Portland Architecture

Portland and New Orleans: river cities considered

The Lower Garden District in New Orleans (Brian Libby)

 

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Call it the summer travel edition of Portland Architecture. After all, sometimes it takes leaving home to understand it properly: a sense of perspective.

That was true for me 22 years ago this month, when I arrived for college in New York in 1990, having enrolled at a university there without ever visiting the city first. The culture-shock was strong, especially since I arrived in hot-humid late summer during a sanitation-workers strike that resulted in huge piles of trash on local sidewalks. Even so, going to NYC divulged me of certain small-town naivete and helped me better understand Oregon, my home, both good and bad.

Recently I visited New Orleans for the first time, and the experience has lingered in my mind. Perhaps that's in part because this was the first time I'd flown somewhere since before the pandemic began. It was also one of my only visits to the American South, which feels like a whole different country. But it reminded me of seeing New York for the first time: gritty but in certain spots undeniably beautiful, and full of energy.

It took me a couple days to get acclimated, especially since it was very hot and humid. After one multi-hour morning walk, it looked like I had dived into a pool with my clothes on. Yet it was hard not to be enthralled by the architecture of New Orleans, particularly its houses: all those wrought-iron balconies on the outside, and all the high-ceilinged, transom-window-lit spaces inside. New Orleans also has a kind of energy that I appreciated: not just a party atmosphere for which the city is famous, but because it's a more culturally and racially diverse city than Portland.

 

The Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans (Brian Libby)

Perhaps most of all, though, I enjoyed being out on the water, be it the Mississippi River, which I crossed via the Algiers Ferry, or Lake Pontchartrain, which I crossed by car along a 25-mile causeway. In New Orleans it's impossible not to be aware of the water, because only the levees are keeping the city from being overtaken, and its history is full of tragic hurricane strikes and floods. Even the city's extraordinarily pothole-ridden streets are because of the water underground, constantly shifting the topography. Yet the combined presence of the river and the massive lake makes New Orleans an extra-special location, just as the combined presence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers is inherent to Portland's DNA.

A few days ago I came across one stat indicating that both Portland and New Orleans' downtowns are struggling. The Recovery Rankings feature data compiled by the University of California at Berkeley about downtown recoveries, based on 62 North American cities' cell phone activity between spring of 2019 to spring of 2022. It ranked Portland 60th, next-to-next-to last, with 41% of activity recovered. New Orleans was only nominally better at 50th. It reminded me that that both cities are really about their great neighborhoods more than their central business districts. And the fewer people live downtown, and the more it relies on offices, the harder it is to come back.

What sticks out for me the most is that Portland is still a young city. It lacks the grit of New Orleans, as well as the aforementioned diversity and energy. Yet there is every bit as much beauty, and maybe more of a sense of possibility.

 

A screen shot from the Recovery Rankings page (downtownrecovery.com)

In the weeks after visiting New Orleans, I got thinking more and more about how the cities are oddly similar. They're both river cities that are surrounded by lush green landscapes, vast enough to make the metropolises still, even with modern sprawl and population growth, feel somewhat isolated, or at least humbled by the scale of the forests surrounding them, be it tropical or temperate. I started working on a video travelogue and explored the fraternal-twin relationship of New Orleans and Portland in a recent Portland Tribune column.

Ultimately the most significant distinction between these two cities (besides perhaps their demographics) is that Portland is more focused on the future than New Orleans. In the latter city there is a richer history and historic urban fabric, but I saw few works of new architecture mixed in the old beauty. Even so, I became interested enough in this idea, and these comparisons, that I talked to two media and arts colleagues who have lived in both cities.

 

"City By Water," a New Orleans travelogue (Brian Libby)

Matt Davis, a former Portland Mercury reporter and editor whom I got to know in the late 2000s, moved directly from here to New Orleans in the early 2010s (before returning to his native England and then settling in New York City). I've always enjoyed Matt's candor.

"I found New Orleans refreshingly culturally direct," he told me by email. "People were much more inclined to tell you what was on their mind than in Portland, where people tended to skirt around the issue. In that way, the Mardi Gras celebrations and the rich music scene had a similar in your face-ness, probably a Catholic-inspired, French-inspired "this is what we're doing" quality to them, where Portland's felt more indirect and subtle."

"It extends to the civic life too," he added New Orleans is honestly corrupt. I'd describe Portland as self-satisfied or corruptly inclusive. Like, we THINK we're doing the best version of civic engagement. In New Orleans everybody just knows you run for office to enrich your friends and family! New Orleans, too, is actually remarkably small. I was struck by that, often. Portland's downtown core is small, yes, but the outlying neighborhoods give the city more scale. I'd say I preferred living in Portland for livability, and I preferred living in New Orleans for grit and excitement."

 

The French Quarter (Brian Libby)

I also talked to Brian Borrello, who has called Portland home for more than 25 years but was born and raised in New Orleans. Borello is well known for his environmental works and public art projects. As described by Jeffrey Thomas Fine Art, "His experience with a broad array of sculptural and graphic techniques, and a versatile range of conceptual approaches is evident in his paintings, sculptures and public art pieces. As a visual artist, Brian is particularly interested in creating awareness of human life in balance with other life forms and with our shared environment. In his art for the public realm, he seizes opportunities to make 'places' by activating urban spaces through image, form and symbol, in response to history, community and context. "

We wound up having a longer conversation about New Orleans and Portland, which follows.

Portland Architecture: Can you tell me about the New Orleans neighborhoods where you grew up?

Brian Borrello: The first house my family bought was in Broadmoor, one of the lowest points in New Orleans: a former lake they filled in. And it often flooded. That's one feature of New Orleans, a city that's six feet under sea level. Then at some point, we moved out to the Gentilly area, right by the lakefront, which then was sort of the burgeoning suburbs that's still in town. And we lived right on right across street from Bayou St. John, which was a connecting point between Lake Pontchartrain and the river, part of this series of canals and bayous. Once upon a time, there was sort of a Venice like canal structure that supported the industry in New Orleans.

New Orleans and Portland are both river cities in these lush green landscapes. Is that part of what drew you here?

a pretty accurate observation. I was a city kid, but growing up, my uncle and my grandpa would take me out into the swamps and teach me woodcraft, how to fish and hunt how to gut an animal and shoot a gun. It's kind of a southern rite of passage. My grandpa had a camp at Honey Island Swamp, an hour outside of town. on the Pearl River: deep cypress swamp, pretty primordial, pretty snake-infested, pretty awesome. That nature connection was one of the reasons that drew me up to Portland, because you can be in the forest within an hour: in some pretty deep woods. You have to go a little further to find the old growth. But there's not a lot of old growth left in Louisiana. In a way, it's kind of part of the same legacy, an area of colonization: a presence that pretty much cut down all the old-growth trees.

 

City Park in New Orleans (Brian Libby)

When did you come to Portland?

I came here a few times beginning in 1996 and just kind of fell in love with the Pacific Northwest. Portland being a new city, to me it’s a little bit more forward-viewing, you know, a little bit still establishing its identity.

New Orleans is an old city that’s been under Spanish and French and English domination. You had opera houses and cafe culture and the slave trade: all this stuff before Portland was even founded. New Orleans is kind of always looking towards the past for culture and architecture. Everything's about Mardi Gras and the sort of vestiges of culture and food and arts. It was a pretty significant cultural footprint there that was distinct from the United States, even before Manhattan and San Francisco and everything else, but kind of waned. Even now as it’s sort of reinventing itself as a foodie town, it’s definitely with an eye towards the past: the heritage of architecture that you saw: all the old brick buildings with the ferns sprouting out of them, the tropical type building styles with the French doors and the high ceilings.

That heritage can be an inheritance but also a burden, I’d suppose.

Yes. I felt the need to kind of get out and see some new horizons. I needed something completely different. I’d traveled and lived in New York for a bit, Los Angeles. Did my graduate studies in Arizona. The Pacific Northwest seemed like it was kind of green and growing progressively. At the time I moved up here, you know, TriMet was doing light rail stuff and incorporating public art. That was one of the reasons I really wanted to do more public art. And in a lot of art over all, there’s more of a spirit of embracing the new. In New Orleans, history influences a lot of what you're able to do. Some of my good friends are architects down there and they're always, you know, trying to do something new, but always having to face the, you know, the historic New Orleans preservationist community.

I loved traveling across Lake Pontchartrain on the causeway. For a portion of that 25-mile journey across the lake, the land was so flat I couldn't see the horizon. It felt like we were on this highway into the ocean or to infinity. That experience and riding the Algiers Ferry across the Mississippi reminded me in a visceral way how New Orleans and Portland are water cities—each at a delta near multiple bodies of water and each, not coincidentally, receiving a lot of rain.

I think New Orleans might get even more rainfall than Portland, but not as consistently. There are these big cumulonimbus clouds that come off of the Gulf in the afternoon. Those thunderstorms do their thing and then it's just a steam bath, and then it goes away. And of course the danger is the storms are increasingly getting more numerous and more intense. I wish you could've gone to New Orleans before Katrina, because it changed everything, you know?

Could you talk a little bit more about that, how the storm changed the city and how it impacted your family?

I'd been through some intense storms before I moved. I went through Hurricane Betsy as a kid [in 1965]. We watched a lot of carnage in the neighborhoods there with trees and old carports disappearing and places flooding and stuff. Hurricane Camille [1965] pretty much wiped out a good chunk of the Gulf Coast, did a lot of damage to New Orleans, and I saw that aftermath. Very humbling. But Katrina was different. Just to be clear, though: Katrina didn't destroy the city. I describe it as the Great Federal Flood of 2005, that resulted from the compromised and shabby levee system. I considered myself pretty much bicoastal up until 2005, dividing my time between Portland and New Orleans. I still have family there, and I had a little studio space for cheap, a couple of hundred bucks a month. I’d fly down there, do shows pretty regularly, make art. But my studio took about six feet of water. There was this dirty line, like a bathtub ring that just went and cut across, you know, everything: all socioeconomic barriers, Black, white, everything. We lost four of the five family homes in Katrina. My family home had to be demolished.

It seems like Portland hasn’t had its Katrina moment yet, but with the earthquake that’s predicted for our region, that may change.

Katrina taught me something. When the storm hit I went down there and saw the mom and pop establishments were pretty much the first to come back online and feed people. My friend had a café, and she pretty much opened just to feed her neighborhood. All the corporate stuff—the Popeye’s and the Burger Kings—just folded up. You always imagine, you know, you pay your taxes, you're part of the social contract where you do all the right things, and you figure somebody's got to come take care of that, government or whatever. But there was no cavalry coming over the horizon to save people after Katrina. It was a big fucking mess and lot of, ‘Well, too bad you should have just not built on a floodplain.’ To this day, I still have a lot of disappointment about that. But also it was a reality check. It's like, you know, with an earthquake, you know, it's going to be us. It's not going to be the National Guard coming to save the day.

 

The Mississippi River from the Algiers Ferry (Brian Libby)

How has that impacted affordability? That was one of the city’s attractions, much like in Portland until recent years.

Up until Katrina, which again, was a pivotal moment of change, it was a cheap place to live. After Katrina, everything had to be rebuilt to, quote, modern standards. Almost everyone who could had a new mortgage, or a new loan to rebuild, and it all got expensive. Where you could once upon a time live pretty cheaply, that went away. In the before times, you've got a job, you're making rent, and you can spend some time on the front porch and cook that pot of beans, play the saxophone and have a porch party or take a week off for Mardi Gras. Some of that affordability left with Katrina. But I'm really concerned about that loss here in Portland too. As an artist, you always have a gravitate towards the places cheap rents. We do our best work in the cracks between things. When I lived in New York, it was a warehouse or when I was in Los Angeles, it was a it was an airplane hangar. In New Orleans, it was studio space that was fashioned out of garage space. And when I moved to Portland, I moved into a Quonset hut on Alberta Street. My rent was less than 500 a month, which is crazy to think about today. Then at some point my landlord told me, “I'm going to I'm going to triple your rent.”

How are the cities different?

I think the obvious distinctions is between Black and white cities. New Orleans is absolutely a Black city.

That was one of my favorite things about the city: that different energy you get from a place with diversity and a sizable Black community. I saw a large communal group of bicyclists go by one evening, and almost none of them were white. Nearly the opposite would be true in Portland.

I remember back in the Nineties going down to Jazz Fest not long after the unrest following the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. I remember being surprised that the vibe was just so chill. Everybody was talking about that first not-guilty verdict and how it was really fucked up. But there was a sort of ease. It’s not to say there isn’t discrimination, because there is most definitely that. Yet I think that Black people and white people have lived, side by side for centuries now in New Orleans, and at times there’s more of a sense of collective culture.

What both cities’ Black populations share is displacement. There’s the I-10 freeway in New Orleans, which destroyed a lot of Claiborne Avenue were destroyed, in a plan by Robert Moses. That was all Black businesses, along places like Basin Street, which forms some of the roots of jazz. All those clubs and homes got destroyed to build that that freeway, the same as Portland with and Albina. These freeways got built pretty much over the path of least resistance, which was a Black neighborhood.

 

A Garden District house associated with painter Edgar Degas (Brian Libby)

Are the cities different in temperament?

New Orleans is a party town and it's got a nightlife that’s kind of unstoppable. You can kind of find something to do at all hours, for better or for worse. And that's it's another reason I moved here: I had to give my liver a break. New Orleans will feed all of your appetites. And I've seen any number of artists and creatives that kind got besotted by drugs and French Quarter nightlife. I realized if I really wanted to get some stuff done, New Orleans was going to be aiding abetting the other the other distractions. That was that was another reason I had to put some distance between them.

I still see Portland as a young city, still kind of finding its identity, finding its way. I'm just hoping it doesn't get priced into boutique land and priced out of affordability. I'm not seeing the housing situation improving right now. We're focusing on how to find pods for people on the streets and on the freeway corridors instead of going way upstream and looking at the real cause, which is Wall Street and investor acquisition.

A lot of a lot of my artist peers have disappeared into other places simply because of, not being able to afford to make it here or to find a place to make their work, because as an artist, it's not just living space, but it's work space. New Orleans has that same kind of challenge now that it's been discovered as a good real estate investment. But the perception of crime in both of the cities is now kind of taken a little bit of the shine off. I think maybe there's a little bit of a silver lining with that perception. It maybe makes things a little bit more accessible to people.

 

 

 

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“A different way of developing cities” — SERA Architects' Tim Smith discusses the OMSI District and civic ecology

Tim Smith at his his AICP College of Fellows enshrinement (SERA Architects)

 

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Last December, more than a decade after it was first announced, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry unveiled plans for its OMSI District along the east side of Willamette River, which will turn surface parking lots and vacant land between the Marquam Bridge and Tilikum Crossing (and adjacent to the museum) into a high-density enclave. The district is projected to include 1,200 housing units, forming with the Burnside Bridgehead development to the north a residential bookend to the otherwise non-residential Central Eastside. There will also be mixed-use commercial buildings, as well as a waterfront education park focusing on indigenous heritage, and a Center for Tribal Nations on the OMSI property. There are ambitious sustainability goals here, its backers promise, and a commitment to equity.

Although ZGF is the OMSI District's master-plan architect (replacing Oslo and New York-based Snøhetta), SERA Architects is a partner on the development team, led by Edlen & Company; principal Tim Smith helped put together the development team. This comes as Smith, founder of the firm’s Urban Design and Planning Studio, was earlier this year named to the American Institute of Certified Planners' College of Fellows. Smith has also served locally as vice president of the Portland Planning Commission and the Mayor’s Central City Roundtable, not to mention as urban design advisor to the City of San Francisco for the Treasure Island Redevelopment. At SERA, he has also been instrumental in the firm’s long-range planning and urban design efforts for Google.

Anticipating an interview with Smith about OMSI and his long career on the occasion of his College of Fellows honor, I also watched a 2011 TEDx talk that Smith delivered called "A Living Community Framework for Sustainability," in which he discusses the social and equity-based components necessary for healthy and sustainable urban communities; that topic wound up guiding a lot of our conversation, including our talk about the OMSI District.

Brian Libby: Congratulations on your fellowship.

Tim Smith: Thank you very much. It just goes to show you that if you are standing upright for 40 years, they'll give you an award. So here I am.

I watched your 2011 TEDx talk earlier today, which focused on the concept of civic ecology and took inspiration from E.V. Walter’s Placeways, which puts human experience at the forefront of urban design as a way to address contemporary social and environmental dislocation. But you mentioned coming from Philadelphia, which got me thinking about Edmund Bacon’s seminal 1967 book Design of Cities. These are two very different perspectives about urbanity and placemaking, almost like Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.

Edmund Bacon was actually my teacher [at the University of Pennsylvania]. Kevin Bacon the actor is Ed's son. I used to live down the street from all of them, so I have one degree of separation from Kevin Bacon. Ed’s approach was definitely a top-down, ego-driven one. When you took his course, he would show things that he had done, and if you questioned any of it, he would just not even respond. More importantly, in Design of Cities Bacon favors the axis—with its wide multilane boulevards—and other very formal aspects of planning. The axis is really an example of how to exert power in city planning, and I just really have grown to have difficulty  with the concept. In a city like Paris with many axes, what’s more interesting are the neighborhoods off axis, which are basically medieval, and whose fabric has been largely determined by people who lived in the neighborhood rather than something that was done from on high.

Conversely to Edmond Bacon, civic ecology argues that social infrastructure is at least as essential. It brings to mind Portland's turnaround in the 1960s and ‘70s, through neighborhood organizations: a kind of civic ecology. But some of that neighborhood activism has since come to be regarded as NIMBYism, or lacking inclusiveness.

One of the best outcomes of a civic ecology process would be something called a civic public-private partnership. The idea behind it is to eliminate the concept of NIMBYism: that you engage citizens as the third leg of a local government and private developer stool, so that they co-create the vision and the steps to implementation for change in any given place. Community stakeholders will have less reason to be against change if they are actually part of the sausage-making, as it were. I think Portland's success back in the ’60s and ’70s was rooted in neighborhood groups and the city and private developers being open to working with each other. I don't believe that's the case now in Portland. Many people say the neighborhood model is broken in Portland. That may be true, but what's really broken is the relationship: the constructive, co-creative relationship between those three entities.

 

Covers of Placeways (UNC Press) and Design of Cities (Thames/Hudson)

 

For years Portland was praised as a progressive boutique city with amazing street food and bike culture: a destination. Now, there’s this perception we’re struggling more than other cities to bounce back from the pandemic and the unrest. Given that you look at cities with a longer view, what do you make of this?

Cities have ups and downs, as do communities, neighborhoods, countries. It's all part of being a nested bundle of integrated systems. Occasionally all the systems are positively reinforcing each other, and occasionally a couple of them get sideways, and begin to kind of fracture things and slow things down. The best example of this is the community I mentioned in the TEDx talk, Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, where I lived for a number of years. In the 1960s, that community was really suffering from the failure to compete with suburban development. Folks in the community bootstrapped a strategy to make it much more dynamic, forming a host of  civic entities that were able to localize the neighborhood’s decision-making. They realized that the city of Philadelphia with its limited resources couldn’t be as helpful and responsive as a local governance structure could. From time to time there would be issues of disagreement among people working within the civic-public-private structure, which caused the system to slow down or break, but eventually they always figured it out and moved on.

In Portland, obviously the issues are much greater.

How so?

We don't yet seem to have a unifying vision of the city. You might say that at the beginning of the Portland Plan, back in the ’70s, there was this unified vision of where we needed to go, which made neighborhood associations work. The problem with that vision is that it did not include the African American, Asian, Native American, Hispanic and other communities. So here we are years later and that vision has kind of faded. There's a real question out there about what's the new vision and whose vision should it be. Suddenly there's a lot of factions that are out there raising their voices, saying, ‘You need to pay attention to us because we live in this place, too.’ I feel like there's a call to action that the folks in city government are beginning to sense. I firmly believe we're going to be okay once we kind of get this together.

So what can we do? There’s a movement afoot to change Portland’s system of government. Is that a step in the right direction?

I'm very interested in this charter commission, to see what they recommend.  I wonder, however, if it might  have been better to develop a process of vision and unification first, and then ask the question, ‘What governance model and therefore charter do we need to actually make this new kind of vision happen?’ There are more complex forces out there that we need to embed in our city systems, and maybe we need a different kind of governance model. I think Portland will bounce back, because cities are resilient. If we can be much more inclusive and figure out a process to make this new vision happen, we're going to be even better than we were.

 

A view of the OMSI District site (SERA Architects)

 

That might be a good segue into talking about SERA’s urban design work with OMSI. It’s an interesting placemaking opportunity in the Central Eastside, which doesn't have residential except at the Burnside Bridgehead. OMSI’s property is also a crossroads with the Hawthorne Bridge and downtown, and on its southern edge it’s beside a new transit bridge leading to South Waterfront. For years Portland Public Market wanted to locate down there, and maybe still does. This area is also part of the so-called Innovation Quadrant. A famous architecture firm, Snøhetta, was hired to produce a master plan. But years have gone by without any groundbreaking.

Snøhetta’s master plan was interesting, but what really stuck out to us was that some of the sustainability goals didn’t have an implementation strategy behind then. Certain aspects of it didn't feel too buildable, to be polite. So when OMSI put out the RFP for a developer to implement the master plan, I helped put together the team that's working on it now: Edlen and Company, a company out of Cleveland called Long Haul Capital that is involved in the impact-capital world, the Farkas Group [an infrastructure, financing & development agreement advisor], and a company called Urban Systems that does a lot with smart-city infrastructure. OMSI also hired ZGF Architects to lead the Central City Master Plan process.

What about OMSI’s sustainability goals, and the opportunity for an eco-district?

We began to realize that a standard development approach would not be able to achieve the carbon-reduction outcomes and other sustainability goals district-wide. So OMSI and the development team applied for and received a grant from the Bullitt Foundation to have a series of design charrettes focused on the entire district, as opposed to a building by building approach. You're probably familiar with Bullitt’s headquarters in Seattle, one of the nation’s first to be Living Building -certified. They said, ‘We want to fund you to take this Living Building approach and do it for an entire neighborhood.’ In response to that challenge the team came up with ideas about integrated, equitable-district infrastructure that included shared energy, water waste, food systems, urban habitat, local economy, last-mile mobility, digital open-source economy. Edlen and Company is not an infrastructure developer, so we formed a brand new company focused on district scale infrastructure called InfraCenters LLC. It's a joint venture between SERA, Long Haul Capital and Civic Technology Ventures. In the OMSI district, InfraCenters will investigate: How do you actually create a district scale integrated system where the water, the energy, the waste systems of all kind, and last mile mobility are all supported by a digital platform.. Central to our mission is carbon neutrality and social equity.

How can you build that civic ecology along with the architecture itself? How can there be more than for-profit development down there?

We responded to a grant opportunity from Metro for equitable and sustainable development and have been working for more than a year with OMSI, the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, the Columbia River Inter-tribal Fish Commission, the City of Portland, Prosper Portland and others to create a Center for Tribal Nations and Waterfront Education Park in the OMSI district. We're getting close to creating a concept that will integrate with all these other ideas—perhaps a Portland Public Market, an Oregon Botanical Project—and act as a catalyst for an Innovation Quadrant. We've also been talking to a number of impact investors, including banks who through the Community Reinvestment Act are required to invest locally. We have gotten them interested in the idea of investing in perhaps a local entrepreneur space or even a clean technology hub within an actual InfraCenter building, whose focus would be BIPOC community entrepreneurs. It could be a live-work space. We want to provide a pathway for a diverse array of community members to participate in all aspects of the emerging  climate-change economy instead of limiting it to the usual experts

What has emerged is a partnership between Western science and traditional ecological tribal knowledge and perhaps  a more thoughtful and inclusive way to describe and address an issue like climate change. Because, ultimately, where we are going in terms of technology is back to traditional tribal knowledge about systems thinking and working with nature. Both OMSI and its inter-tribal partners are excited about telling that story in the district through the real infrastructure that we hope to create down there. So it's a mind-blowing opportunity.

 

Rendering of future OMSI District (ZGF Architects)

 

This sounds very different from traditional development, but with so many moving parts it also seems difficult to pull off: a puzzle with a lot of pieces.

What is really different about this is usually architecture and planning firms are waiting to respond to an RFP or a development opportunity and then, as a designer, you're at the mercy of what the developer is going to be able to pencil out to their investors. Bringing your own money to the table is an opportunity to change how development can happen. And I feel like we may be on the cusp of creating a different way of developing cities where the money gets directed to do really good things: social equity building.

It’s interesting to me that you work for an architecture firm, but a tenet of the civic ecology you talk about is that we can’t build our way to true sustainability.

My hypothesis is that the best way to address some of our complex issues is to start with the software—the resource flow systems, the relationships—and build the hardware—the physical change—on top of that. We've all been doing it the opposite way: building the hardware and then retrofitting software into existing structures. The real impact will not come from a bunch of green buildings sitting next to each other. It's going to be from an integrated neighborhood approach that contains an array of buildings, streets, and spaces interconnected through a digital platform that enables real-time response to human needs. In such a neighborhood, people will have control over their place and their livelihoods and can feel a sense of ownership of their community. And so that's the vision behind this. It's turning things  inside out and flipping the scale quite a bit.

 

Systems diagram for OMSI District (SERA Architects)

 

It reminds me of places around town where a big idea for redeveloping a neighborhood has either failed or achieved mixed results: the South Portland Urban Renewal Area in the 1960s, for example, which today feels like failed urbanism except for the Lawrence Halprin-designed fountains, or even the South Waterfront, which came a generation later and, though quite different, also lacks much urban energy.

I think the first problem with many new developments is a misreading of the opportunity—is this really a blank canvas or is there some underlying context that suggests a deeper and richer approach? Imagine if that original South Portland neighborhood had remained, and those wonderful fountains had been inserted into that? Those residents might have taken a deeper ownership of that neighborhood and thus those fountain spaces might have been a different kind of community infrastructure. It would have been a completely different outcome.

At the same time, we have to figure out how to keep neighborhoods like that from becoming so successful that they begin to price out the people that made them interesting in the first place. How do we broaden accessibility to all developments—racially, ethnically and financially—and make new development  permanently affordable: intergenerationally affordable and accessible? I think we have a great start at OMSI because OMSI is not going to sell the property. They're going to keep it on a 99-year land lease, which opens up all kinds of possibilities for enduring accessibility and attainability.

So really a unique, interesting landholder in that regard. What’s the key to making it work?

These developments work when people in the neighborhood feel a sense of ownership. People don't like having stuff handed to them from on high: ‘Hey, we figured this out. Now it's yours.’ It just doesn't work. It really doesn't. So co-creation is the whole basis of the civic-ecology model, which is that those who participate in the sausage-making are going to feel ownership and therefore it's going to have a life that goes beyond what the designers designed. Because it will always be being designed.

Could you talk about making some of these ideas into a kind of toolkit, given your work with Metro?

A number of years ago, we were hired by Metro for an initiative called  Great Communities.. Metro was seeking decision criteria to ensure that  Urban Growth Boundary decisions would not only satisfy growth requirements but also yield great communities. We developed criteria that addressed a number of Civic Ecology issues: How do you handle energy, and water? What about the local economy? Is the topography such that it would support a walkable community? The work was accepted by Metro and is now part of the criteria that they use to bring land into the urban reserve and ultimately the growth boundary. Now UGB decisions are likely to offer the opportunity to connect to existing neighborhoods, or to support a Main Street. When people impacted by these decisions can become part of the process and realize that what's going to happen isn't just a development to satisfy growth goals, but an opportunity to build a new or enhance an existing community it offers an opportunity to avoid a NIMBY conflict.

 

Rendering of future OMSI District (ZGF Architects)

 

And NIMBYism, even though it can turn negative, it’s often comprised of locals who are active in their community. Which, in theory, could be turned around into something positive. But often NIMBYism is specifically about opposition to height.

NIMBYism is a message that there is the potential to create a real community. There are people in the community who have the energy and the time to participate in something positive because they're able to organize against something. Imagine if you took that energy and organized it into co-creation, to begin to weave together all these aspects of their lives and future residents of this area: to achieve something much better than just arguing about six-story buildings or three-story buildings? Development can become much more aspirational. People then have a platform to say, ‘I want my community to evolve to a place where we're energy self-reliant, where we have urban agriculture, where we have developed relationships with farmers outside of our community, where local entrepreneurs can afford to live here, where there's affordable housing. We want all these things. And you know what? If we can be part of where these things happen, I would gladly exchange all the things I keep fighting against, like tall buildings.’ I think when you hear people saying negative things, it's really a call for help. People don't like railing just for the sake of railing. They're really sending a signal. You have to be open to the signal.

Tell me some great city like you have visited that inspires you.

There's a bunch of them. There's a beautiful city in southern France called Aix en Provence. Oh my goodness, it is so wonderful! It has got everything we've been talking about. There are certainly some great neighborhoods in Philadelphia where I lived for a while. I mentioned Chestnut Hill, but when I was living there it was a bit racially stratified. The adjacent neighborhood, Mt. Airy, is diverse and it’s one of the most wonderful neighborhoods in America. I’m originally from Detroit, and in the neighborhood I grew up in, North Rosedale Park, my father was president of the civic association and our entire family was deeply engaged in the community. Of course, with disinvestment in Detroit, it really suffered. But it’s a shining example of great urban neighborhood, and it’s coming back again.

What might Portland learn from Detroit?

Cities like that are fascinating because there are opportunities they have there that we don't have here. What has happened in Detroit is that they are so desperate that they seem to have moved away from bureaucratic siloing  and toward an integrated focus on problems. And they're actually getting a lot of stuff done. I think it's kind of what we need to do here.

That’s a very relevant discussion given that Portland might eliminate its arguably obsolete system of government, where elected city council members control bureaus but aren’t accountable to specific geographic constituency.

It's a real problem. I'm completely against the non-geographic focus. Commissioners in Portland are forced to be about bureau-focused silos. I sense they do not want to be and that they get interested in problem solving. It is just very difficult in any governance structure to think and act holistically. With our system it is even more challenging. But if they were in charge of a piece of geography and were able to work with all the bureaus, they'd be the first ones to want to de-silo those bureaus. I remember years ago a mayoral candidate took me out to lunch, because we were fellow TED talkers that year, and he asked, ‘Could you give me some advice on what I ought to do if I became mayor?’ I said, ‘The first thing you’ve got to do is break down the silos. Everyone will hate you and you'll probably be a one-term mayor, but you've got to break those silos down. Otherwise the city is just going to devolve.”

You’re a principal at SERA, and I admire how the firm has endured over generations, after being founded by people like Bing Sheldon and Don Eggleston. What advice might you give about succession?

I'm trying to get out of the way and maybe just advise. It's a very difficult thing to do. When you get to a point where you have a depth of experience, that is the time to step aside, become an advisor, and let other people discover things on their own. And I'll do that.

Bing was a mentor, and I always remember: he just leaned on me very closely for a number of years, until one day he came up to me and said, ‘You know what? You're on your own now. I think you know what you're doing. You know what to do. You come and see me if you need me. But I'm not your guy anymore.’ And that was that. And boy, is that ever a tough thing to do. I'm the second generation and we are now advancing the third generation in the firm. And I think one of the great things Bing and Don did was to make it an employee-owned firm, which means that people have different incentives than they do if they're working somewhere where the profit goes to a few people at the top.

Conceptually, it’s like some of what we've been talking about with civic ecology.

Yeah, I guess we're a civic ecology firm. And it works. It really works. In setting up the systems of relationships and flows of money and investment and everything, that helps you become a different kind of firm. We want to have an impact in the community and on the planet, and you can't do that just by responding to RFPs and making sure your work pencils out financially. We at SERA are on the cusp of a new paradigm and I think our industry is as well. It's all a big experiment – and lots of fun!

 

 

 

 

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