Sustainable Portland What We Need Is a City That Can Carry Us into the Next Century by Steven Ames See simplicity in the complicated. Achieve greatness in little things. —Lao Tsu In May of 1981 a survey of planners, architects and university professors on the future of American cities was published in Next Magazine. The conclusion, as usual, left little doubt as to how the experts view Portland. Among the 55 largest cities in the nation, Portland was ranked second for its overall future prospects. It was also judged most attractive city for its size and finished close to the top among trend-setting cities, best-managed cities and best cities for retirement. Here was yet another in a string of accolades for Portland and environs, an urban region already highly touted for its quality of life and livability. No doubt, some of the more visible Portland area achievements over the last decade have helped win such generous praise: the nation's first intentionally designed mass transit mall, the first major citywide energy conservation policy, the first publicly elected regional government, a new light rail transit line, and a host of less prominent but equally impressive innovations. Why Portland? What makes us so prone to succeed? One could argue endlessly—and many people do—as to whether it is dynamic leadership or an active citizenry or any number of other factors. But this line of argument altogether bypasses some of the more indigenous qualities at work. One such quality, so pervasive and yet so subtle, is rarely if ever acknowledged: Portland is a successful place because it is a distinct place. Tucked between two mountain ranges. at the base of one of the nation's most fertile valleys, bounded by a great waterway, this urban region is remarkably well defined. We are a place apart. Our awareness of our "portlandness" is keen. In the local language, "East" can mean anything from The Dalles to Atlantic City. We have our own spectacular setting, our own varied and beloved climate and, not surprisingly, our own unique history. Put differently, the Portland area has a sense of place about it. Should anyone be surprised if over the years we might learn to see things differently ... or sometimes do them better? Why is this elusive quality, a sense of place, so valuable? Because it is a reference point—both a perspective on the larger world around us and a platform for local action. Held rightly, a sense of place is a tool for framing those bigger- than-we-care-to-imagine problems and bringing them back down to local scale. It helps us to focus our awareness on who we are, where we are headed, and what our next steps might be. In so doing, we often discover that the best solutions are those that can be found in our own back yards. In Portland, what happens locally matters. In the last decade our awareness of this has given us a subtle advantage in controlling pointless freeway expansion, strengthening our neighborhoods and conserving energy. What is hard to imagine happening in a hundred other sprawling urban regions sometimes seems to come naturally to us. Thus far, as the experts agree, we have been much more fortunate than most. But we are not magically immune to the many headaches facing urban America. The Portland region, for example, is projected to expand by another half-million people in the next twenty years. This would be the equivalent of adding a new city to the region, one third again larger than the entire city of Portland, by the year 2000. Most of these people would migrate from other parts of the country, seeking jobs, housing and the good life for which the region is so well known. And beyond our boundaries of place, the world is lunging headlong into larger crises. Regardless of how well we bring our own house into order, there will be no avoiding the impacts of these interregional and international developments. In all likelihood, the coming decade will demand that the people of the Portland area maximize the resources— yet honor the limitations—of our own region. This challenge will require all the skills, determination, creativity, caring and gutsiness we can muster to pull it off in the style to which we are accustomed. More than ever, we will need to hone this special tool, our sense of place. Driving Forces in the 1980s The 1980s are increasingly being acknowledged as a period of intense new pressures for this nation. Like a plains thunderstorm, we can feel it coming long before it hits. Economists, politicians, and other observers of the American system do not openly savor the rumblings on the horizon of the new decade. Privately, many of them express doubt and cynicism. The public itself is not far behind in its perception that uninvited changes are in the works. During the 1950s and 1960s, according to opinion polls, Americans characteristically believed that the present was better than the recent past and that the future would represent an improvement over the present. Writ large, this was 37
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz