The Burnside Blog

Posted By Tim DuRoche on 01/11/2009

About planning, Harry S. Truman used to say (among other oat-flavored truisms): “You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one.” While the hyper-deliberate planning philosophy of Mike Tyson dictated: “Everyone has a plan – until they get punched in the face.”

The news a few weeks back that Gil Kelley, Director of the Portland Bureau of Planning , would not be jumping the broom with the next mayoral administration, fell somewhere between those two pearls of wisdom. Sudden and impactful—the news left many looming questions and sent conjectures around Portland’s planned, natural, and built future into a pachinko-style careening.

Will Mayor Adams’ replacing of Kelley signal a ruthless bursting of the Portland Plan’s “gonfalon bubble” (to bastardize that other Adams, Franklin Pierce) ? Probably not.

Is the fight for new building heights within Old Town/Skidmore historic district a slam dunk, as Steve Duin thinks ? What will become of that glorious 13.4 acre question mark where the US Post Office sits?

Life will go on—the Portland Plan will likely gain momentum, diabolical plans like the Burnside-Couch Couplet will linger acridly, some folks I’ve talked to worry about the restructuring- of the Bureau of Housing and Community Development—especially the dilution of neighborhood empowerment now that that ball’s in PDC’s hands.

I can certainly see a certain logic in merging the bureau with the city’s Office of Sustainable Development , creating a new-fangled Bureau of Sustainable Planning and Development (with OSD head Susan Anderson at the helm—she’s no slouch, she’s whip-smart and has a fluid background in urban and regional planning, sustainable development, etc. ). As it stands sustainable policies and practices (from food policy and green design solutions for low-income housing to mixed-use, 20-minute neighborhoods buoyed by shared asset developments like Rosa Parks Elementary/New Columbia and Humboldt Gardens —developments with amplified access and linkages to key services) are at the heart of the Portland Plan —but I don’t think that means we should raffle off Kelley’s wisdom and leadership and just call it good.

I certainly wouldn’t agree with developer John Russell ’s reading that “Kelly’s style of planning is what [he calls] “kumbaya planning” — singing songs and holding hands and never bringing up differences.” (Perhaps Russell’d prefer the Chicago mode of planning, where alderman decide who builds what where, disingenuous advisory groups, stacked with developers, are passed off as “neighborhood’s voices” and money, not planning, drives the process.)

Say what you will about Portland’s Hepburn-Tracy-like love affair—”I love you/leave me along/well okay/hey, wait a minute!”—with planning and public process, Kelley was a right place/right time marshall who understood the importance of big idea planning, valued the process, and was committed to the long-now of smart growth.

Ethan Seltzer summed things up nicely earlier today:
“Gil Kelley made significant contributions to that legacy and “brand” for Portland. Under his watch the City turned its attention to the Willamette in a systematic and forward-looking way. South Waterfront, Marquam Hill, University District, West End, St. Johns, Gateway, and many other districts and neighborhoods have received new and careful attention. Portland, through Gil’s efforts, has re-engaged Metro and the regional growth management and planning processes that will profoundly shape the City in the future. Urban design and economic development became centrally important themes for the Bureau of Planning’s work. Planning functions within the city became connected across bureaus and in substantive ways through his work.”

This new direction, Adams’ bureau-reorganizing that merges the Planning Bureau and Office of Sustainable Development into a new Bureau of Sustainable Planning and Development, could be seen as the natural evolution of a process that began with Vera Katz to look more closely at the planning function and bureaucratic structure.

Kelley knew instinctively that to fully engage long-range, coordinated planning across bureaus, the cumbersome permitting function would have to shift [note: the new restructuring of city bureaus combines the permitting functions, once spread out amongst seven Bureaus, creating a “one-stop” super-store of sorts] . Kelley told the DJC ’s Kennedy Smith in 2006, “what I underestimated in coming here was how siloed the city government is. We have a separate transportation planning function, environmental planning function, parks planning function, so there’s a lot of planning going on. The question is, is it leveraging one another’s efforts in some way?. . .I have tried to concentrate our energy on the bigger moves – getting back the river, acknowledging our downtown as the central city. We have to improve the design quality and investment in the neighborhood centers and corridors. Those are the big things that we’ve got to do. To the extent that we get distracted from that, we’re letting time go by.”

At the Portland Plan Summit, this last June at the Convention Center, there was a distinguished parade of thinkers, doers, visionaries, activists and bureaucrats, including no less than Svend Auken , former first vice-president of Danish Parliament (and co-author of the Kyoto Protocol), Urban Greenspaces’ Mike Houck, the always-engaging David Bragdon, OMSI’s Nancy Steuber, and the redoubtable sustainability-whiz Dennis Wilde, housing activist Jean de Master of Human Solutions, and Metro’s Rex Burkholder, among others. During the course of the day, some very impressive ideas about cities, livability, climate change, and such revolutionary ideas as health and happiness were bandied about . Even Tom Potter (who most in the room had forgotten was still Mayor) and [Mayor-elect] Sam Adams took to the mic. And while Auken was a hard act to follow—we were all ready to move to Copenhagen by the end of his keynote—the person who carried the dais, with wit, aplomb (make that poetic aplomb), a measured cool, and razor-sharp acuity was Gil Kelley.

Mining both a sense of history/preservation and stewardship of our usable past and a scale-able approach to city-building (modeled on walkable, “20-minute neighborhoods,” reminiscent of medieval towncenters), Kelley addressed how Portland might evolve, while still addressing indigenous enterprise, families and children (“how can we approach urban planning as a child might see the world: ‘where do we play, explore, learn, make.’ . .”).

While it might be dismissed as sentimental sounding, Kelley echoed Auken’s concept of “charm” as an aspirational piece of planning—and wasn’t afraid of the big idea. This was not a Disneyfied “Celebration”-like sense of charm, but one that respected the edges and corridors, the nooks and crannies and that valued human scale —more over, Kelley envisioned a city where economic development and cultural-social amenities and services were not in conflict to, but collaborative elements of Portland’s “charm,” distinctiveness, and authenticity.

So what kind of best-laid-Plans lay ahead—what are the challenges that face a newly minted bureau? Gil Kelley had some ideas of his own in this morning’s Oregonian

“How can our plans ensure continuation of our core values, enhance the quality of neighborhood life and provide equitable opportunities for all residents? How can we contribute to the long-term health, prosperity and happiness of Portlanders? How shall we position our economy to build upon local strengths and fit into the global picture? How will we approach global issues like reducing climate change? How can we sustainably balance our expectations with our ability to pay?

The opportunity exists to address these questions and make profound choices in two efforts now under way: the city’s ‘Portland Plan’ and Metro’s ‘The Greatest Place’” initiative . Portlanders and Portland leaders should seize on these and make the most of them, engaging the broadest array of participants, thinking strategically, making choices and enlisting partners for action.

Here are some potential ‘big ideas’ that might frame the future of Portland:

Learning clusters and the value-added economy.
We should build upon the cluster of public universities and private centers of excellence primarily centered in the city center (from biomedical, product design, film and specialty foods to energy and green building technologies, social work, and peace and health initiatives) to foster collaboration between them. In so doing, we can educate the next generation of residents and develop new technologies and services that define Portland’s niche in the global economy. This in turn could reinvigorate our valuable industrial base and port facilities.

20-minute neighborhoods and the town square.
Our sense of place, our ability to accommodate growth in beneficial ways and our approach to sustainable use of resources may lie in re-creating the essential attributes of traditional towns where all or most daily and weekly needs can be met within a 20-minute walk from home: shopping, schools, recreation, community gardens, a variety of housing types, some working spaces, studios and a town square or ‘village street.’ Connecting these neighborhoods to larger walking, bicycle and transit networks would link them to existing employment centers throughout the city.

Nature in the city.
More than 100 years ago the Olmstead Plan, created by the firm that designed park systems for most major American cities, provided a bold but only partial framework for the city’s form. We need to expand upon its vision and complete it. Residents and workers should be able to access nature every day, and connecting to green spaces improves health, learning and sociability. From our streams and hilltops to our riverbanks and floodplains, to our parkways, jogging trails and newly developed green streets, we need a more complete and functional ‘green network’ that serves urban ecological functions and recreational needs.

The bicycle city and a new energy paradigm.
The need to improve air quality drove much of our urban development and transit agenda in the 1970s and ‘80s. Today’s imperative is to reduce greenhouse gases and increase energy self-reliance. Retrofitting the cityscape for bicycles as a primary mode of transportation needs to be a priority. By employing simpler, more decentralized and neighborhood-scale energy systems we improve our self-reliance and economic capacity.

Social equity and cultural inclusivity.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, poverty and cultural diversity were highly concentrated in portions of inner Portland. Today the picture is quite different. Our population has diversified substantially, and inequities in income and services have spread to North and East Portland and outer parts of the metro area. Our community-building efforts need to manifest cross-cultural dialogue and understanding, and our policies and investments should guide the provision of amenities throughout the city, particularly where families in poverty have moved in large numbers.

A center for the arts.
Portland is a place where art of all kinds happens. We need to preserve and enhance this wonderful attribute so it can continue to feed our identity and our sense of beauty, and bring visitors to our door.
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