^ View of Portland from Pittock Mansion, Facing East
Growing up in Portland, I don’t feel like I really started to develop a sense of relationship and belonging until I started biking and jogging around in my spare time in 8th grade, and my experience of the city opened up outside my home and school. The first circuit I would do ran from my inner-Northeastern neighborhood to the downtown waterfront, but boredom’s specter drove me to explore new routes around the city center, and to consult Google Maps to find the furthest places I could go. Over four years I slowly filled in the map of my experience of Portland’s five quadrants, four cardinal suburbs and dozens of neighborhoods, and Portland started to take a three-dimensional shape in my imagination, defined as much by the verticality of its landscape as its geographical distance. Portland isn’t just a city close to nature; it’s a city defined by the two rivers that flow through it and the hills and mountains that drown the works of man beneath a green and white horizon. Forest Park hulks over downtown like a crashing emerald tide, while Mount Hood rises like a silver spear to pierce the rising sun. Large neighborhood parks lace between the two across the leafy cityscape. Wherever one goes in Portland, these things always remain constant.
.^ The Portland flag is a symbolic representation of the city’s natural landmarks, showing the intersection of two rivers amidst a green forest.
But one of the great joys of exploration was seeing how everything else changed around them, slowly, subtly, as downtown rolled into the inner, middle, and outer neighborhoods and then unto the peripheral towns, gently, seamlessly. Biking allowed me to witness these slow transformations as they happened, over many miles and thousands of buildings, rather than through the jaunting stop-motion experience of a Trimet bus.
^ View of Downtown from University of Portland, with Swan Island in Foreground; Looking South
Taking in this languid change helped me to realize just how large Portland manages to be, despite its imposing natural borders and location in the West Coast’s flyover country. It has grown into a metropolis of two million held together by a complex system of policies and interlocking governments that only sometimes appear to be functional; a friend formerly employed by the city government described its civic life as “a suffocating culture of consensus”. But all that crowding, chaos and disorder is rooted in our fundamentally shared belief that Portland is a good enough community to live in, with enough potential for further improvement to be worth fighting for. Sometimes literally.
^Cherry Trees on Waterfront Park, with Steele Bridge in Background; Facing North
Portland has a proud history of experimentation, and of developing its own solutions to the problem it faces. Having grown to maturity in the Reform Era, it is a city dissatisfied with merely copying the grossly embellished accomplishments of the older American cities, instead preferring to re-examine them and infuse them with its own needs and ideals. Instead of building ever-more highways, it tore them down and repurposed the funds to build an expansive light rail system. Instead of spreading ever outwards like the great metropoles, it devised the urban growth boundary to protect its natural landscapes and encourage infill development. The drive of Portland businesses to reinvest in public amenities, at a time of suburban flight elsewhere, helped make the city center one of America’s most comforting and walkable.
Portland is a medium-sized city that dares to compete with America’s great urban centers by proposing its own, unique urbanist vision that combines a conservative desire to protect its natural landscapes with a progressive faith in experimentation and cooperation, driven by a firm belief that things can always improve. Its grand visions are too often frustrated by infighting and the resource limitations of its smaller size. Yet, however much these obstacles stifle its desire to grow, Portland will never be a “finished city”. It will never lose its drive to become something better. Having grown up alongside Portland, and knowing there’s still so much of the city for me to explore, I’m excited to see how it changes further.
^View of Downtown from the Broadway Bridge, Facing South; Bancorp Tower and Union Station in Foreground