals, in order to become real, must compromise the ideal. We each have our own individual psychological tensions between freedom and control that manifest in our decisions about what we will do and where we will do it, and we neverthankfullybecome perfect people. Cities allow us an opportunity to play out our freedom/control drama on a broad canvas, and the result is that cities fail at perfection just as predictably as we do. The city of total control fails because there are people brave enough to defy control, while the city of total freedom fails because there are always those ready to provide the comfort and safety of order. Amid all of this failure and frustration, we move through the city, simultaneously acting in the narratives of our individual lives and that of the city. The speculative city in which we might become our best speculative self will never be builtsome other city will be built instead, one that is frustratingly not designed according to our individual desires. Writers and filmmakers are luckythe lives and cities they cant build in the real world are made anyway, on the page and screen. These works are even sometimes referred to as masterpieces, despite the fact that theyre not real. If we were all allowed to count

What is being managed is the behaviorthe livesof people.

every unrealized dream or abandoned plan as a nevertheless significant vision, we might all be counted geniuses, with impressive bibliographies and IMDB pages. But because our unbuilt masterworkswhether bridges, buildings, or homesexist primarily as settings for our unrealized superior selves, in addition to counting ourselves geniuses, could we also count ourselves happy? Something tells me models of unbuilt happiness arent as satisfying as models of unbuilt bridges. Perhaps untroubled happiness is just another ideal, thoughwhich means it only exists in cities that dont.

Dan DeWeese is the author of Disorder, a story collection, and You Dont Love This Man, a novel. He has been the editor in chief of Propeller magazine since 2009.


Design for a Crowded PlanetA traveling exhibition offers innovative solutions by and for city dwellers.

C Y N T H I A E . SM I T H I S T H E C U R AT OR OF S O CI A L LY responsible design at Cooper-Hewitt, a Smithsonian Museum in New York City dedicated to historic and contempo-rary design and the impact of design on daily life. From August 2012 through January 2013, Smiths exhibition Design with the Other 90%: Cities was on display at Mercy Corps Action Center and the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in Portland, OR. Smith

also wrote and edited a book about the exhibit, which focuses on the innovative solutions city dwellers, designers, and govern-ments are finding to deal with the immense migration of people into cities across the globe.

JIll Ow enS: In the foreword to Design with the Other 90%, Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation writes that the adja-cent possible opens up new ideas rapidly. How would you define the adjacent possible?CynthIa e. SmIth: I think shes talking about the fact that within cities and often in informal settlements, the density and the amount of collaboration that can take place because of those connections happens at such an intense level. There are so many combinations of ways that people can take advantages of those adjacencies. For example, they often live and work in the same location, so it becomes a much more efficient place. While these locations often lack adequate sanitation, housing, access to water, etc., there are also some advantages. Some would describe, and I would agree, that these are places where people

Informal settlement dwellers, SDI affiliate Mahila Milan, and architects discuss existing and new community layouts, Yerwada Slum Upgrade project, Pune, India.

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can emerge out of poverty, because theres so much happening within these informal economies. We need to build on that. A lot of people who work in this arena would say that, instead of tearing down or removing the settlements, which is too often what happens because residents lack secure land tenure, because theyve migrated in and settled on land they dont own, we need to actually support those residents. Residents often have quite innovative ideas and ways to improve their conditions.

JO: You write about the interface between the informal and the for-mal in citiesthat innovations that bridge those gaps are the most innovative and useful ones. What are some examples?CeS: To lay the groundwork for this, its mostly because this growth, this migration is taking place at a really rapid rate. For-mal governmentslocal and regional governmentscant keep up with the number of people moving into their cities. Close to a billion people, roughly, currently live in informal settlements, and thats projected to double in number by the year 2030. Most of that growth is going to take place in Africa and Asia, and some parts of Latin America. So how do you deal with that next one billion people who are moving into these cities? You could see it as one billion solutions, or one billion problems. A lot of these organizations working with these people see it as one billion solutions. In this exchange of information, design can play an important part in that, because were talking about the built environment. But it goes beyond the built environment. Its really about systems, innovative systems and procedures.

There are a number of examples within the exhibition that have already been successful at doing this, where theres a design exchange thats taking place. With the SDI, Shack/Slum Dwellers International, they use a peer-to-peer horizontal exchange of information. They are in thirty-four different countries around the world, and thats expanding. In the Bang Bua Canal Commu-nity project in Thailand, the government works with the settle-ments in order to provide secure land tenure. So there are real collaborations that are taking place.

JO: What elements make a good city?CeS: Though I think this can be applied to many cities, what Im looking at primarily are cities that are experiencing this rapid informalization. So I think its a number of things as theyre going through this transformation. One is including the people in the planning and reurbanization process. Another is develop-ing capacity locally. There are examples from South Africaand this is true in almost all African citieswhere a large portion of the citys economy derives from the informal economy. Instead

of excluding that, the cities should really begin to support that in some way, because its not going away, and really acknowledge that thats an important part of the city.

One of the things that Capetown, South Africa, did was to pro-vide public land for urban agriculture for the informal settlers. They acknowledged that there was an issue with food insecurity and began to provide that for the settlers, along with resources to help them create an economically sustainable way to provide for their own families and maybe make it into a business.

Something that is getting a lot of attention in cities here in the United States is creating mixed-use, mixed-income housing thats closer to work opportunities. You can imagine why this is important. When you start to move people away from where theyre working, you create a new kind of poverty, because it takes so long and it takes so many resources for them to get where they need to be to make a living. You need to think of it holistically. I was just in Denver, and theyre creating their social housing in this way. Its called transport-oriented design, and its happening all over the United States. But its also true in other expanding cities across the world. Instead of moving the informal settlements, tearing them down and moving them to the outskirts, its much better to have people living close to where they work.

JO: What do you think the cities in the United States and Europe can learn from cities in the developing world? That concept sounds like a good place to start.

Before and after: stair upgrade with integrated basic services, San Rafael-Barrio Unido, La Vega, Caracas, Venezuela.


CeS: Absolutely. Its really about learning from places that have limited resources in environmentally compromised areas. Theres so much that we can learn from that. Theres one example that I talk about a lot in lectures, which is in Caracas, Venezuela. Urban Think Tank, an architecture firm, developed a vertical gym based on what they saw happening in the informal settle-ment, which is very dense. The kids had this soccer field which was unsafe, in a violent area. So they created this vertical gym on a small plot of land, and they went tall. It was four stories high, and each floor was programmed differently. They took clues from the local settlement to create this new kind of building.

They designed it as a kit of parts. What I mean by that is it can be programmed in different ways for different activities, and they can then transfer that. Theyre starting to build them in four other locations in Caracas. If one needs a music hall, there can be a music hall, or a market, if another needs that. Now theyre beginning to talk to a city in Jordan, a location in the Netherlands, programmed differently but designed very similarly with this kit of parts. They were also talking to New York City schools at one point, because of their limited space this can activate that kind of space. So that kind of thinking is coming out of these locations.

Another example out of Caracas [image above]: the Integral Urban Project was a team of architects, engineers, road design-ers, and a geologist working directly with San Rafael, one of the many vertical informal settlements in Caracas. In Caracas, the formal city is at the center, and then on the periphery, on these

steep mountain slopes, these informal settlements are built. This creates a very interesting dilemma. You have these very steep hills, and people are going up and down them all the time. They have to travel this day in and day out. So how do you create a better pathway, a better way for people to get to and from their homes and the rest of the city? They devised a road that circled it, so that public transportation could get near to it, and then they created a whole network of stairs and open space, because its very, very dense. Then within the stairs, they incorporated the infrastructurethe sanitation, water, and electricity. What was most important about this was, again, instead of remov-ing the people while they did the work, they kept everybody in place. So while improving their conditions, they kept the social cohesion. These are real communities, where people have lived, brought up families, so thats an important criterion. Many of these successful projects answer the question: How do you keep social cohesion? Sometimes its: How do you create social cohesion?

JO: How have cities evolved over time? How is their role changing in the world?CeS: Global cities are becoming more and more important. Theyre becoming almost as important as the nation-state, from an economic point of view. When people talk about places, they talk about London, Mumbai, Beijing. Because so many people are migrating into these places and theyre so large, they have a lot of influence.

So how do you deal with that next one billion people who are moving into these cities? You could see it as one billion solutions, or one billion problems.

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And cities are talking to each other. There are large orga-nizations of cities that are trying to work together to come up with some joint solutions. Thats even true here in the United States, where the most innovative developments are taking place at a city level, not at a state level or a federal level. Its because of how cities work. Theres a mayor, and often the mayor has a lot of power. Ill use New York as an example. Structurally, our mayor has a lot of ability to make a lot of changes. Our mayor here changed the zoning laws. His commissioner of transportation transformed the streets to make them more bike-friendly. Its funny, talking to someone from Portland about bike-friendly policies. But for a big city like New York, putting in bike lanes and alternative transportation is a big step. And thats true all over. Youll hear about cities like Phoenix, or Salt Lake City, doing really interesting things at a city level, because they have that ability. Theyre not gridlocked, like everything else is.

JO: I was intrigued by the idea in your book that those who work on cities use a mixture of science, craft, and art. How have you seen those elements play out in your work with cities?CeS: Im thinking about Design with Africa, an initiative started with money from the government of South Africa working with industrial designers to extend the conversation about how to design for the African continent. They created this initiative based on the African concept of ubuntu, which is all about work-ing together collectively. They came up with this idea for these low-cost bicycle modules that could be used in a variety of dif-ferent ways.

This again goes back to the first thing that we talked about, this whole hybrid solution between formal and informal. So they provide all the pieces that a person couldnt make themselves, like the bicycle wheels, the chain, the gears, etc. The person who gets the modules can then put it together using local and found materials. So you can come up with a cart, a small bike ambulance, a bicycle itselfjust all kinds of interesting things using your own ingenuity and local materials. The reason they were thinking about this is because you dont necessarily need to manufacture a fully built expensive bicycle for parts of that area, because people cant afford it. So you really need this alter-native, and this is coming directly from designers in Africa.

I have the privilege of being able to meet with all of these peo-ple who are doing really interesting, innovative work, whether theyre people who are living in the informal settlements, or organizations that are working with people who are living in the informal settlements. The thing thats consistent is that these are innovative approaches, so depending on what their expertise is, or where their interests lie, thats what they bring to bear. Theyll see a problem, and theyll create a solution that will call on their strengthswhether its science, or art, or cul-ture, or design.

Central square at the entrance to the Santa Maria

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Jill Owens works in marketing at Powells Books.

All photos in this story are from Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museums Design with the Other 90% Cities exhibition.


T HIS IS W H AT IT ME A NS TO SAY PORTL A N D. IF W ER E talking specifics, this is what it means to say North and Northeast Portland (the NEP). What we call The Town.

It means hoop dreams born during your Biddy Ball days (you played for Dishman or ASP, or else you wasnt as cold as

you thought you was) that flame out all too soon. It means if you keep the hope flickering long enough, you play spring tournaments held hours elsewhere and spend whole summers practicing in Irving Park.

What it means to say Portland is, at some point, spending part of your year working with at-risk youthor all of it being one.

My city. It has meant a decades-long love affair with colors: red and blue. It means prep games with the air fragrant with dollar pop-corn and the eerie presence of gang task force guarding the exits. What it means to say my city is the word rose: the Rose Garden, the Rose Quarter, the City of Roses, rosebushes in the yards of homes in the West Hills, in neighbor-hoods where they build a new Street of Dreams every year.

A street, that is, for someone elses dreams. What it means to say my city is yes, you

dream, but small, realistic. The Town. The Town. When those young

dreams desert you, you take up pimping and pandering or selling dope, or if youre bold, taking by force things that dont belong to you. What it means to say Portland is that, if youre one of those dudes, sometime in your late teens or twenties you move to Vegas, hustle a new ride, and drive all the way home with the butt-naked ambition of being the cynosure, of being, for an afternoon at least, the axis of it all. In my city, dudes who stay local, dudes with aspirations

What It Means to Say Portland

M itch el l S. Jack son

IL LUST R ATIONS by M IGU EL A R I A S

City, Suburb, Town, Woods, NeighborhoodFive writers reflect on why they live where they live.

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average as fill-in-the-blank, plus abandoned faith, those guys push wheels made a generation ago: restored American-mades with custom systems, exotic paint, and wire rims with too many spokes to count.

In 88, what it meant to say my city was a collective awe at our inaugural drive-by murder (RIP Ray Ray).

It has meant Pop Life and the Woodlawn Park Bloods and the Lokd Out Pirus and the West Side Pirus and the Denver Lane Bloods and the Inglewood Family Gangster Bloods and the Rol-lin 60s Crips and the Columbia Villa Crips and the Kerby Blocc Crips and the Hoover Crips and the Imperial Villa Crips and the Unthank Park Hustlers and them boys from Failing Block and the Going Street Posse and the Gangsta Disciple Folks and the Richmonds (who can forget the Richmonds?), etc., etc., plus damn near a new set every other new beef. What it has meant to say the Rose City is gang heroes and gang villains and attend-ing the funerals of heroes and villains and innocents to witness crowds so large they spill out of an Avenue Baptist church and into the street.

If youre from The Town, it could mean get back against a sec-ond cousin or an old elementary school friend.

Nah, thats what it meant to say the Rose City. Ive been away some years. It damn well may be another kind of city.

When youre gone, you see how much your city changes. Or does it? What it meant to say Portland, Northeast Portland, The

Town, was copping a bag from your big homie, a precooked and acetone-cut underweighed baggie, and standing on a street your mom warned you away from: Failing or Going or Gantenbein or Skidmore or Mallory or Rodney or Church or Roselawn, corners where young boys whose quivering flames were soused anytime before yours carried stolen straps and a heavy grudge against the globe. My city, what it meant was you posted on a hot block all night for almost nothing, only half of which (if you were lucky) was yours to keep.

Being from The Town meant feeling as though youd toured every grade school known to man: King and Sabin and Irving-ton and Faubion and Boise-Eliot and Vernon, not because you wanted to, but because there was always something or other that some months made the rent unbearable for whomever. It meant riding a TriMet bus to and from those schools, and later to various middle schools, and afterward to a few high schools. It meant standing at an uncovered bus stop on an ultra-drenched day with the frail hope somebody you knew would ride by and swoop (good lookin, Cool Nutz).

What it means to say my city is an entry-level gig at Nike, Adi-das, or Intel, or for the few and proud, landing a damn good job with the state.

If youre from The Town, you mightve marched on behalf of a beach blast, but for all your life attending a rally in Pioneer Courthouse Square was out of the question.

This city, this cityit has meant an ambivalent belief in the Blazers and, for a multitude, zero faith in much else.

For too many or maybe too few, what it has meant to say The

Town is our oh-so-lovely Measure 11 mini-mums. It has meant theres a good chance you can find who you been searching for in the jus-tice center if for months you aint seen them on the streets.

What it means to say my city is if you dream, but small and realistic; if you toured, or felt you did, most of the schools in the city; if you mashed on somebodys baby girl all winter to ride a new car down MLK in sublime sum-mer effulgence; if you had your hopes doused a decade too soon; if you caught a coveted bus route to almost all the elementary schools in the city; if you had an infatuation with colors: red or blue, or maybe transformed from one color to the other; if you used to stand all night on a dim side street for a few bucks (if that) of profit; if you flirted with a second or third strike or were stretched out with a mandatory sen-tence; if you had a habit of taking stuff with a pistol that dont belong to you; if for fear your moms would find and puff it you couldnt ever stash at home the sack fronted by a headstart-on-prison big homie, it means theres a good chance that the Rose City, that The Town, that our cityand we could mourn this but maybe its reason to rejoicemight now, and if not now, then soon, sooner than anyone knows, be a place that belongs to someone else.

Mitchell S. Jackson is a Portland native who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches writing at New York University. His novel, The Residue Years,was published in the summer of 2013.

This city, this cityit has meant an ambivalent belief in the Blazers and, for a multitude, zero faith in much else.


W H Y DO W E SN EER AT SU BU R BS? W H Y DO SO M A N Y films and novels generally portray them as soulless, colorless, bland prisons for mindless automatonsvast, shal-low plats of repression in which the young and free-spirited are trapped, and from which they struggle to escape? Why is that? Its wrong and stupid and silly, and I am weary of it, so I will now rise to the roaring defense of suburbs while sitting in my small suburban house, which, despite its moist corners and shaggy coat of moss, seems denser with life and more stuffed with story than any city domicile or rural retreat.

For one thing, there are more animals and plants around here than there are in the city: we have had deer bound down the street, coyotes trot up, hawks and owls and rabbits and herons and eagles and osprey and vultures and chickarees and wood rats and raccoons soar and hop and swoop and scurry nearby, beavers and ottersand probably trout and turtleslive in the creek one street away. Eighteen different species of trees

grow within a stones throw, and four species of edible berry. It seems to me that my education and that of my children are inarguably deeper because we live in reach of so many species of being, not just canine and feline and urbane.

But we are also surrounded by more than a hundred human beings within a one-block cir-cumference: teachers, coaches, policewomen, actors, restaurateurs, carpenters, mechanics, engineers, attorneys, the happily retired, the unhappily unemployed, and the Bird Lady, who lives with thousands of parrots and cocka-toos, it seems, from the shrill cacophony at her end of the street. Many of these people I know well enough to say hey and chat about sports and weather; a few are good friends; many I do not know, as they are new or do not wish to be known, such as the man in the cottage overgrown with blackberries, with its mossy door on which no halloweening child has ever knocked.

So we have the dense human burble and the braided tales and graces and pains of city life, while also swimming in the buzzle and thrum of wildlife and the snap of clean air for which people seek rural retreat at the coast or moun-tain or riverside. We can easily work in the city and get there by bus or automotive propulsion; and just as easily, we can slip into thickets and farmland when the hurly is too burly.

So again I ask: Why the sneering? Why the cultural pummeling? Especially as Americans continue to steadily move to the suburbs: ac-cording to the 2010 census, some 122 million Americans live in suburbs, while 44 million live in cities. Time magazine reports that sub-urbs have half the poverty rate of cities, even though about three times as many people live there. The FBI reports that suburbs have a third of the crime that cities do, even though

In-Between Place

Br i a n D OY L E

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about three times as many people live there. The New York Times reports that 20 percent more suburban students than urban students earn high school degrees.

Are there many subtle and complex reasons for all this? Sure. Are there rafts of problems in the suburbs, from drug use to rape to meth labs to pollution to racism? Sure. Are they Valhal-las and Nirvanas and the acme of the Ameri-can dream? Nah. But they are often absolutely lovely, friendly, generally safe, generally well-managed small villages and towns and hamlets that are unfairly demonized as cookie-cutter white enclaves; in many cases they actually are small villages and hamlets that the city metas-tasized toward, changing their flavor forever; and they remain, for all the cultural sneering, the places where most Americans want to live. Are most Americans fools, to want to live and raise their children not in the city, which can

often be cacophonous and dangerous, but in a town near the city, a place where kids can swim and run more freely, a place perhaps with better schools, a place with plenty of neighbors for stimulus and safety, but a little more space, more trees, more hawks?

In general, if you look at the last American century, you see people moving to the suburbs: rich and poor, of every color, ev-ery religion, every ethnicity. Why? Because suburbs are good places to live. They are neither/nor. They are neither as remote as much of rural America, where jobs are few for the many, nor are they as dense and tumultuous and edgy as cities. In general, people move to where the jobs are, and once they have jobs, they move to where they are most comfortable. We want some pri-vacy, but not isolation; we want enough space to house and raise children in safe and healthy and stimulating ways; and so, in the main, we live in suburbs.

Question: Do those who portray the suburbs in literature and film and television as a wasteland, as a sort of dispirited ant farm writ large, live in cities? What if their artistic produc-tion is wildly successful and earns them gobs of money: would they stay in the city, or move to a big, new house by the beach, or overlooking the river, or with a view of the mountain in the suburbs? Just asking.

The two books that most woke me up to something subtle and true about the suburbs were Second Nature by Michael Pol-lan and The Thunder Tree by the shaggy Northwest brilliance of Robert Michael Pyle. Both explored the idea, utterly new to me when I encountered them, of a sort of in-between spacenot wilderness, not urb, but us, as it were. Both books gently but deftly made me realize that we generally use silly and falsely dichotomous categories when we talk about landscape. Pollan used gardens as his heroesnot farms, not wild growth, but a sort of negotiation with plants, in which we provide labor and they provide food or managed beauty. Pyle used abandoned lots and weedy yards as his heroesthe actual wild spaces in which most American children first encounter insects and small mam-mals and birds and wild berries and unbuilt space.

I suppose that this, to me, is the glory of suburbs. They are that in-between space, with something of the populous fizz and bustle of cities, and something too of the sprawl and ancient lure of landscape not wholly ordered by human beings. Perhaps they are often dismissed and insulted by popular culture because of this very compromise, this mongrel nature; but perhaps a little of both is a fine way to be.

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine and the author of the sprawling Oregon novel Mink River.

We want some privacy, but not isolation; we want enough space to house and raise children in safe and healthy and stimulating ways; and so, in the main, we live in suburbs.


E A R LY A PR IL , SU N R ISE ON THE M A LHEU R NATIONA L Wildlife Refuge south of Burns. Most of my fellow passen-gers in the John Scharff Migratory Bird Festival van had come from Seattle hoping to see the courtship display of the sage grouse. Where will you settle, then, when you retire? someone asked the driver, a local Fish and Wildlife employee.

Oh, no, Im not leaving, he answered. I love it here. Besides, Boises only a few hours east of us, Salt Lake to the southgood roads north and west, too. You can get anywhere from here.

The Seattle folks may have been mystified, but I knew what he meant. Its what we all want, isnt it? A centered belonging to place, yet a connection to the world outside our own? For me, that place has been the inland Northwest, from the Clear-water Canyon country where I was born to the High Wallowas where I ran along the lake every morning before schoolI taught high school classes in writing and literature in the val-ley just below Chief Joseph Mountainto Pendleton, the town where I live now.

Yet despite my love for this vast and varied landscape, Ive felt an inner conflict. How can I claim to belong to land taken from its original inhabitants? Arrow points keep turning up in the fields of my familys Idaho land; when my father was a child, the

circle where a tepee had stood was still visible. Live well, and build good houses, She Who Watches taught the people of her village near The Dalles. But no matter where my people build our houses, their foundations rest on dis-possession. Were here now, I know. We must live somewhere. But how can we live well?

I came to Pendleton when budget cuts took my teaching job in Joseph. At first I wasnt sure that I belonged in this particular part of the Northwest, at least outside of the classrooms of the community college where Id been lucky enough to be hired. I didnt know much about wheat ranching, and Id long since lost my taste for rodeo. Of course, there was more to Pend-leton than the world-famous Round-Up; I would find a welcoming bird club, an amazing tai chi teacher who studies with grand mas-ters in China, wineries galore just up the road. The arts are thriving here, too: there are four galleries if I count the two on the nearby Uma-tilla Indian Reservation, where Andy Warhols work is on display just now at Tamstslikt Cul-tural Institute. I can take hands-on classes at the Arts Center of Pendleton (free for kids), and theres music, everything from the East-ern Oregon Symphony to the Mounted Band. Terrific bluegrass, a mens chorus. A rock n roll camp that draws teens from all over the Northwest. Theres literature, too: the annual Eastern Oregon Word Round-Up and a thriv-ing monthly First Draft Writers Series, where Ursula K. Le Guin spoke in October. I live just around the corner from an athletic club. Star-bucks has arrived, and three young men came home to found the Prodigal Son Brewery and Pub. Two wilderness areas are right next door; my sixteen-year-old granddaughter and I came face-to-face with a mountain goat on top of Ea-gle Cap a few years ago. My politics lean left of the majority, although eight thousand people had registered as Democrats last time anyone counted, and fifty-seven as Green Party sup-porters. But in my neighborhood, people walk past each others bumper stickers to offer help when someones sick or to ask for help them-selves. Or just to visit.

Like life anywhere elseincluding the coun-try south of Burns, Im sureits complicated.

Belonging and Connection

Bet t e Ly nch H ust ed

Bette Lynch Husteds books include Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land, Lessons from the Borderlands, and At This Distance: Poems. She lives in Pendleton.

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The freeway that bisects Pendleton leads west to Portland, where Ive been part of a po-etry workshop group for the past few years. That monthly infusion of friendship and in-spiration a

Fall/winter 2013: The City

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