We have a vision for 1 million new people moving into this city. How does design thinking work into this process? What are our hopes and dreams for Portland, and how can we build our city to realize them?

“In the Round: Collective Leadership” was the title of PDXplore #2, part of PNCA’s ongoing Idea Studios. From 6-9 Pm on July 22nd, some of the most active members of Portland’s community attended what would be an important first step in creating a lasting dialog for the intentional and mindful development of Portland’s maturing land and cityscapes.

The panel featured 10 members mayor-elect Sam Adams, Metro president David Bragdon, Hillsboro mayor Tom Hughes, Portland planning director Gil Kelley, and City of Gresham executive manager Alice Rouyere”.

The purpose of the panel was to bring clarity to the relationship between planning and design, while making the needs of a growing population known to important civic leadership. The idea was create a safe space for Elected Officials and Designers to speak about the challenges facing Portland and their vision for the future.

Five members of the panel were member’s from Portland’s design community, and five were from Portland’s civic community.

Panel Members

The Design Panel

Mike McCulloch is the Architect/Principal of Michael McCulloch Architects. He is proposing diagrams for the city that are inclusive and easily understood.

Rudy Barton is Chair of the Architecture Department at Portland State University. He believes that the key to understanding Portland is to recognize that the Willamette River is the defining heart of our city-both literall and metaphorically.

Carol Mayer Reid is Principal of Mayer/Reed, and is intrigued by the comparison of Portland with our neighboring Left Coast cities: San Fransisco, Seattle, and Vancouver, B.C.

Richard Potestio

William Tripp is an Architect whose drawings of the design principles unique to Portland focus on the making of ritual space, the outdoor living rooms essential to creating and sustraining community.

The Civic Team:

Sam Adams is a Portland City Council Member and Mayor-Elect of Portland. He is currently Commissioner in Charge of Portland’s Office of Transportation and the Bureau of Environmental Services.

David Bragdon is the President of Metro, and has lead new initiatives to preserve natural areas and protect water quality, suport thriving neighborhoods, create jobs and economic prosperity.

Tom Hughes is the Major of Hillsboro and was both and educated in Hillsboro’s school system. He serves on numerous boards, including the Washington County Community Action Organization and the Oregon Economic Development District.

Gil Kelley is the Planning Director for the City of Portland and assumed his post in January 2000. He is leading several new initiatives aimed at furthering the city’s vitality, livability and beauty, including river stream restoration and investment in neighborhood centers.

Alice Rouyere is the Executive Manager for the city of Gresham. She has 17 years experience in urban planning, community development and public works in city government and private consulting.

Robert Liberty is currently the Metro Councilor for District 6 and has 25 years of experience in promoting livable communities at the local, regional, state and national level.

Tom Walter of the Coriggo group served as the moderator of the event. He is a recognized speaker and teacher in leadership development and 6 years experience with Wieden and Kennedy, where he saw WK’s global development group.

The Panel Begins

Idea studies are explorations of creative practice.

The exhibit that’s around you is dedicated to making the place around you a great place for the next century to come.

I want to talk about this as a proposition to all of our panelists, but more about that after the panel.

Tom: It is a humbling experience to stand here in front of you this evening, and also VERY much an honor.

This event is being videotaped this evening… so if you have a problem with that, then talk to this gentleman over here, or this woman.

I was thinking about the term ‘moderate’ as a verb. And I don’t want any confusion this evening with the adjective ‘moderate’. Because that’s not what i want this evening to be like.

Unreasonable thinking is what causes change and leadership.

There’s a caveat with that. I would anticipate we do that with clarity, respect, and humanity.

I’m going to start this off with Carol Mayer Reid and the first question:

Carol: Both residents and visitors alike understand the value of life we have here in Portland. What are your concerns and specific solutions for maintaining this quality of life? Do you see specific designs that will allow this to play out more easily than before? Finally, how it would be these changes be positive for us in the region?

Response: I think growth can be a good thing if we harness growth. It can also be a nightmare. If it doesn’t pay its own way, or if the vales we have here are sacrificed. The answer is that it depends on what we do.

It’s not necessary a million people coming here, but it will be a million people born here, living here. Accommodating in the way Phoenix or Huston did, it would be very negative.

It depends the most on what we invest in. How what we spend in the public capital relates to the private capital.

The most recent million people were accommodated here from the 1960’s to today, so about 40 years. All the highways that were built, most of which were funded by the city during the period. Other systems didn’t get a dime. Thus, there was a real bias in what got funded for people.

I think the challenge now for this next thing, is what we put in the pod. What’s our investment strategy? How do we accommodate that many people in a walkable, livable way? Figuring out the new ways. Not the types we needed in the past, but the types we need in the future.

As someone who deals with the land use system is to invert the land use system in terms of what we need. There is often an ambivalence about enhancing the land outside of the urban growth boundary rather than improving the land within it.

Improving terms in the city — a lot of that depends on investment.

There are all those empty parking lots in the Lloyd district that are dead. Why aren’t we using those?

Structured parking lots rather than interchanges. When you put money into different places, it creates a different type of retail.

Tigard wants to have an urban center. Gresham wants to have an urban center. This is not all just about Portland.
2/3rds of the people of the region live outside of Portland.

The first is developing the infrastructure and finance tools that will create the type of Portland we want to have today. The way we’re going to finance great communities in the future.

The second is parks. Park, to me, are an essential part of creating a great community. This area passed the greatest natrual preservation act in history in 2006.

We’re patting ourselves on the back that we tore out a highway a few years ago, but we’ve left it to do nothing.

Forth: of course, the public transportation network. Making those investments really in a way that makes a difference in this great investment neighborhood.

It depends on the public center investing in the things that make this urban center a great place to.

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Carol Mayer Reid: A lot of times we preach to the choir. But how do you deal with audiences of people who are not on fire?

Man: 2/3rd of our people live in a region unaffected by development patterns. One of the reasons Tigard wants to have that urban plaza is because their football team won State the other year and they wanted a place to have a celebration. They needed up having to celebrate in a Fred Meyer Parking Lot.

Recognize our region is actually not that dense. You don’t have to change single family neighborhoods that much if we make the correct changes.

I don’t think that has to happen, these radical changes to existent residents, in order for that to work.

We can talk about expanding the Urban Growth Boundary or we can talk about enhancing our communities.

It costs twice as much to try to enhance and develop communities on the outside of the Urban Growth Boundary than to enhance communities on the inside of town.

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Rick Potestio:

In perspective, I think that all cities reach a moment where they begin to set down their character and their destiny, or the destiny of their character.

I think in Portland we chose to see if the city itself could be the most dense and developed of the other cities in the region. Those such as King’s Hill, the Hawthorne district , Sullivan’s Gulch, parts of the NW have shown the greatness of community plans.

Sam:

Well I think it stats by planning for human beigns and neighborhoods. i think it is planning to be humble in the knowledge that people live in the neighborhoods that fit their needs, that is affordable to them. I think Portland has proven to itself and others that density, or robust transit, that you can have neighborhoods that are both affordable and very sought after.

The emergent analysis of planning is that we can replace the current spaces with better ones, so I think David, that it makes sense what you are saying about implementing town squares, but that we need a lot of public effort and entrepreneurial spirit.

If we were to turn an empty lot near where I live into a public area, that would work well.

Oregon is 14th in the nation for citizens of older age, and we need to plan for that while also planning for a Portland that is becoming progressively younger.

We need to have land use focused and strategic planning that helps to take us places.

Potestio:

From our studies we’ve found that the most dense neighborhoods tend to be the most diverse, and the most vibrant. But we start to see the barriers when we try to modify existing spaces. We begin to see that there is no real mechanism, either financial or political that enables any of this public change.

Sam:

Going back to the fenced off area by where I live that no one can touch unless they below to the school — you don’t start taking to the neighborhoods about densifying the neighborhood, you talk to them about what they want. If you’re planning to put in a Whole Foods and they want a New Seasons, you have to have a certain type of traffic density, or ability to handle that traffic density.

What the public does is does the basic research and makes the connections between the markets and the developers.

In some cases, neighborhoods can accept 10 story structures along highways, because they are excited about what that additional customer base can bring for their small neighborhood.

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Rudy Barton:

I think there’s a hunger in the audience for discussing the development of design.

My question is for Gil.

Portland’s plan is internationally known for its ability to create public spaces.

Vision trumped regulations

New tools were created in order to further the design of the public realm.

What are some of the new techniques that you think will be used as part of this design?

Gil:

I am very optimistic about the future of the city, and the metropolitan range. I’m optimistic because of the leadership that’s represented by the people at this table and by the robust attendance of people at this meeting.

You find an enormous willingness to help shape the future in a positive way. Part of that relies on our tools and techniques. We have to first realize where we are. If we are that this pivotal moment in this city’s history…I actually think we’re at this magical moment in time because Portland for the first time is looking at it’s land use policies, the state at it’s land use planning goals.

There is a sweet spot in the next few years to ask the big question. To ask what the big ideas are, and to implement them.

The Portland effort is called “The Portland Plan”, and that’s for asking simple, or not so simple questions. Where do we want to be int he the next few years? Where do we want to go? Are schools a part of that? Are hospitals a part of that? What is the role of neighborhood organizations in that. Who do we take with us? How do we get there?

And the most important questions: how do we know if we’ve gotten there? We need to have ways of measuring how well we’re gdonig in addressing equity gaps or climate change.

So there is a big picture planning effort going on now, and part of that will be visiting our big picture toolbox, and part of that will rely on coalescing on our big picture ideas.

In many ways when you plan a new city on the ground you have to address that landform and the natural features — all of those things that are quite visceral. And you build some buildings, but you don’t expect to have them last more than a few generations, because each set of generations builds things differently.

But now we’re very fragmented now. We have a series of engineers dealing with streets, and a building commission for buildings. Somewhere along the way we’ve lost the vision of the landform. To re-envision the city in the way that people congregate and find their way around town.

And then you kind of think about the buildings that last. So the toolkit has to really start focusing on recovering the landform and our lace in this global era, and moving to articulate what we care about the public realm.

That’s essential going back to the centuries ago to what we began o think about the public realm. How do we govern? How do we leverage more people’s efforts?

I think that’s the palce where we have to start the conversation.

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Host: You talked about a series of obstacles that have been in place for a very long time… when did you first start thinking about this?

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Answer: I think the power of ideas is what is going to make everyone begin thinking about leading the movement of diversity or environmental change. I think that it can’t be a conversation between the Bureau of Landing planning. It can’t simply be that we will write a set of policies and that somehow magically the world will conform, and we need to make sure the market will conform.

Can the bureaucracy in our state and in other communities work together to implement new ideas or will they prevent things from happening?

—-

Sam: I wanted to add on to what Gil was saying.

Giving Portlanders real opportunities to fulfill their needs. We need to fulfill their basic needs, and be accountable to every part of the city, and we need to look at global warming, energy use and production. At least residentially. I think there are important goals we need to set, and then we need to plan and design towards to those goals

First we set the goals, and then we plan and design to meet the goals.

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BIll Tripp:

I changed the order.
The city is changing. The creation of public space in the Pearl district and the waterfront is the end point of a series of negotiations between large tracts of space. What we want to see is that the creation of the actual outdoor rooms should in fact drive zoning. The current toolbox does not allow us ta way to create a design for the city.

The space Sam as talking about, at the back side of the school, was that these spaces are crucial to the development of our communities. The city, rather than a space to visit, is a place to live. Back to this question of the toolbox…

—–

Sam: We have this post office site, the main Rose quarter. How do you figure out a public square, or green spaces, in the existing neighborhoods? As mayor, I’m going to propose a town square or meeting space in at least every city in Oregon. We’ve been talking about if the city of Portland could aquire voluntarily over time, the One person’s potential green space or town is another person’s living space that they intend to live in for a very long time.

—-

We need to have a sense of that common space that binds us together, for multiple functions. We have a lot of work in the Portland area to accomodate people, to have a system of parks and plazas that link to corridors. That becomes a sort of cognitive framwork of how we develop the city over time. There has to be a way to develop what the city wants to do.

How do we work our way out of that box, so that the power of the public space and public realm becomes valuable?

—–

When the city chose to purchase Mt. Tabor, the city got a lot of critisim, because it was “so far out”, and was useless.
Some of the most exciting developments combine community an ecosystems.

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Mike MuCulloch: I have a question directed at Robert, Alice, and John.

I think one of the collective agreements that we looked at when one zooms out 30,00 feet that there’s lot of room here. But basically when you look at that map that is behind us is that the Urban Growth Boundary out to be held, and it’s causing all sorts of creative solutions in planning, design, and so forth.

My question is whether or not you can support that, and that the constituent parts of the the plan. These communities can commit to allowing their communities to intensify to hold 75,000 people in Gresham to uphold this Urban Growth Boundary.

Robert:
I would say that we have a fiscal environmental and social strategy is a moral responsibility.

1. Policy making protects future generations.
2. The majority of growth in this region is not going to the boundaries.
3. Cost to taxpayers. Not a very exciting concept, but I don’t think that people who are concerned about rising health care costs in the middle class will be very excited about paying more taxes.
4. There’s more resurgence of poverty. Now we have people who are losing access to the greenspaces of the city.
5. Climate change. In our region the single most emission of greenhouse gases is driving.
6. We’re running lo in the region, on the planet, for land for growing food. We have land here that is ideals for those things that is right next to us. And to sacrifice that land in the name of development is to lose something that can not be given back.

If we think about enriching the public space we need to spend less money and resources building private space.

—-

Alice:

Those living on the edge have great assess to green spaces. We’re having to work through an urban renewal district, We in Gresham know that we have to come up with creative resources to deal with infill. Great expanses of parking lots provide great abilities to adapt in the future developing, and an opportunity for profit.

Any opportunity we have to palce green on developments, because they have the ability to cover up architectural sins.

What are the points of inspiration? In Gresham it’s the mountain views. In the city it’s the river. How can we focus on that? How can we accommodate the future generations. When I think about my kids and what they can buy and what they cannot buy, and if there’s going to be living in my basement forever. The market isn’t with us today, but it will be with us soon, I hope.

On the greenfill side of things, I think we have some very innovative plans that have been developed in this region. We’ve developed many different approaches; cost-saving measures. We’re ready and creative, and I think we continue to need the help of our partners:.

Jonn Southgate:

I work with the city of Hillsboro, which is the opposite of the city of Gresham on the other side of the area. I think there’s a change in demographics, a change in attitude. There’s a growing desire for what you might call authentic identity. I am stuck by how people are drawn to our downtown. The city has made some strategic decisions in our plaza, we’ve put a light rail out to Hillsboro. We’ve made investments in several projects, like the conversion of an old church to an art space. The old town theatre that has been revived downtown and people have been drawn to it.

I think that suburbia is monochromatic and boring, but Hillsboro is a neat place. They like to come down to the market and experience the arts in the space. Partnering with metro would allow investments that would benefit downtown Hillsboro, and it hasn’t had many strategic investments in decades form the city. It is a tough social equation to allow higher density five-story condos downtown to increase density .

I think that Hillsboro community is supportive of nuanced growth. I don’t think that life has to suffer in order to get 75000 more people into Hillsboro. More and more people grasp that if you want to make that little sector thrive, you need more rooftops, you need to make use of the parking lot spaces. And I don’t think that the construction of 3, 4 or 5 story buildings will not be a pain in anyone’s eyes.

Right now we have this sort of blanket,
It’s one thing to have a paper exercise, but i hope we can accommodate those 30,000 units and place them in the spots that have no identity, no community. The empty lots and parking lots.

——

Host: In closing, I’d like to ask the panel if there’s a certain idea that’s percolating in your minds since the beginning of this panel.

Tom:

I don’t think accommodating the next million people has to be as scary a it seems sometimes. I think we’re going to have to be creative.

3600 dwelling units have been added to Portland each year; that’s about 1% of Portland’s population every year. Since the passage of the 20/40 plan, we’ve been averaging. I think it’s a great discipline to embark on that challenge.

Robert:

Burnside, Barbur, 122nd. There’s projects out in Milwaukee, homes, low income homes, restaurant and some shops. If you built one of those every year every few miles or so along that area…that’s our housing for the next 25 years.

That’s trying to help out what Oregonians hate:

SPRAWL…and DENSITY.

I will accept change in my neighborhood or city…along with some improvements.

i think there are many designs for doing this. You can have a Vancouver tower, 3 and 4 stories along these corridors.

I would challenge people in this room to give us a choice that improves the life for everyone in this region.

John:
I’m talking to rather conservative neighborhoods, but the lights begin to go on when we talk about the investments and capabilities of what we and the city can do for them.

The choir is growing. It’s getting bigger.

—

How do you concentrate development in a region that makes sense?
A three of four story building doesn’t pencil out? How do we, between the tax code, an the building regulations, make that pencil out.

There are a thousand people out at Intel that want that authentic urbanity.

There are all of these greenfields surrounding us, not brown fields…grey fields.
How much Urban Growth Boundary expansion will the taxpayers in this region be willing to pay for? The market is not there anymore to pay for the infrastructure.

—

Adams:
I think its great to get the designers together unrestrained and unrestricted by politics. That allows them to rise about the certain city boundaries and political boundaries. There’s only so much federal money that flows to the flows to the infrastructure.

Leading people to believe that Damascus, the largest community to be able to rise out of a greenfield and the ability to find those hundreds of millions of dollars to connect it to the rest of the region was a huge mistake.

Hold the link on the Urban Growth Boundary and we will find a way in all of our communities to be able to make density into a positive of thing as possible.

Alice: I was reminded about the entrepreneurial approach.. and how can we partner up in order to get more expansive abilities to deal with the densities we will be dealing with in the next fifteen years.

We nedd to have vibrant communities that need to have income diversity.

Rudy: Sam, I was very encouraged by your optimism and your efforts to develop public space in every neighborhood. I’d like for you to consider layers. Consider building five of the neighborhoods you propose in 5 years.

Adams: Okay.

The Audience cheers

Response: Just trade one streetcar line.

The Audience ooohhhsss…

Voice behind me: Yeah, they’re public spaces…

Mayer Reid:

Sometimes public spaces are very narrowly defined.
Maybe these interactions will occur at intersections, and we need to design those spaces really carefully, and look at those spaces with new eyes.

I’m really encouraged by the way that the place is the stage for those conversations to take place.

Rick:

Design is not just hitting our numbers, it’s about the quality. Sometimes the solutions are going to be highly unconventional. 13th street is an example of where people walk in the street. Either you can have a fence and a balcony, or you can have a stoop and a garden.

We need to really think about quality and the characteristics of those designs.

—-

Mike McCullough:

We used to have the definition of home as the house we live in. Now our definition of home is the city. Or the coffee shop that we go in our jammies. Yes, there’s the tiny little pocket park, or the neighborhood coffee shop.

Without quality, those rooms don’t get used. To have good quality outdoor rooms; they have to be designed. And you can’t leave it up to the private sector to design them because they’re public rooms.

——

Questions for the audience:

Question: I’d like to think small, really small, for just a minute. A lot of people working in these kind of junk spaces that have been left over. The practical reality that the control of these properties is often under the control in control of ODOT or PDOT, as more and more people are on bikes and on foot, do we really need transportation engineers, god bless them, in jurisdiction of these environments anymore.

Sam: No. When we have new positions available, when we’re ding well, we start out with designers and then have the engineers develop that examples.

Caroy Gardner: When I grew up here, home was really the street. his is where i came from and this seems like what we’re trying to go back to. The area I grew up in, seems like the area we want to go back through.

Audience: I’d like to ask a philosophical question of the panel. I’d like you to consider the term “Rabitat”, which is a term that describes a rabbit living in its natural habitat. I feel that often we chop up words so much that we can no longer consider their meaning. So I’d like to propose another word, that that is the word “humitat”, or the idea of a human living in a human’s natural habitat. So the question is then, “Is Portland a natural Humitat?”

Host: We’re going to put you on our communication’s team.

The audience continued to ask questions, and the majority of the audience stayed to listen.

Audience:
The character of a city, prosperity, equity, and character, how those are worked through in the area of design towards that battle?

Potestio:

The most important thing we need to achieve here is diversity across all categories, so we can expand the diverse urban form, achieves diversity of diverse urban forms. I moved from a very uniform seaside neighborhood to a very diverse west side neighborhoods, with 5 million dollar houses next to plow income apartments

Host:

The intent of this evening was to really crack open a discussion about the preciousness of design, and to expose what happens during interdisciplinary thinking. The intention was not about trying to solve many issues, but trying to see how we can move forward with these issues.

Tom Manly of PNCA is going to touch on the proposal we have for this panel.

Tom:
Stewardship of the environment is planting trees and forest under whose shade we’ll never sit. We can become leaders not only in this region, but in his world.

The proposition, I’d like all of you to commit to joining a planning effort to create a biannual exhibition that will look at the very best ideas that will look at the very best authentic urbanity. If you commit to doing that, I will commit to going out to the other institutional locations of the city, then we will come out to the other events and commit to sponsoring the keynote speaker of these locations. Sam said he’d go home and get his checkbook.

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Sponsors: Aira Consulting, Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects, City of Portland, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, GBD Architects, Gerding Edlen Development Company, Metro, PNCA, Red Door Film, Williams and Dame Development, Inc., Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership.

Co-sponsored by: PNCA and Elizabeth Leach Gallery