Urbanism and Environment in Portland's Sense of Place

In 1970, the City of Portland completed the Forecourt Fountain to local applause and national acclaim. Located in an urban renewal district near the southern edge of downtown, the fountain was a carefully crafted landscape that covered an entire city block. Although themselves outsiders to the city, designers Lawrence Halprin and Angela Danadjieva created a distinctive place that is emblematic of Portland's approach to city-making, for it holds in tension the distinct values of environmentalism and urbanism.

Set between an office building and a parking garage, the fountain is an oasis and refuge within the city that anchors a series of open spaces that break the monotony of a high-rise urban renewal district. The fountain's sloping contours transform a city block into an analog of a Cascade Mountain stream. Shrubs and trees create tiny cool glades. Water gathers in narrow channels at the top, tumbles across concrete lips and plates, sloshes around artificial boulders, and plunges into a pool. As viewers drift toward the surging waters, the fountain echoes the Olmstedian goal of urban parks that draw their users away from the city.

The same space is also designed for intense urban use. It serves as a plaza for the Civic Auditorium. Especially in its early years, before growing vegetation began to block sight lines, it was a socially charged public space. Businessmen walked out of their way to see the water turned on at 11:00 A.M. Families brought picnics on summer weekends. Hippies bathed in the pools, smoked pot, and drove the city parks commissioner to distraction. The fountain has accommodated rock concerts, ballet performances, baptisms, and weddings.

Contemporary Portland offers other symbols of this creative cohabitation of country and city. Metropolitan-area residents in 1994 and 1995 voted to tax themselves both for the acquisition of stream corridors, parks, and other open spaces and for light rail construction, with its promise to intensify land uses. Both officially and unofficially, the city uses two very different emblems to epitomize its character as a community. One is the blue heron, adopted as an official city symbol in 1986. This graceful bird that thrives in the riverside marshes that wend through the metropolis seemed a natural mascot to Mayor Bud Clark, who enjoyed early-morning canoe trips along the Willamette. Herons now appear on city letterhead and microbrewery labels. The other emblem is a huge, hammered-copper statue of "Portlandia" reaching down from a post-modern city office building toward the downtown bus mall. The figure represents civic life and commerce. Its installation occasioned a spontaneous community celebration as thousands of Portlanders turned out on a Sunday morning to watch the statue barged upriver like a red-orange Cleopatra and hoisted onto its niche in the heart of downtown.

This careful balance between environmentalism and urbanism is the central creative tension that has shaped the character of Portland over the past generation. For the past 30 years, Portlanders have tried to redefine and bridge a fundamental divide in urban and regional planning. Builders of modern cities have long been torn between the preference for "going out" or "going up": for lowering the overall density of metropolitan settlements or for increasing the intensity of land use. In the Portland case, environmentalism as an urban planning goal draws explicitly on the thought of Frederick Law Olmsted and Lewis Mumford, with their visions of cities and towns interlacing with the natural and cultivated environments in a democratic regionalism. But Portland's eclectic urbanists also borrow the insights of Jane Jacobs and William S. Whyte to assert the value of civic interaction in public spaces.

One result is strong public involvement in both grassroots environmentalism and neighborhood conservation. Small waterways, wetlands, and natural spaces in the Portland area benefit from more than a hundred "Friends of..." organizations. Friends of Forest Park, Friends of Fanno Creek, Friends of the Columbia Slough, Friends of Elk Rock Island, and similar organizations monitor development pressures and advocate for restoration programs. At the same time, Portland hosts two-dozen community development corporations and has a national reputation...