Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon

doi:10.1016/j.cities.2006.12.003

Cities, Vol. 24, No. 4, p. 285–297, 2007 Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 0264-2751/$ - see front matter

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Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon Chris Hagerman

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Department of Geography, Portland State University, 1721 SW Broadway, Portland, OR 97207-0751, United States Received 22 July 2006; received in revised form 22 November 2006; accepted 20 December 2006 Available online 18 April 2007

This research critically examines the planning and redevelopment of historic industrial waterfronts adjacent to downtown Portland, Oregon. While the city’s economy once centered on its waterfronts, economic restructuring and industrial decline rendered obsolete many of these spaces and their ancillary warehouses and railyards. The city and the region have pinned their hopes for the future on real estate development, biotech and the creative economy. The waterfront has become the site of considerable residential and commercial redevelopment that transforms underutilized areas into an expanded downtown following a familiar model of condos, restaurants, offices and galleries. These remade waterfront districts must be considered within the way in which articulations of nature and urbanity are mobilized in order to shape expectations and consumption of the new neighbourhoods. This is particularly relevant given the city’s prominence in academic and mainstream media regarding its liveability and environmentalism. Waterfront ecological restoration, urban liveability, and sustainable technologies all appeal to the urban imaginaries of planners, developers and residents while potentially displacing other concerns or questions. Public–private partnerships and strategic rescaling suggest new governance regimes are articulated in the visioning, planning and development of these districts, simultaneously reconstructing neighbourhoods and ecologies. Portland is often considered (and considers itself) at the leading edge of progressive urban development and politics. Careful criticism of the city’s production of new urban spaces should be pursued to avoid foreclosing opportunities for articulating alternate urban futures. Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Urban political ecology, waterfront redevelopment, Portland, planning

Introduction: Portland planning and waterfront redevelopment

options including: light rail, streetcars, a soon to be completed aerial tram, walkable neighbourhoods, an award winning bus system, and bicycle friendly streets. In a word, it’s liveable. Organizations such as Partners for Liveable Communities and publications from Inc. magazine to Outside and Bicycling have touted the city as a leader in various components of liveability (Partners for Liveable Communities, 2005; Frisk, 2006; Grudowski, 2005; Inc., 2005). A focus on planning, a high degree of civic engagement, and a pervasive environmental consciousness come together in a city where inclusive government

Nearly everyone loves Portland, Oregon. It is beautiful, has a mild climate, progressive politics and strong environmental ethics. Common stories of Portland circle around outdoor activities, unique civic spaces and institutions, and a variety of transit

* Tel.: +1-503-502-8693; fax: +1-503-725-3166; e-mail: [email protected].

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Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon: C Hagerman

touts a ‘get along’ ethos and compromise politics (Abbott, 1997). 1970s civic and environmental activists, reacting against modernist planning and governance, incorporated elements of public participation and community planning into urban policymaking, focusing their attention on halting the decline of downtown neighbourhoods.1 The reversal in the fortunes of the city’s downtown has become an oft repeated and rare success story of planning for redevelopment in American cities. The regional government’s Urban Growth Boundary and ambitious 2040 Plan advocate for further increasing urban densities, particularly in the urban core, in order to limit suburban sprawl as the metropolitan area continues to grow by an expected 1.8% a year (Edmonston and Hasan, 2005; Metro, 1994; Central City Plan, 1988). The city’s extensive downtown riverfronts were once the focus of economic activity, serving as trans-shipment points and processing centers for the resources extracted from Portland’s hinterland before later becoming vast shipyards and sites of industrial production (Robbins, 1997; Robbins, 2004). By the 1980s, the historic riverfronts had become increasingly economically marginal, while their physical proximity to downtown encouraged their reconsideration within the city’s planning networks as potential spaces of new central residential, office and retail districts (River District Steering Committee, 1994). Announced in a press release in 1996, Portland’s newest central city neighbourhoods occupy two historic waterfront areas on opposite sides of the downtown, and have been remade through a public planning process that contained strategic appeals to ideals of community and environmentalism intertwined within a discourse of liveability that recasts understandings of the city and nature (City of Portland, 1996; PDC, 1999). To interrogate the redevelopment of Portland’s new waterfront residential neighbourhoods requires investigating the role that reintroduced forms of nature play in framing these waterfront districts. The liveability discourses that circulate widely within planning and development networks, particularly in Portland, are not easily restricted to conservative or progressive politics, and highlight limitations in the gentrification literature. In order to trace the articulations of power in making decisions about Portland’s new urban riverfront landscapes it is necessary to broaden understandings of governance, to include the networks of non-profits, environmentalists and neighbours that plan for 1 The downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods of Portland are commonly referred to as the Central City. It is not analogous to the entire metropolitan area of the city of Portland. The 1998 Central City Plan expands the area of concern in the 1972 Downtown Plan to include nearby neighborhoods and the convention center and sports center complexes on the east side of the river (see Figure 1).

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redevelopment, as well as the spatial conceptualizations of waterfront districts to include the warehouses and worker housing integrated into the areas historically defined by riverfront commerce. How nature is reinserted into these particular areas of the city—sites of longstanding intersections between economic, riparian, and social systems—is a key component of the political and ideological reconstruction of urban areas, involving networks of power between numerous actors, and resulting in new and contradictory understandings (Castree and Braun, 1998). To examine these understandings contained within the term liveability, this research draws on official plans and documents supporting the planning efforts in these neighbourhoods, landscape analysis, participant observation of public planning and policy related events, and interviews with a broad array of actors. Considering the urban political ecologies of redevelopment of the historical waterfront neighbourhoods within the Portland model demonstrates how the reclamation of modernist social and industrial riverfronts with references to ‘liveability’, reframes waterfronts within specific articulations of nature that work to mitigate anxieties of social and ecological dislocation, but also marginalizes issues of social justice. The Portland model For the last quarter century, Oregon has followed a State-mandated program designed to limit urban growth and maintain its agricultural and forest lands. Drawing inspiration from a historic Olmstead plan for the city, and emboldened by the writings of Jane Jacobs, community activists in the 1970s created an integrated vision of small scale neighbourhoods within a regional park system and restored waterfront ecologies (Abbott, 1997; Lang and Hornburg, 1997; Orfield, 1997; Newman and Kenworthy, 1999; Duany et al., 2000; Partners for Liveable Communities, 2005). Comprehensive planning and expanded building codes and regulations required new forms of development and design, creating new urban landscapes that meet many of the criteria of a now-extensive literature on liveability, while also garnering accolades for the level of citizen participation and compromise on social issues. Because planners, politicians and developers internationally have looked at Portland and the State of Oregon for best practices, the shifting social constructions of nature implied by references to green values such as ‘liveability’ are critical. The act of framing these new urban neighbourhoods is a spatial practice encompassing both symbolic and material effects. New visions incorporate particular memories and not others, articulate social exclusions, and recast places within new forms of cultural capital (Till, 1993). The reclamation of industrial spaces utilizes devalued industrial buildings and machinery, now reclaimed as aesthetic touchstones

Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon: C Hagerman

of historical memory but abstracted from their productive capacity (Willems-Braun, 1994; Zukin, 1995). This creation of a symbolic landscape includes construction of natural landscapes that also act to frame, define and set apart the areas for subsequent residential and retail redevelopment within reclaimed urban waterfront ecologies (Gandy, 2002). Studying urban re-development of the historic waterfront is an opportunity to examine, as Gandy suggests, the interrelationships between the city, nature and social power in late modernity. If we accept that arguments about nature are not innocent, then we must examine how they are directly implicated in social relationships. Issues of power in this context directly lead to questions about who is granted legitimacy to speak in debates about urban-nature futures (Willems-Braun, 1997). This is particularly relevant in areas that dramatically portray the history of industrial capitalism and its social and ecological effects as they are transformed for the future. The environmental restoration and economic redevelopment of waterfront industrial sites reflects not only a remediation of the legacies of industrial pollution, but also an attempt to replace legacies of social conflict and labour unrest, through a focus on imaginaries of post-industrial economies, ecologies and urban citizenship. This requires the erasure of social and environmental dislocations that were products of the modern city, treating the historic waterfront as a tabula rasa for the projection of new urban landscapes, identities and natures. These urban imaginaries are produced through new flexible governance regimes and facilitated by the displacement of social and environmental problems, both locally and abroad. The decommissioning and scrapping of obsolete ships, once a common activity along Portland’s shoreline, now occurs in countries that cannot afford to be concerned with environmental impacts (Sleeth, 2006a; Sleeth, 2006b). Low-income housing and services and shelters for the homeless in these once marginal waterfront areas find themselves on the defensive, forced to legitimize their continued presence in an ‘improving’ neighbourhood (Special Visions Committee, 2005).

Waterfront redevelopment The historic waterfront, which dramatically portrays the history of industrial capitalism and its social and ecological effects, is a particularly relevant site for examining urban transformations that focus on creating liveability. The docks along the waterfront and the ancillary district that provided warehousing and processing services were tied to areas that provided residences for the immigrant and seasonal labour that served in the waterfront economy (Ford, 1994; Abbott, 2001; Sawyer, 1985). This conception

of a waterfront district expands the spatial extent beyond the docks at the interface of river and land. Local authorities have often confined undesirable activities and populations to industrial waterfronts. These neighbourhoods served not only as locations for the transportation and processing of goods and sites of congregation for a ready pool of unskilled labour, but also as a container for marginalized groups (Sawyer, 1985; Ford, 1994; Abbott, 2001; Wong, 2004). This is particularly relevant in Portland, a city with long standing racial tensions reflected in the contemporary metropolitan demographic profile of a city less diverse than other major US cities, with a minority population of 20% (5.7% Asian, 2.9% African-American, 0.9% American Indian and 8.7% Hispanic: Edmonston and Hasan, 2005). The re-development of urban waterfronts into mixed-use residential districts has become so widespread as to generate its own subset of the redevelopment literature (Hoyle, 2002). Many commentators are critical of the creation of landscapes of consumption via state sponsored gentrification (Harvey, 1989; Smith, 1996; Smith, 1989). The redevelopment of waterfront and industrial districts involves a shifting of spatial priorities by urban governance regimes, from a history of containing the urban poor and industrial uses to dispersing them in favour of destination-oriented retail and residential areas imagined as post-industrial or ‘creative’ economic spaces. Gentrification and liveability Analyses of urban redevelopment often encompass vastly different forms of urban transformation, ranging from the private rehabilitation of individual houses most often associated with gentrification, to publicly planned and funded redevelopment of derelict industrial lands or brownfields. The tendency of many commentators to lump all forms of urban change within the covering concept of ‘gentrification’ points to how it has become a ‘chaotic’ term, but this also identifies a strand of critical thought which re-politicizes the policies and actions of purportedly ‘neutral’ policymakers, developers and planners (Rose, 1984). Planners and policy makers often focus on historic preservation, greenspace design, environmental remediation, and the creation of new residential, commercial and business districts, all conceptualized under the umbrella of ‘planning for liveability’. The gentrification literature commonly presents liveability planning as mere window dressing for redevelopment, proceeding from more immediate causes such as capital circulation or dramatic social change, with waterfront gentrification among the most egregious forms, insofar as it capitalizes on the de-industrialization of the central city and the displacement of working class neighbourhoods for new, elite 287

Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon: C Hagerman

landscapes of consumption2 (Zukin, 1995; Smith, 1996; Harvey, 1989). Yet, liveability is more than just clever marketing, as the term reappears in numerous contexts within and outside of redevelopment debates. It reflects a vision for the future of the city that negotiates anxieties about the environmental damage and social fragmentation that occurred as a consequence of industrial modernism. The concept of liveability is not removed from modernism, but instead displaces the contentious activities and social conflicts elsewhere. Restoration of the urban landscape often requires the silencing of particular stories and the removal of contentious places and activities to make way for new liveable spaces. Planning During the planning process, different articulations for the form of future urban landscapes are argued (with all their attendant but unacknowledged social, economic and natural implications). This then becomes the ideal site for asserting the need to acknowledge the materiality of discourses and the role of power in legitimizing particular knowledge(s)3 (McCann, 1997; Flyvbjerg, 1998; McCann, 2003). How is the determination of what constitutes a liveable landscape made (and by definition, what is unliveable)? Too often power is viewed as onedimensional, totalizing, and antagonistic. If previous studies treated government as a monolith that created policy internally while implementing it though hierarchically organized institutions, the ‘governance’ literature documents the fragmentation of the state, as policy formation involves increasingly complex negotiations among interest groups, officials, and community organizations, while implementation is often through public-private partner-

2 Critical responses to the return-to-the-city via gentrification portray it as a violent response by the privileged to the takeover of the city by minorities and the working class during the 1960s (Smith, 1996). A discourse of liveability signals the need for those in power (capital interests, the state, the bourgeoisie) to eliminate non-conforming presences in their new outposts in the hostile inner city. Others have stressed the rejection of suburban bourgeois values in the impulse to return to the city (Caulfield, 1989; Ley, 1994). Instead of a conservative, reactionary element, they suggest that it is instead liberal reformers re-taking the mantel of 19th century progressives who move to urban neighbourhoods and value diversity, alternative lifestyles and social responsibility (Ley, 1994). Integrated approaches consider the cycles of urban dis- and re-investment as critical conditions necessary for gentrification, but meld them with an analysis of the new cultural products and social relations of the classes drawn into gentrifying areas (Bridge, 1994; Bridge, 1995; Zukin, 1995; Smith, 1996). 3 Examining ‘knowledge(s)’ expands the study of planning beyond a focus on the practice of planners to the ways in which the very knowledge of planning is created and constructed. This view holds that knowledge both reflects the world and remains socially constructed—artifactual constructivism in the terminology of Demeritt (1998).

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ships, intergovernmental agreements and other quasi-public forms (Marcussen and Torfing, 2003; Bogason, 2004). Negotiation and persuasion become more important than command and control in producing support in policy negotiations (Martin et al., 2003; Salamon, 2002). While theories of network governance extend agency within complex networks and decenter power, it remains necessary to continue to recognize that some actors do have a greater ‘‘capacity to direct the course of socionatural relations’’ (Castree, 2002, p. 141). Restructuring of the state planning apparatus in Oregon during the 1970s supported moving decision-making capacity outside of the state’s purview to include as much of civil society as possible, to create a more progressive planning program. But the intersections between a diminution of state control and the growth of a professionalized class of policy consultants to guide planning and provide social services has, over time, lessened the radical impact of this mainstreaming of progressive ideals. Liveability Discussions of liveability within planning networks often draw on both conservative and progressive impulses. Liveability is a complex and unstable set of understandings combining ideologies of nature, society, urbanity, and nostalgia. This marks liveability as neither inherently inclusive nor revanchist. Examining articulations of liveability provides an avenue for researchers to interrogate the redevelopment of historic industrial landscapes, the knowledge of urban planning and design and their consequences, without necessarily retreating to a deterministic reading of particular projects, processes, or motivations. Pinning down a definition for ‘liveability’ proves difficult, as it has become a highly mutable term. Definitions of liveability have evolved from a focus on the visual aesthetics of a city, to revitalization through amenity creation, and in contemporary policy usage is being stretched to include all manner of job creation or creative economy initiatives (Partners for Liveable Communities, 2005). Criteria that define a place as liveable are easier to come by and reflect a focus on urban design, environmental quality, and human and economic development. Originally, liveability discussions focused on central cities and ways to reclaim the economic, retail and social centrality of downtowns. During the 1990s, increasing attention paid to urban sprawl brought together a number of criticisms of suburban development—it ate up open space, was racially and economically homogenous, socially deadening, poorly designed, automobile dependent and environmentally destructive, from the scale of wetland habitat adjacent to a subdivision to global warming caused by automobile emissions. Sprawl became a foil for liveability. A liveable community, then, is one that does not sprawl—it has a distinct center,

Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon: C Hagerman

coordinates land use and transportation, is socially inclusive and focuses on environmental preservation. At the root of the interest in creating and tracking liveability is a condemnation of industrial modernism and postwar urban form. The factories and industrial uses that spawned massive urban growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries destroyed the liveability of the city, and suburbanization was an attempt to find it outside the city. Now coping with the loss of population and industry, central cities seek to focus on the new ‘creative’ or ‘knowledge economy’ which completes the removal of industrial landscapes, replacing them with new neighbourhoods for residents returning from their exile in the ‘burbs’. The social, environmental and economic consequences of modern urbanism and suburbanism are the backdrop to the calls for increasing liveability, with reference to historic forms reflecting an uncritical nostalgia for landscapes from the premodern past. Under a variety of labels, such as new urbanism and neo-traditionalism, planners, architects and designers have valorized the urban forms that predated the automobile era of American cities, conceiving a more liveable landscape in terms of reduced automobile dependence, walkable neighbourhoods and greater proximity to transit, shopping and entertainment. The return to these ideas of a (perhaps only imagined) bygone era responds to a perceived lack of sociability in the modern suburb, (Kunstler, 1993; Kunstler, 1996) a perception that there has been a breakdown of civility in the inner city, (Beauregard, 1993; Smith, 1996) and nostalgia for a bygone pre-industrial relationship between culture and nature (Gandy, 2002). The polluting industrial uses that dominated the waterfronts of that era are not included in these visions. Instead, access and reclamation of waterfront nature figures prominently into assessments of a metropolis’s liveability, broadly defined, but distanced from the environmental and social disruptions that accompanied the industrial past. Nature and society In the context of the redeveloped waterfront, these creations of new liveable urban landscapes require reconciliation between urban social life and the integration of nature into the city. Political ecologists have argued for the need to take ‘nature’ seriously within studies that capture the reconfiguring of seemingly durable and distinct categories of knowledge such as ‘Nature’ and ‘Urban’. Gandy (2002) argues that nature has a social and cultural history and uses the term ‘metropolitan nature’ to capture the diverse meanings of urban nature from immense historic and contemporary water works to reconstructed urban ecologies. The meanings attached to nature, its uses and the knowledge of it are tied up

with the very ideas of ‘modernity’ and the ‘city’. This is found in Marxist inspired work such as that of Raymond Williams, Marshall Berman and Martin O’Connor, in which capitalist urbanization destroys a first nature to produce a second (Williams, 1973; Berman, 1982; O’Connor, 1994). Outside of a Marxist framework, a poststructuralist reading suggests that as urban space is materially produced with new meanings and uses, a new synthesis of nature is also produced. This perspective broadly characterized by Keil as urban political ecology draws on a number of schools of thought that align in attempting to move beyond dualisms of nature and society (Keil, 2003, 2005). Beck theorizes a ‘reflexive modernization’ in which the focus of capitalist society moves to managing the environmental risks attendant with industrial capitalist production (Beck, 1992). The ‘Risk Society’ then expresses this reflexivity at multiple scales, from the global dispersal of polluting industries away from the wealthy countries to the individual internalization of risk, witnessed in the raising of children in contemporary American society (Beck-Gernsheim, 1996). The ecological restoration and environmental rhetoric of liveability bestows elements of ‘authenticity’ on developments while allaying fears of the loss of ‘nature’ and ‘community’ in the post-industrial world. Urban political ecology presents an opportunity to consider a more nuanced analysis of the production of waterfront landscapes than simply as an artefact of gentrification. Preserving and enhancing the liveability of a place has been portrayed as a prerequisite for enticing people to stay in the central city or return to it (Buchwald, 2003). As cities engaged in more entrepreneurial activity and inter-urban competition recast the responsibilities of government, liveability became the illusive characterization that pushed a city’s reputation ahead of its peers (Hall and Hubbard, 1996). The rise of symbolic economies, as suggested by Zukin, 1995, and reflected in the widespread and uncritical adoption of Florida’s (2002) creative class theory by policy makers, demonstrates how urban growth regimes have come to depend on liveability as the legitimization strategy for the creative post-industrial sectors that they are convinced are the new basis of future urban growth. Liveability discourse reflects contemporary anxieties about urban social-nature (or urban social ecology). The hybridized imagination suggests a purified past and utopianist future by valorizing landscapes that evoke an early modern urban system cleansed of the externalities of factories, workers and the socially marginal. Intertwined technological and ecological elements are invoked: nostalgic (nonautomobile) urban forms, the return of streetcars (but in futuristic versions), restored urban ecologies constituted by restored greenspace and water features. 289

Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon: C Hagerman

Staging of urban nature: The River District and North Macadam District in Portland Established at the few areas of flat land along the lower Willamette River, the historic waterfront was the heart of Portland’s early economic activity. It became separated from this function as transportation technology shifted scales and the harbour moved downstream to wider, deeper portions of the river. Until recently, railroad yards, barge works and salvage operations dominated the historic riverfront, but over time, new configurations for this ‘grey zone’ of older buildings and lots adjacent to the central business district have included highway construction, mega-block office towers, stadiums, residential loft districts, and most recently, intensively planned, mixed-use, live-work, entertainment-housing-retail neighbourhoods. Portland’s central city plans have focused citywide resources on revitalizing core downtown areas in tandem with Oregon’s well-publicized growth management policies (Citizen Advisory Committee and Portland Planning Commission, 1972; Citizen Advisory Committee and Bureau of Planning, 1988; Metro, 1994). 15,000 new housing units in the central city area were expected to be constructed in two redevelopment districts along the Willamette River, which flows through downtown Portland (see Figure 1). These two sites, adjacent to Portland’s central business district, and characterized by the Portland Development Commission (PDC) as underutilized industrial waterfronts, serve as case studies of the processes by which the industrial urban landscapes are reconstructed materially and conceptually to reflect liveability ideals and in the process, meet the consumption objectives of particular demographics of elite consumers (River District Steering Committee, 1994; City of Portland, 1996, 1998). When planning began for revitalizing the first district in the late 1980s, the Development Commission working with property owners designated it ‘The River District’, recognizing the historic linkages to the waterfront economy and signalling the potential for a coherent identity in the future (River District Steering Committee, 1994). Reminiscent of many of the narratives of other waterfront gentrification plans, the legacies of pollution, decaying buildings and the concentration of socially marginalized populations were considered obstacles to successful revitalization (Sawyer, 1985; Borchert, 1991; Bjelland, 2000). However, the context of planning for infill within the Portland model suggests a more careful examination is required of the relationship between liveability discourses, gentrification and planning for redevelopment. Through a planning process managed by the Bureau of Planning and the Portland Development Commission, both areas were identified for new pedestrian-friendly, mixed-income neighbourhoods with moderate and high-density development of housing, retail and commercial

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activity, set within reclaimed waterfront ecologies (City of Portland, 1996, 1998). The 1972 Downtown Plan, the 1988 Central City Plan, and district plans, all chart the evolution of development concepts for the transformation from declining industrial waterfront to revitalized postmodern condominium districts and interweave the twinned elements that liveability discourse in these new neighbourhoods have come to rely on—rebirth through re-introduced water-themed nature and futuristic takes on nostalgic modes of transportation and urban form. Tanner Creek drains from the West Hills and ran through Portland, powering early mills. Long since buried under the industrial area of the River District. Early redevelopment plans showed it brought back to the surface as a central design feature of a new residential neighbourhood directly connected to the river (River District Plan, 1994). Evolving from these conceptual plans and guiding visions, formal developer agreements commit the city to infrastructure improvements, while zoning code amendments set standards for heights, setbacks, massing and greenways, allowed uses and parking. Bonuses of height and density accrue to designers who incorporated good design and donate land for the public space and riverfront greenway imagined in the plans. The liveability focus on creating human scale, walkable neighbourhoods has been implemented by extending the historic grid of downtown Portland into and through the former industrial sites and railyards (PDC, 1998, 1999). Futuristically styled streetcars, imported from the Czech Republic, circulate through the two districts and downtown, providing a liveability amenity while they work to counter impressions of suburban excess and auto-fixation. The streetcar is freighted with heavy symbolic capital as it reshapes the cultural landscapes of the waterfront districts, tying them together into the new Central City coalescing around downtown, as imagined through the 1988 Central City Plan. Transit planners and redevelopment interests readily admit that the streetcar’s primary purpose is as a marketing tool, stimulating investment dollars and consumer interest along its route. Non-residents use it as a destination in and of itself—as a form of recreation, exploring the landscapes of the new liveable waterfront (Stewart, 2001). The quasi-public commission that oversees the streetcar operation argues that the city’s $72.5 million investment in the streetcar has leveraged $2.28 billion in development along the streetcar’s route through the two districts (Office of Transportation and Portland Streetcar Inc, 2006). The River District is already approaching buildout and has nearly reached its 20 year housing goal of 5000 new units in a single decade, half of which has occurred in the last 5 years. A 250 acre parcel directly abutting the downtown business core, it contained a mixture of older, underutilized buildings, abandoned railroad yards and an extensive stretch

Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon: C Hagerman

Figure 1 The River District and South Waterfront District within Portland’s Central City (adapted from PDC, 2000).

of formerly industrial river frontage. New developments have been enormously popular even during an economic slowdown, with condos costing several times the city’s median home price. Hulking fragments from the industrial past rust in front of a converted gym, a design accent repeated at brew pubs, shops and parks in the area. A more complete history of the former worker’s area as a home for permanent, semi-permanent, or transient labourers is not to be found. Such elements are contextless, the development commission itself refers to a ‘postmodern’ approach to architecture and planning that predominates in the area (PDC, 2006). The result is a denial of the social context of the industrial economies that shaped these landscapes, their decline and the lives of people who lived and worked here. These elements do not speak to the dislocations of industry as globalization has reshaped it under late capitalism but instead revel in the play of quaint historical symbols increasingly abstracted from the past of a working riverfront. On the river to the south of the downtown, the city organized another urban renewal area for the 125 acre North Macadam district, envisioning another 3000 housing units alongside expansions of the Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU: City of Portland, 1998). The North Macadam District remains in the early stages of construction as complex ownership issues, ongoing industrial activity and a different political environment and context for public/private discussion hampered the process. Rebranded the South Waterfront (or SoWa), the

beginnings of development have hinged on the design and construction of an aerial tram envisioned to rise into the forested hills above the industrial waterfront. The subject of intense local debate because of its path over a historic neighbourhood, and blossoming costs, this capital project will connect the OHSU hilltop campus with the new neighbourhood, providing a key anchor tenant and the linchpin to the city’s plans for a post-industrial biotech sector (Frank, 2006; PDC, 1999). Yet the transit options from a bygone era, the extension of a walkable city grid, and the futuristic visions of a non-polluting, creative-based economy did not originate solely from within a monolithic growth regime. City officials and planners, business interests and property owners, and representatives of various neighbourhood and community groups make up the quasi-public boards that oversee the planning and development of these districts. Events, tours and hearings present progress and design options while soliciting input from the community, but also present an opportunity for meanings of liveability and its specific framing within new forms of urban-nature, to be articulated and reinforced in relation to the redevelopment of the new districts. Many commentators have been critical of these forms of public consultation in planning, focusing on how they are key discursive sites in the political struggles within the increasingly fragmented and privatized sphere of planning (Dear, 1989; McCann, 2001). Fundamental decision-making often remains outside of the public eye and strategically affects 291

Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon: C Hagerman

the structuring of the public process itself. The shift in the 1970s towards greater public involvement in planning in cities like Portland and Vancouver BC has been cast as a response to progressive idealism (Kenny, 1992; Ley, 1994). However, researchers have also found that powerful interests often dominate contemporary public processes, retaining the veneer of public inclusivity while continuing to direct development, particularly when plans move from the visioning phase into implementation (Kenny, 1992; McCann, 2001). The parks in particular have been a center of public involvement during their planning process. Public forums, guided river tours and design presentations reinforce connections to a sense of civic engagement, ecological restoration and river amenities. These green images suggest to the public the hope for a post-industrial urbanism that combines premodern nostalgic urban forms, modes of transit, sociability, un-tainted nature and post-industrial creative economies. These representations circulate via city documents, the media and from developers, with strategic appeals to nature that evoke liveability and shape expectations and meanings of the landscape being transformed. While symbolic references to many of the envisioned amenities might eventually be included, participants are often left thinking there is a significant gap between the completed landscape and the visions portrayed in the public process. Salmon Nation: cleaning up the water The explosion of industrial development during and after World War II resulted in extensive pollution, channelling and damming of the rivers and streams in the Willamette Watershed, halting many of the already declining runs of salmon. While National Geographic celebrated Oregon in 1972 as it led the country in implementing anti-pollution legislation

to clean up the Willamette River, the salmon populations failed to rebound (Starbird, 1972). The Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act that followed led to the identification of many of the species of the Willamette watershed as protected or endangered, bringing penalties to bear on the state and local governments in the region. The primary method of reshaping salmon waterways is to increase viable habitat for salmon fry by reversing channelization and removing culverts in an attempt to slow stormwater, decreasing suspended particles, pollutants and water temperature before disposal into rivers. This strategy of re-engineering outfalls at the river bank was utilized particularly in the re-naturing of the South Waterfront District. Once a wetland, industrial activity in the 20th century converted the marsh to dry land as numerous industries, from cement factories to shipworks, dumped fill to elevate the plain. The basalt ballast blocks from liberty ships decommissioned after the war still define the river edge in many places. Reclaiming the waterfront for ecological purposes figured prominently in the plans to redevelop the district, linking the re-naturing of the riverfront to the identity of the new urban neighbourhoods. In attempts to restore the river’s edge to preindustrial conditions in order to improve the habitat for salmon, slopes were regraded, riprap and debris removed, and rootballs shipped from Eastern Oregon were secured to the reconstructed riverbank during the low-water season (see Figure 2). At the same time, a converted historic warehouse began to play host to a yearly celebration of ‘Salmon Nation’, a public event that fosters an environmental identity rooted in a Pacific Coast regional identification as ‘people of the Salmon’. Both the River District and the South Waterfront have been imbued with these elements of symbolic capital that link

Figure 2 Rootballs installed on a reconstructed riverbank. The Oregon Health Sciences University’s Central Campus atop Marquam Hill is visible in the distance.

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Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon: C Hagerman

Figure 3 Jamison Square, The first park in the redeveloped River District.

their urban transformations to the specific environmental issues of restoring riparian salmon habitat. Public planning events The parks department, as a part of the public visioning process labelled the River Renaissance, led jet boat tours of the former industrial waterfront, highlighting the restored streamfront features and the potential public and ecological amenities that would accompany the public greenway. This public process was explicitly tied to the visioning of parks and the greenway, which coincided with the authorization by the City Council of the South Waterfront Development Plan in 2003. Public exhibits visually portrayed the future greenspaces envisioned for the district. Participants were invited to vote among a series of concepts for the design of the greenway paths, which ranged from naturalistic to heavily landscaped. The environmental restoration of the riverbanks for salmon habitat was explicitly linked to the liveability amenities that would frame the future development in the city’s newest neighbourhood. However, desires gathered in this process are constrained to articulate an already limited number of choices of natures that will be constructed within whatever amount of land is given over for public space in the district. In exchange for infrastructure spending and development bonuses provided to property owners and developers, the public was to receive new ecological spaces that would return salmon to the river and people to the district that it bordered. Economic redevelopment that would follow from the infrastructure improvements to the area would replace the historic heavy industries or marginal storage uses with an emerging biotech sector drawing more of the ‘Creative Class’ to the city. Few people would find anything wrong with planning for parks, greenways or environmental restora-

tion. However, the development focus on new configurations of nature divert from the reality that substantial public money is facilitating the development of primarily elite residential housing. The public money used to leverage much larger proportions of private investment is directed to key infrastructure projects such as the tram, the streetcar and environmental remediation. At public hearings, the expansive dreams of riverfront greenways and parks are set against fulfilling the city’s commitment to creating new housing in proportions equivalent to the city’s income profile. The use of public money is justified in order to secure a public good in the form of ecological restoration and green space of the waterfront, but discussion of the greenway has been used to shape expectations and soften criticism of other aspects of the development plans, such as views blocked by new condominium towers, increased traffic congestion, lack of schools or services, little planned affordable housing, relocation of social services for the homeless and the creation of exclusion areas for marginalized populations. Wealthy in-migrants become the focus of liveability discourses as they hold the key to fulfilling the urban renewal district’s self-fulfilling objective of increasing the property-tax increment, to generate the public sector investment capital that is needed to galvanize the next round of public infrastructure improvements. While riverfront greenspace played a prominent role in framing and defining the new areas during the design phase, new public open space so far has consisted of only two ‘postage stamp’ parks. The little park space provided so far is intensively used. No connection to the river has yet been obtained nor has Tanner Creek been brought from its culvert and back to the surface. Both park designs do symbolically connect with the River. The first recreated a spring with water falling from a curving wall of rough stone into a broad wading pool (see Figure 3). Once built, the 293

Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon: C Hagerman

Figure 4 Tanner Springs Park design drawing produced by Atelier Dreiseitl and Greenworks, P.C as a part of design presentations, public events and media releases (PDC, 2003).

first park’s influx of residents and visitors highlighted the underlying tensions in the neighbourhood’s planning. Ironically, the city’s broader demographics have come into conflict with the rather narrow income profile of the residents of the new condos surrounding the park. Successfully designed to meet the needs of an urban neighbourhood as a place of intense civic interaction, it has drawn families with children from the entire metropolitan area to play in the fountain. Stories of residents complaining of the noise and potential health risks of so many children playing in the fountain have been oft repeated, often with the subtext that the homeless use it as well. The power of this concern shaped the subsequent planning of the second park. Instead of social imaginaries, this park was to appeal to ecological imaginaries offering a demonstration project of bioremediation of the park’s stormwater (see Figures 4 and 5). The recently opened Tanner Springs Park was explicitly designed for ‘contemplation and reflection’—the rules are explicit— ‘no dogs, no wading’ (Gragg, 2005). The park design was presented through plans, slides and evocative nature and water photographs to a community meeting of several hundred people. The park’s design symbolically evokes the desire to daylight4 Tanner Creek, and its central feature is a swale that cleanses the park’s surface runoff through a re-created wetland

4 The return to the surface of a stream currently underground in a culvert.

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sunk below street level. Visually, it is to evoke a connection to a powerful environmentalist ethic and aesthetics associated with Portland’s identity ‘as an environmentally sustainable city’. But this re-natured space of contemplation is an ecological Disneyland— it is a fantasy space. The water will be contained and the history of industrial pollution will not be ‘peeled back’, but sealed underneath a concrete cap. The bioswale is a bathtub demonstration of bioremediation with a filter back-up system. The larger parks, marina and greenway extension offered at various points in the public planning process and used to shape support for the extensive public investment in the district remain on the drawing board for now. The images of the daylighted springs, expansive greenways and riverbanks restored for salmon were mobilized to approve the plans for the district, but the implementations of those visions have ‘failed to pencil’5 or been delayed to the end of the development process with few guarantees that it will correspond with those images. The City Commissioner who oversaw the Parks Department lamented during City Council approval hearings for the district’s developer agreement that the funding for the Greenway remained unsettled and at this time no money 5 ‘‘It just doesn’t pencil’’—a phrase used to explain how design visions don’t make it to final construction because of the reality of budgets. This provides a supposedly neutral accounting of design elements left on the architectural drawings and not found in the built environment.

Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon: C Hagerman

Figure 5 Tanner Springs Park. The River District’s second park.

exists in the parks department to maintain the greenway, let alone build it (Francesconi, 2003). Redemption of historic industrial areas, mitigation of the environmental pollution and re-greening of the landscape suggest an opportunity to remove the visible negative ecological legacies of industrial capitalism while replacing it with a landscape stressing—if not post-modern or anti-modern, at least anti-suburban lifestyle possibilities—commuting by streetcars and trams, consuming locally produced foods and art. These developments have become a strategic manifestation of the city’s national image in order to appeal to the ‘creative class’, the young, well-educated, artistically inclined and willing to serve as flexible labour in the symbolic and service economies. But more important, they sell a vibrant urban landscape to wealthy households importing capital to the city and shoring up the local economy. The redevelopment of industrial waterfront districts in Portland reflects the capitalist production of space, through the utilization of particular stagings of nature to present the possibility of the construction of new urban places that appeal to the imaginations of residents. Environmental and economic anxieties are linked with social anxieties as troubling pasts and contemporary social conflicts are smoothed over as a part of the rebuilt, liveable, waterfront landscape. The planning and development process creates new narratives highlighting restored ecologies, urban civility and sustainability that overwrite legacies of oppression and pollution and the history of workers and residents within the industrial landscape. The dominant symbols of industrial modernism are to be discretely hidden and new forms of nature reintroduced in their place. This works to assuage apprehensions about the ‘risk society’ by referring to a redeemed urban future which pretends modernism and the messy political, ecological and social issues it stirred up, never occurred (Beck, 1992). The references to liveability

suggest the possibility that our new lifestyles can be pursued without similar modernist excesses. The global flows of capital, goods and communication, which make the liveable city a possibility by displacing social and environmental externalities, belie the emerging reality that pollution and social unrest have also become global. Portland, then, provides a valuable case study of a city focusing on liveability along its waterfronts, as it wrestles with its situation within global economic, social and environmental transformations.

Conclusion Planning for liveability in Portland has sought to capitalize on and reinforce particular forms of nature, linked to specific types of marketable urban revitalization and reflecting desires for post-industrial knowledge-based economic development amid the uncertainties of deindustrialization and globalization. Considering waterfront redevelopment through the discourse of liveability planning in Portland presents an opportunity to move beyond blanket assessments of gentrification, while maintaining a political commitment to reasserting histories of industry and urban social change into the accounts of urban renewal in which both nature and social life are reshaped. Urban political ecology maintains that the remaking of natural landscapes must be considered along with the social and economic effects of the replacement of industrial landscapes with landscapes of consumption. The complex governance networks through which livability discourses originate, and are then transformed and propagated, necessitate a reconsideration of the approaches to analyzing the planning and gentrification of waterfront redevelopment. While power remains unevenly held, relegating control of discourse only to the traditionally powerful interests of property and capital undermines the agenda and intentions of 295

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many of the actors that participate in these networks. Consumption of these new landscapes as articulations of identity conceived of in a complex, non-dichotomous sense remains a necessary component of redevelopment research. Sites on the historic waterfront allow the opportunity to directly assess the intersection between redevelopment, planning, the broad sweep of industrialization, decline and post-industrial economic development, and social transformations. Considering the broader geographical conceptualization of the historical urban waterfront allows an analysis of urban revitalization that connects the social, economic and ecological contexts of the industrial past to the envisioned urban political ecologies of the future. Finally, while the Portland model may be a leading example of progressive land use, transit and environmental and participatory planning, unpacking taken-for-granted conceptions such as liveability remains vital to a critical analysis of the outcomes of planning and redevelopment processes as other cities look to the Portland model for best practices or actors within the city reflect on successes and failures.

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