PSU assistant professor Laila Seewang (Portland State University)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
This spring, Portland State University's School of Architecture has been hosting an online series of urban design conversations between designers in Portland and other cities called "Infrastructure of the Public City," addressing "both the large-scale systems and ideas that organize cities as well as concrete, contemporary urban design problems and projects," as the PSU website describes.
Whether it's roads and bridges or Internet access and social media, underground plumbing or bike routes, the web of connections we build is at least as important as the buildings we construct.
Honestly, I meant to write about this series when it began in April. Since then, there have been conversations about housing in Portland and Los Angeles, downtown struggles in Portland and Detroit, material usage in Portland and Tokyo, and urban memory in Portland and Montgomery. But I was able to do the next best thing: talk to two of the series' co-creators, PSU assistant professors Laila Seewang and Anna Goodman, about the conversations and the broader ideas that have emerged.
And of course all of this is happening in a tumultuous time for Portland. For years, the city was hyped with the help of media and TV, attracted to everything from its quirky youth population to its emerging role as a culinary capitol. People began moving here in higher numbers. More recently, as the pandemic caused downtown's windows to be boarded up protesters took to the streets after George Flloyd's murder and President Trump sent federal troops to help the Portland Police tear-gas them, the city became an international flash point, so much so that a lot of speculative real estate developers here and in other cities have become a lot less bullish and some in local media are hand-wringing about our downward spiral.
In sports psychology they tell players not to get too high or too low. I think the Portlandia-era hype was just that, and conservative think-tank members editorializing about Portland as Pompeii are even less tied to reality. But without a doubt, it's worth talking about: not in a pointless false-binary argument between opposing sides, but between intelligent design thinkers around the world. Hence the online PSU discussion series, and hence my conversation with Dr. Seewang and Dr. Goodman.
Banner image for the discussion series (Portland State University)
PORTLAND ARCHITECTURE: Laila, I read that your research uses infrastructure as a lens through which to study environmental and urban design. Can you talk about your background, how you come to infrastructure as an architect? And did I correctly read that you studied 19th-century German plumbing?
LAILA SEEWANG: I grew up in Australia: Tasmania. I was in the capital, Hobart, a city of 250,000 people. I studied at Cooper Union in New York and worked at Pei Cobb Freed on urban design projects.
Slowly, over time, I realized that infrastructure is so significant to urban design—where they are and who gets to use it or how electricity is distributed—that it affects how we use the city. It also makes the experience of the city different for different people. Who gets power back right after the blackout? Who doesn't? I was living in New York when the World Trade Center towers came down, and in the year afterward we had two blackouts that really turned the city upside-down. People were terrified. But also, some people got power back in a day, while some parts of the Bronx were out for like a week. I suddenly felt the individual building is not really what the city is about. I think it's more about infrastructure.
By the time I got to Switzerland, for a Ph.D. in urban history, I focused on the municipal water infrastructure in Berlin in the 19th century. Once it's built, it is a whole other host of associations, a kind of path dependent on how the city can grow to be the city it is today. A lot of decisions are made by building this hard-infrastructure network. So I see infrastructure as all of the people and issues and cultures and ways of using. What are the resources that they tap? You can tell a lot about how we build cities and use resources just by looking at the infrastructure.
And Anna, what about you? I read that your work is focused on the politics of architectural practice and the role of making and craft. Where are you from, and how does your work and that of the Urban Design Collaborative relate to the series?
ANNA GOODMAN: I am an architectural and urban historian with a background in practice, and a lot of my work focuses on the way universities and other educational settings form architects into the types of political actors that they are in the world. How do they actually start to propose an intersection between professional and citizen? And how does that also create the potential for architects to adapt to different social movements or a different socio-economic or political context? I spent half of my childhood in New Mexico and half in Alabama, went to architecture school at Rice University, and then ended up bouncing around to Boston and living abroad for a bit and then coming back. I was actually working as an architect in Portland for some years before I decided to go to graduate school at Berkeley for a master's and then a Ph.D. in architecture history and what we call global metropolitan studies at the time, which is an interdisciplinary focus on urban questions.
I think what we're trying to do with the whole Urban Design Collaborative and the lecture series is to start to insert Portland State University as one of the actors or spaces where some actual political or material thinking can start to happen. We have all this interesting research and all these people in conversation with each other. But actually we can open up the university to the city in a way that's happened at different universities at different historical moments, where they become very key actors within cities, positive and negative. We want to think critically about what our position is within a city and even the region in the nation, to start shaping ideas about the future of architecture and urban design.
Anna Goodman (Portland State University)
It's an interesting moment to be having this series of lectures and conversations, looking at Portland in comparison to other cities. While we think we have really unique individual struggles, everybody else is having a similar type of struggle. Do you feel like in the lectures there has been some ‘We're not in this alone’ type of feeling?
SEEWANG: That was the motivation for the for the series: we in the Urban Design Collaborative at PSU thinking, ‘We're not sure that all of the people who need to be are at the table to figure out what this city could be. I was hired at the same time as two full-time faculty devoted to urban design issues, and I felt like we didn't know the city. So we were just having loads and loads of conversations with different people.
What have been some of your favorite conversations in this series?
GOODMAN: To look at downtown, for the April 23 talk we invited Dan Patera and Melissa Ditmer from Detroit, who had watched the city go through bankruptcy and how it is looking for strategies to renew the downtown. And having seen what's happened to Portland downtown in the last year, there was this question: could we learn anything from Detroit? What did they do? What did they learn? What do they think they did? It was just a very energetic conversation and I think there were overlaps.
Downtown Portland has been such a hot topic and I feel like it's been a difficult problem to untangle, because you have impacts of the pandemic and the protests, and the presence of riot police and federal troops. But then you also have a wave of deliberate misinformation impacting how many people see it all. There was a time last summer where I was arguing with all these people on social media from outside of Portland telling me that my city was on fire. I don't mean to make this a political conversation about that, but I actually was thinking that that information, too, is its own kind of infrastructure — and unfortunately, so is misinformation.
SEEWANG: Portland has become this poster child, I think. I'm not from here, but it just seems like Portland is always being used as an image of something. This week, we actually are talking about technology and data in cities and sort of the retreat to the virtual. What happens to public space if the next generation really finds the public realm in virtual space like this? Communication technology, I think, it is its own infrastructure.
GOODMAN: I moved to Portland in the mid 2000s when the city was in some ways coming into this progressive reputation. But to people who moved here in the ‘90s, it might have meant something different. Over time, I realized each wave of urban change has its own narrative. I think it's been very helpful to see these comparisons [with other cities] and put them in a more national context. And I think that it's been an effective way for me to reconsider some of the myths that I had internalized about the city and that some of the things that seem really puzzling when you look at the myth actually make a lot of sense when you hear the perspective of these different experts who really do know the histories and know the contemporary policy or other environments that have created the condition for what we're experiencing today.
10th Avenue Portland Streetcar stop (Brian Libby)
Can you talk a little bit more about some of the conversations that have taken place?
SEEWANG: Two weeks ago we talked about timber, which is obviously at the heart of Oregon’s history. Thomas Robinson from Lever Architecture and then Momoyo Kaijima from Atelier Bow-Wow really just talking about how architects can make better choices and what timber means and what biodiversity means, in terms of the geographical relationship. She's trying to do similar things in a way, like trying to think about a healthier relationship with natural resources. But of course, the geography is… It's still an architecture based on timber, on wood, and this cultural tradition of building with wood, but the types of trees are different and the geography is different, but similar problems to overcome in trying to negotiate that geography or that environment.
How does the lecture series fit into the broader context of what the Urban Design Collaborative is doing?
SEEWANG: I asked Mark Raggett, who used to run the Urban Design Studio for the City of Portland [now an associate principal at GBD Architects], ‘What do you think is the one of the biggest issues in urban design in Portland right now? And what would you like to have a conversation about?’ He said, ‘I think it's technology. Any changes we put into the city these days, we're basically designing the city for like 20-year-olds. For example, we love our public spaces. We love our plazas and parks. But to what degree is that going to be relevant for the next generation, and to what degree is the public realm inside technology? So then I said, ‘Okay, that's a conversation.’ He agreed to moderate it, and then we reached out to Hector Dominguez who runs, Smart City PDX. They just outlawed facial recognition in public spaces in Portland, and they're doing it a bunch of other related work. And then Hector actually then recommended Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist who ended up working at Intel for the ethics of data use. We were able have a conversation about how our data is used.
GOODMAN: The Urban Design Collaborative was initiated by the dean of the College of the Arts and the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Regional Planning. It really is an inter-departmental collaboration. Laila and I are from the Department of Architecture. The director of the Urban Design Certificate, Ellen Shoshkes, has been taking a big leadership role in the planning side. Her passion is almost a tactical urbanism and placemaking approach on the street. She felt very motivated by the pandemic to start to have conversations about how streets should be used in Portland in the short term and how that might affect longer, more transformative change. She's taking charge of that particular lecture or that particular pairing. And I think it will talk about some of the work that they've done. There's been three workshops that have combined, people from nonprofits, people from city agencies and PSU faculty and students, to talk about what are future pedestrian street possibilities or streets that could be used for dining or other things. What are the possible anticipated problems maybe with changes to code or changes to processes or permitting relative to equity or relative to other agendas? Jeff Schnabel, the chair of our department, has been really adamant that the Urban Design Collaborative is really multiple. It's a bunch of different initiatives that are going on under this umbrella. And so that's one that I think is going to have a presence and a momentum in the city.
It's interesting to think about how the way we use some of our existing infrastructure is changed. I can go jogging down the middle of the street in my neighborhood and it's become normalized. How we use streets was already changing, with initiatives of past years with Sunday Parkways. But it’s gained momentum. And similarly, automobile congestion patterns have changed a lot through the course of the pandemic, and if not everyone is going back to the office for five days a week, that could impact how we justify things like highways. So what do you think about the opportunity now? Maybe it’s kind of like the early 1970s in Portland: a time for big changes.
Pioneer Courthouse Square, January 2021 (Brian Libby)
SEEWANG: In the Urban Design Collaborative, we've spoken to a lot of people who were really invested in that change from the ’70s and ’80s, and you know, I don't see that what we're doing is anything different. We're just building upon the success that was already in place. I feel like there's now a good foundation to be able to talk about these things. And there doesn't seem to be much resistance from the people who would have thought that Portland has gone from doing the best to this. Because I don’t see that we’re trying to say that city had a lot of issues, but that city was great [at solving them], and how do we now address more contemporary issues? I think it's more a question of does that city still work today, and how can we continue the work?
I moved here from Zurich and everyone was saying how amazing the rail network [MAX and the Portland Streetcar] was, and I thought, ‘Yes, the hardware is great, but the software is a little bit…we still get stuck behind the cars. Like, why aren't the lights just stopping all the cars as soon as there's a bus there, and the bus goes through? That seems obvious. I think that there are a number of great things in place. And now’s a moment...I think it was Nolan Lienhart from ZGF [in an April 23] talk with Dan Pitera of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center] who said, ‘Now is not the time to start thinking about what the next city is. Let's just recover from the pandemic and recover from protests and emerge slowly. And then we will be able to change something about this city and the way we want to. But first, everyone has to get on board with a new narrative.’
It's about forming a collective vision, right?
GOODMAN: Exactly. I think there was quite an energy to that Detroit-Portland conversation, where people were really feeling this was a conversation that needed to be had: that was floating around in people's living rooms but had never hadn't really fully been articulated. I think Nolan put it like, ‘We're facing all these things, racial justice reckoning, that moniker of the whitest city in America as well as the pandemic and how that's been handled, the attacks from federal figures. I think that he was saying, ‘We can address these things, we can look at it without necessarily denigrating some of the major achievements that have been that have happened with the city: those things that happened in the ’70s that really did change the quality of life for a lot of people, not everyone importantly, but a lot, and that we can be proactive there if we if we think carefully. We don't need to rush and we don't we don't need to make snap decisions because we don't really know how things are going to pan out for downtown. We could be next year looking at a very active situation downtown where everyone's pouring into the, or not. Some businesses might come back very strong. Others are going to be gone forever. It's nice to be setting up the sort of intellectual infrastructure or the infrastructure of this dialogue or communication, because that I think is going to bear fruit later on, maybe in the next ten years, not something that's going to be solved with one new plan, but rather when we have different institutions and organizations and thinkers who are in dialogue with each other, then potentially we can start to form that collective vision."
It's a reminder that there is a human infrastructure too: that consensus is powerful because it connects people.
SEEWANG: I think that's the idea. Infrastructure was always seen as this sort of decision that got made for our cities by engineers or technicians in some sense, like in a black box without it. It wasn't a public issue. It was merely technology. And I think what Anna says, by somehow having a conversation about it, making it public, it allows people to publicly become part of that conversation and say, ‘No, we want something different,’ rather than this sort of design and engineering of infrastructure getting dropped on everyone. Someone's designed it, clearly, along certain parameters with certain values. But now is the moment when we can say, ‘Hey, we want it to have different values.’ I have to attribute that to a graduate student in my class who sat in front of one of my seminars and said, ‘The system was designed, and it can't adapt very well to the new values we want wanted to have.’ Yeah, exactly. So that's why we have a conversation about it. And then when the chance comes, when Biden gives us millions or billions to redo our public infrastructure or pull down the I-5 and bury it , whatever it is like, then we can all say, ‘We've had this conversation. We think we know what we want now.’
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Thank You Brian for a fantastic article with both good and troubling insights. The comment by both Laila Seewang and Mark Raggett: reveal an interpretation of public spaces and realms beyond the current visceral and experiential to the virtual:
This week, we actually are talking about technology and data in cities and sort of the retreat to the virtual. What happens to public space if the next generation really finds the public realm in virtual space like this? Communication technology, I think, it is its own infrastructure.
I asked Mark Raggett, who used to run the Urban Design Studio for the City of Portland [now an associate principal at GBD Architects], ‘What do you think is the one of the biggest issues in urban design in Portland right now? And what would you like to have a conversation about?’ He said, ‘I think it's technology. Any changes we put into the city these days, we're basically designing the city for like 20-year-olds. For example, we love our public spaces. We love our plazas and parks. But to what degree is that going to be relevant for the next generation, and to what degree is the public realm inside technology? So then I said, ‘Okay, that's a conversation.’
So, with the 200-year anniversary of Fredrick Law Olmstead here now, what would he say to this framing of the public spaces realm?
Posted by: Henry Kunowski | May 21, 2021 at 05:19 PM