Portlandness
Portland I.
Geographic “place” is the intersection of one’s subjective interpretation of a location (past experiences, comfort) with the location’s objective, physical characteristics. I’m working at a Boy Scout camp called Raven Knob this summer. It’s in a valley in western North Carolina, near Mt. Airy. There is a lake, a dining hall, program areas for each area of scouting, many wooded trails, a disc golf course, and several mountains. For a week, it is the entirety of 700 boys’ lives, and then a different set of boys, and then it fades away until the next summer. I don’t love this place, but it feels natural to be here.
I expected a focus on the “Portlandia” side of Portland, including hipsters, microbreweries, and young people. I also associated the city with environmentalism, although not as the “ecotopia” described in the atlas. I didn’t know the geography of Portland, so I didn’t associate it with the Willamette and Columbia rivers. I didn’t know there were such distinctive neighborhoods within the city, each with their own distinct populations and color palettes.
The authors present seven separate definitions of Cascadia to emphasize the point that a city can’t be defined by just one explanation. None of the definitions of Cascadia are incorrect, and they all represent a different part of Portland as a place, whether as part of an economic region or as an ecotopia. A Cascadian city is green (both environmentally and physically), on the West coast, progressive, and independent.
The essence of Portlandness is the way the city’s people feel about it. The authors make the point that culture and place are not rigid; they change with people’s changing thoughts and opinions. Maps are useful because they are “representations of how people see places” (9), and so they can show both the concentrations of what is currently defined as Portlandness (liberal, green, bike-friendly) and the changes over time as people’s definition of Portlandness changes.
- Urban Landscapes
An Urban Landscape is all of the manmade parts of a city that make it more inorganic. It is arranged much like a forest in a natural landscape. The skyscrapers and industrial buildings in the Central Eastside Industrial District are the large trees. The smaller buildings, individual shops, sidewalks, and strip clubs that make the city unique are the undergrowth that supports the urban ecosystem. It isn’t stagnant; it changes with its people and with changing architectural and landscaping views.
I chose the Ruins of Taylor Electric. To me, it demonstrates the conflict between the citizens’ desire to “keep Portland weird” by expressing themselves through graffiti and the government’s desire to maintain order. When the Doug was described, the atlas quoted Martin Patail as saying, “Political nonexistence might be Cascadia’s greatest asset.” There seems to be a conflict between the graffiti artists and eco-geeks, who stand for independence and expression, and the government, which is supposedly representing that same population. It’s interesting how a government should do its job when the people for whom it’s established are against the order that governments exist in part to maintain.
With the Taylor Electric building in mind, I would map what has happened in the last 15 years to buildings that have been vacated- whether they’ve been bought, repurposed, torn down to leave an empty lot, or replaced by another building (and what purpose a new building or company serves). This would show the path of development in places where there are buildings either old enough to be vacated or unprosperous enough to be sold/abandoned. I would call the map Old Ends and New Beginnings.
III. Wildness
This section focuses on the intersection between the natural and urban environments of Portland. Some perspectives, such as “Stumptown”, “Oaks Bottom”, and “The City Chicken and the County Cayote”, reveal how Portland has encouraged, or at least accepted, wildness within its borders. The Oaks Bottom section again shows the conflict between Portland’s government and its citizens. Others, such as
“Heterotopia” and “Lost waters and Phantom Streams”, demonstrate the ways in which the city has altered and reduced the wild landscape in order to urbanize. The dystopian side of Portland described in the Heterotopia perspective acknowledges the environmental and racial consequences of making the city perfect for some at the expense of other people and landscapes.
In the Stumptown perspective, the more progressive neighborhoods of Portland have embraced wildness within an urban setting by planting trees. These neighborhoods have gone as far toward the urban side of the spectrum as they’re willing to go, and are now moving away from it. It’s interesting and encouraging that after a community has sufficiently developed, it wants to transition back towards wildness instead of becoming more and more urban. Portland is embracing wildlife and the Cascadian scenery that surrounds it. However, the tree cover is far from uniform across the city. I wish the atlas mentioned if there was a correlation between tree cover and affluence of a neighborhood, and if tree cover changed as a neighborhood became gentrified or impoverished.
This concept is what I would map in order to witness a change as neighborhoods change. It might even turn out that encouraging the planting of flora is a strategy to improve an area socially and make it more safe/welcoming.
V. Social Relations
This section has three main topics- the amount of video surveillance in Portland, the complexity of the city’s “green” moniker, and the city’s past and present relation to poverty and homelessness. Depending on one’s interpretation, all the streetlights and surveillance cameras could be seen as a welcome safety measure or an intrusive and unwelcome method of spying. The other two sections are in part cautionary tales about what the dangerous influence of money. LEED certification is also a certification of a company’s willingness to pay for it. When the minority populations of Portland were redlined and displaced, the culture of neighborhoods like Boise was hurt, along with the lives of its residents. While Portland preaches inclusion and diversity, the potential revenue of a stadium or an area experiencing “urban renewal” pushes its government and well-off citizens to ignore their neighbors.
It’s both important to remember and easy to forget the poor and homeless when helping is not required. The Invisibility of Homelessness perspective was interesting. The Right 2 Dream Too settlement makes homelessness salient while still focusing on helping the homeless rather than focusing on that salience. The social relations of this community contrast with those of the gentrifying and redlining community by solving a problem rather than moving or removing it. It’s also a reminder that in a city with Platinum LEED certified buildings and bioswales, there are still basic needs that have not been met.
The perspective noted that although many opposed the central location of Right 2 Dream Too, the community is in an ideal place to form a support network and have walking access to the infrastructure that allows people to stop being homeless. With this in mind, I would map the low-income communities of Portland based on their access to a list of amenities such as medical clinics, washing and showering facilities, and quality food. This map would show the ease of access to help and to the infrastructure necessary to create a successful community.