Historic Portland Maps: 1866 Portland Map

The last in this particular era of maps, this survey map highlights the tracing of ‘disappeared streams’ throughout the urban area, which requires research and layering of a number of historical maps onto the modern urban form. One map that has some interesting waterways is a Map of the City of Portland, Surveyed and drawn by order of the Common Council, By C.W. Burrage, City Surveyor, 1866.



This map traces a detailed route of Tanner Creek, the waterway that meandered through modern-day Downtown and Pearl District, through the Northwest Industrial area that was occupied by Couch Lake. The ‘lake’ which was mostly a fen, or wetland, is located in a parcel (marked J.H. Couch), but the boundaries are not delineated. There are some other maps that exist showing the boundaries, which will be layered in as well.



Another interesting waterway is along the east bank, originating in at the intersection of B & C Streets, at 5th Street. The modern location of this would be around the outfall of Sullivan’s Gulch (around the I-84/I-5 connection)… the forked creek meanders through the Central Eastside area, outletting at the Water Street at ‘J’ Street (presently Water at Oak – along the Eastbank Esplanade).



The other interesting feature was the location of the Lunatic Asylum Grounds in Southeast Portland. The location of this facility is somewhere between Ladd’s Addition and the Central Eastside Industrial District… showing that SE has always been the locus of the ‘Keep Portland Wierd’ idea.

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Historic Portland Maps: 1852 Cadastral Maps

Probably the most detailed and broad ranging of these early maps are from the collection from the Public Land Survey System (or Cadastral Maps). These were generated throughout the 1850s in the Portland metro region, with the main portion of Portland encompassed in two maps, which were obviously the base material for the 1852 Survey Map, as it contains much of the same data.





Zooming in a bit on the area of current downtown Portland, we see the nascent grid forming along 'The Clearing', and see the edge of the Tualatin Mountains (West Hills) to the west, even a trail leading toward Beaverton through a slot in the Canyon where Highway 26 west (Sunset Highway) runs. On the east side of the river is the lowland marsh and streams that were subsequently filled to create the Central Eastside Industrial area. Within the Willamette River to the south, Ross Island is intact, well before the constant sand and gravel mining operations left it a ribbon of it's former self.



The detail is pretty awesome, as you really get a feel for some of the drainages that existed, still in visible dendritic forms making sub-watersheds. This section also shows the routing of a 'road' that connected to Milwaukie and Tualatin to the south.



The northern section captures the upper reaches of Downtown, as well as the current Pearl district and Northwest Industrial Zone. Closer to downtown, the original routing of Tanner Creek is made evident by it's headwaters at the 'Tannery' adjacent to the road to the Tualatin Plains. This fed Couch Lake, a wetland adjacent to the Willamette that is currently the location of Tanner Springs Park, a metaphorical daylighting of this lowland. Finally, in the pre-bridge era, the location of ferry crossings connecting east and west are shown



Another notable items on the upper west includes Guilds Lake, a significant water body that was the site of the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted - which was later filled to create flat industrial land as it exists today.


:: image via Portland History

Taking a closer look at the northernmost section you see the level of detail shown in the marshy edge of the Columbia River called on the map 'Columbia Bayou' and some of the earliest low-density riverfront inhabitation.



I really love this map for many reasons, but the fact that it is referenced to the township, section, range mapping convention, making it easy to use as an underlayment for modern mapping to show a pre-development (or at least early development snapshot of Portland context). It also shows a relatively wide span of the region, making it useful beyond the boundaries of Portland.

I have created a few of these maps over the years which I will post when I get a chance). My ultimate goal is to reconcile these into a graphical layer in GIS that can be used for mapping analyses... any grad students out there want a project? (Find many of these maps from this post and the previous ones at the great City of Portland Publications and Maps Page)

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Historic Portland Maps: 1852 Downtown Survey

A focused companion in the same vintage as the 1852 Survey Map (which includes the entire city area) comes from the early Portland 1852 Downtown Survey, a more detailed account encompassing the downtown area adjacent to the Willamette River (oriented with north to the right). One interesting pattern is the street grid running right into the waterfront – as the river was the hub of commerce and building hung right over the water. As the city evolved this interface with the river lefts some interesting patterns which became a highway, and eventually the current Waterfront Park.



A couple of early creek corridors are shown on the south portion of downtown, originating at SW Jefferson Street and winding down SW Columbia to 3rd. There’s another stream originating from Mill Street and continuing southward. I've been mesmerized for years with the idea of these 'disappeared streams' that were later buried under the developed downtown grid.



And the form that continues through of the park blocks, in this form continuing from SW Clay to SW Stark. This is a pattern of park blocks that continues north and south as shown in the 1866 Map (look for this in an upcoming post). I’m curious where in the development pattern the North and South Park blocks were severed.

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Historic Portland Maps: 1852 Survey Map

Following up on the previous post, one of my all time favorite maps is the reproduction of the 1852 Survey Map offers not only development and trails, but information on soils, disappeared streams, topographic and other natural features. The map used to be available via a link to the BES website, but I can’t seem to place the source for it at the moment. The overall map covers what is considered the area of modern City of Portland (click to enlarge to a somewhat more readable scale).



A couple of details:

First, showing the area of current downtown, with natural features of Mt. Tabor and Ross Island. Note the curving depression of Sullivan’s Gulch still in full flow, replaced by what is the current routing of Interstate 84 connecting Portland from the east. There is interesting notations referring to 'Land gently rolling, soil 2nd rate, gravelly', denoting the floodplain of the original creek.

Second, focusing on North Portland, including Swan Island, the wetlands of Smith & Bybee Lakes (in proximity to what was used for Portland's landfill for many years), Forest Park, and the prominent eyebrow of the overlook ridge. The references to 'burnt timber' and trails show the marks of early habitation. The map is a great background for some of the current hydrology and ecology of modern Portland - at least to a certain level of detail.

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Historic Portland Maps: 1845-1852

The discussions of Portland Urban Form (here, here) got me thinking about a series of posts I originally posted to Free Association Design of a collection of historic Portland maps that I thought worthy of reposting here. It's great to see the origins of the urban form begin to take shape, and it provides a context in which to see what happened over a century and a half previous and it's current ramifications. Starting off, this is one of the oldest maps I’ve been able to find 'The Clearing' shows the core of Portland in the early years. The large parcels on the right are owned by Francis Pettygrove and Benjamin Stark, both prominent place-names of early history. This is the first iteration, including the afforementioned 200' square blocks, which were laid out by the business-oriented duo to maximize valuable corner lots.



This map dates to the inital history of Portland – with the initial land claim by William Overton and Asa Lovejoy, and the subsequent ‘coin-toss’ by Lovejoy and Pettygrove, giving the City is current name. From City of Portland’s Historic Portland Timelines, 1843-1901:

“1945: Overton sells his share of the claim to Francis Pettygrove. Pettygrove and Lovejoy survey the land, deciding to build a city. Previously called The Clearing, Portland gets its name with the toss of a coin with Pettygrove’s home town in Maine winning over Lovejoy’s birthplace in Boston.”

While I'm much happier with the western iteration of Portland versus Boston, it's a interesting factoid to see that coin flips original history, but more telling that the City evolved from the man-made Clearing along the riverside. Tying a bit of this history to the mapping, this early settlement map shows the Lownsdale claim. Again from the City of Portland Historic Timeline 1843 to 1901:

“1850: Portland or “Stump Town”, consists of a steam sawmill, a log-cabin hotel and the weekly Oregonian. Sidewalks are rough planks and the streets are dirt turning to mud when it rains. Houses are small and simple, only 2 houses in town have a plaster interior.”

The map below shows the level of development – tied closely to the larger 1852 Portland map in amount of urbanization. You can also see on the right side where the grid shift will take place (along present day Burnside) as the blocks blend into Capt. Couch’s claim.



The inset of the western section shows the sparse development – including pastureland, orchards, and gardens. There was also some smaller gardens and potato fields along the creek (which is probably Tanner) to the NW.



The City of Portland was subsequently incorporated in on February 8th, 1851, using the established Lownsdale plan as a starting point. The inset shows the ‘developed’ downtown – expanded somewhat from the 1945 map of ‘The Clearing’. To the north was land claimed by Captain John Couch – and to the south was land claimed by James Terwilliger – place names that continue to define NW and SW areas to this day. The road shown on this map led to the Tualatin Plains, running along present-day Canyon Road, which at the time was a plank trail built in 1847 – heading towards present-day Beaverton.



To connect the maps to the level of development, an ’urban’ shot showing the City, circa 1852 – taken from the corner of First & Stark (photo via PDX History)

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Suburban Still Life

Another upcoming highlight to our class will include a visit by Linda K. Johnson, a dancer and performance artist most known locally for both the work recently at South Waterfront and the ongoing series of dances that celebrate the local legacy of Anna and Lawrence Halprin and Portland fountains entitle "The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin" which is a regular annual performance in the city (more here from Portland Architecture as well).


:: City Dance - image via Portland Architecture

Back in 1999, she was involved in a curated installation related to the UGB. From the ORLO site: "Spanning Boundaries” was a series of site-specific art works, performances and a one-night symposium into the exploration of Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary (UGB). Growth issues are a provocative topic throughout the nation and each artist created installations along its edges. In this intriguing visual juxtaposition of site/non-site art, “Spanning Boundaries” created a broad civic dialogue about community identity, individual rights, historical antecedent and the future of Portland’s growing metropolis."


:: image via Orlo

Johnson's installation entitled 'The View From Here' included site specific performance work at Riverside/Clackamas, Bella Madrona/Sherwood, Broughton Beach/Marina Drive, Dabney State Park/Troutdale, Springwater Corridor/Powell Butte and Jackson Bottom Wetlands/Hillsboro.

A quote from the book Urban Sprawl, by Gregory Squires "The UGB has even attracted the attention of artists, surely a rarity for a land use regulation. Dancer and performance artist Linda K. Johnson set up camp for 36-hour stints at four different points on the UGB, living in a fence-like tent supplied with a TV set and Martha Stewart dishes and bedding. She quickly replaced her specialized choreography with straightforward chats with visitors, pulling opinions from yuppies, school kids, construction workers, and architects. Out of the resulting "suburban still life" came new, complex understandings of the way that the UGB has affected "every single solitary aspect of the way we livie... traffic, education, taxes, our desires and housing and architecture." For Johnson - and for many other Portlanders - the growth boundary has become "a different viewfinder to see the city through" (Gragg 1999).

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Quest for the Livable City

For an upcoming seminar class that myself and my colleague Brett Milligan are teaching in the Winter Quarter at the University of Oregon Architecture Program here in Portland, I've been doing a good bit of research on our local planning. Look for some upcoming posts here and at Brett's blog FAD on the topic of Portland's Urban Edge.


:: Portlands Urban Growth Boundary

The class will investigate the phenomenon of the Portland Urban Edge in . One recent resource that I picked up from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is an hour-long documentary called 'Quest for the Livable City', part of their Making Sense of Place Series.


:: image via Northern Light Productions

I just finished watching the DVD and it's a great overview of some of the pros and cons of our unique system of land use planning, a passable primer for understanding the edge in a number of ways. Check out a quick trailer here:

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Urban Crude

One the most fascinating passages of the book 'The Infrastructural City' was the chapter on oil production that still existed in a variety of forms throughout the urban form. The fabulous Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has done some investigations, which are captured on a post in the Places portion of the Design Observer site.


:: image via Places

"Los Angeles is the most urban oil field, where the industry operates in cracks, corners, and edges, hidden behind fences, and camouflaged into architecture, pulling oil out from under our feet. . . . Los Angeles is an active laboratory for how to extract oil from a developed city, something more likely to occur as the world urbanizes. Generally considered unsightly, dirty, and smelly, the oil industry has had to develop defenses against the rising value of the land and the encroachment of housing and retail. Sound muffling technology, visual barriers, and the concentration of wells into smaller areas, using directional drilling techniques to access fields through diagonal and horizontal wells, are all technologies developed here."

One aspect beyond the mere existence of these in the city, but also interesting was the methods of hiding this infrastructure within the urban form. One of these is the Venoco Oil Field Tower, which is "...an urban drilling and work-over tower is clad in soundproof insulation, decorated during the permitting process".


:: image via Places

Or the Breitburn Energy’s Cardiff Well Site which has the "...drilling and work-over derrick is concealed within a tower which vaguely alludes to synagogue architecture."


:: image via Places

A slideshow offers many more images in typical CLUI style. It brings to mind the ideas mentioned in the recent post on Subnature, where we want the pure urbanism, but are often forced to incorporate some of the messiness of natural resources and industrialism in our cities - and what that leads us to come up with for ideas.

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Portland Grid, revisited

The question of the efficacy of the grid system is continually interesting, and there have been some interesting conversations about this with a range of folks locally. Another resource to throw some information into this discussion is the recently released background documents in support of the Portland Plan. One worth checking out for any Portland-phile is the segment on Urban Form (it's a large file, so this is a link to all of the background reports).

Scrolling through it, I found this interesting two page study on block typologies, which mentions the ubiquitous 200' square blocks:


:: image via Portland Plan

From page 37-38 of the Urban Form document: "A city’s structure of streets and blocks serves as its urban DNA, shaping its development long into the future. While Downtown Portland’s system of compact 200' by 200' blocks is sometimes seen as Portland’s fundamental pattern, it covers only a small part of the city. As will be summarized in this chapter, Portland includes a diverse and varied range of urban patterns. These examples highlight the wide range of block structures found in Portland (they are not intended to represent what is typical or most common)."

This couple of pages continues to outline a range of variations, also giving an average size and location that they commonly appear within the city. The grid obviously starts to stretch in some areas, turning into a rectangular grid with one elongated side and the inclusion of alleys in some areas. These are bisected by some of the anomalous items like diagonal streets. There is also a larger retangular block size as growth sprawls out into Northeast and East Portland.








:: image via Portland Plan

The square and rectangular blocks degrade in a number of ways, including some neighborhoods that have a more diagonal grid that creates triangular blocks and open spaces. Subsequent iterations include more curvilinear blocks are rectangular grid but with undulating curves, and some more organic layouts that may or may not have been influenced by topography.








:: image via Portland Plan

As you can see, there is definitely an evolution away from the small grid, which is mostly located in the City Center and inner eastside. It's also interesting to see the changes and experimentation that happened as the city moves outward from the center. But wait, there's more... another set of typologies to augment these patterns that offers some more typologies, including the very archetypal Ladd's Addition, an beautiful oddity for sure, as well as plain ol' curvy sprawl. It's a fascinating study.


:: click to enlarge - via Portland Plan

These patterns aren't necessarily the all-encompassing group, but it does outline a vocabulary of almost 20 varieties that range from the prototypical 200x200 block. I spent a couple of days in San Francisco this past week, working on a project, and it was interesting to contrast a small grid with a comparably large one, particularly at a pedestrian scale. It was a block-by-block decision whether this made one or the other more successful - but it wasn't a particular winner either way. Along that line, check out my colleague Brett Milligan and a couple of posts on his Free Association Design blog about the grid and a case study of vertical subterranean structure from Guanajuato.

More to come on the comparisons, for sure and definitely more on the Portland Plan and associated documentation. For those interested, check out the latest community involvement dates to see where the Plan is going...

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Living Buildings 2.0

Early last week, on the heels of the Sustainable Sites Initiative updated system launch, the International Living Building Institute offered the updated version of the Living Building Challenge, v2.0 - which offers a comprehensive building rating system for not just green, but regenerative buildings.


:: image via ilbi

The new system offers a much more robust system that incorporates local food production, expands the notion of sites and access to nature, limits gated communities and incorporates a number of other equity issues. The other major difference is that the results of certification are based on the end result, not the planned result as is standard in many projects. This is part of the reason there is not an officially designated Living Building to date - but many are in various stages of development around the world - on the race to be the first. I'm excited to take a look and see these new changes.

While I'm happy to see the expanded scope, I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't continue to move forward with the separate Living Sites and Infrastructure Challenge - but instead incorporated these ideas into v2.0 of the LBC. Combining sites and buildings makes a lot of sense and the LBCv2.0 integrates the two in a much needed way that is lacking in the majority of system approaches. As a way of measuring landscape projects, it's often hard to remove the building from site scale projects (thus they are not even ratable) - making the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SSI) the only viable game in town as a purely site-specific system.

There's plenty of rating systems out there, so time will tell the overall relevance and reach - but they tend to fall into two categories. Those in the first category attempt to respond the complexity and cost of LEED by offering a more accessible, yet watered down rating that has less impact, and thus less relevance. LEED remains the industry standard, but for those who want to push the boundaries of green beyond mere sustainability, there is luckily these alternatives out there. As LEED inches forward at a conservative snails pace by incrementally incorporated somewhat minor updates and additions to new versions, I foresee SSI and the Living Building Challenge filling some of the vacuum.

They may not gain the same market share as LEED - but will truly define what regenerative design will be for both buildings and sites - something that cannot happen now that LEED has become the defacto standard and is driven by market forces as much as a green agenda.

Read More

Living Buildings 2.0

Early last week, on the heels of the Sustainable Sites Initiative updated system launch, the International Living Building Institute offered the updated version of the Living Building Challenge, v2.0 - which offers a comprehensive building rating system for not just green, but regenerative buildings.


:: image via ilbi

The new system offers a much more robust system that incorporates local food production, expands the notion of sites and access to nature, limits gated communities and incorporates a number of other equity issues. The other major difference is that the results of certification are based on the end result, not the planned result as is standard in many projects. This is part of the reason there is not an officially designated Living Building to date - but many are in various stages of development around the world - on the race to be the first. I'm excited to take a look and see these new changes.

While I'm happy to see the expanded scope, I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't continue to move forward with the separate Living Sites and Infrastructure Challenge - but instead incorporated these ideas into v2.0 of the LBC. Combining sites and buildings makes a lot of sense and the LBCv2.0 integrates the two in a much needed way that is lacking in the majority of system approaches. As a way of measuring landscape projects, it's often hard to remove the building from site scale projects (thus they are not even ratable) - making the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SSI) the only viable game in town as a purely site-specific system.

There's plenty of rating systems out there, so time will tell the overall relevance and reach - but they tend to fall into two categories. Those in the first category attempt to respond the complexity and cost of LEED by offering a more accessible, yet watered down rating that has less impact, and thus less relevance. LEED remains the industry standard, but for those who want to push the boundaries of green beyond mere sustainability, there is luckily these alternatives out there. As LEED inches forward at a conservative snails pace by incrementally incorporated somewhat minor updates and additions to new versions, I foresee SSI and the Living Building Challenge filling some of the vacuum.

They may not gain the same market share as LEED - but will truly define what regenerative design will be for both buildings and sites - something that cannot happen now that LEED has become the defacto standard and is driven by market forces as much as a green agenda.

Read More

Size Does Matter, or Not

An interesting article in Planetizen called "Beloved and Abandoned: A Platting Named Portland" investigates one of the unique, frustrating and beloved quirks of Portland. This is, our slicework of 200 foot square blocks... making for a lot of roads, and development of tiny blocks. It's our burden to bear. The article is a fascinating ride - so check it out.


:: all images via Planetizen

The authors discuss the 'Hippodamian' grid, which is an interesting way of saying square, and relate it to current urban design theory and practice. "Current planning literature brims with references to "the grid" in juxtaposition with curvilinear and dendrite conventional suburban layouts. The "grid" as a network concept has been widely accepted and is now regarded as a superior geometry for laying out greenfield and infill sites."



There is also the reference to the success of Portland directly related to these small blocks, which I'd disagree with (as the authors soon do). I'd say Portland succeeds in spite of this phenomenon, and the issues pervade - as is shown with a reference to successful urban grids, mostly those of the non-square ilk. "Urbanists and romanticists have expressed equally strong sentiments about Paris, London, Barcelona, Curitiba, Amsterdam and Venice. Of the six, only Barcelona adopted the Hippodamian grid in 1859 for its vast expansion, and Venice, without a classic grid, is the preeminent pedestrian haven, yet neither city matches the urbanist’s praise for Portland. Whatever the mix of reasons, Portland dominates the American planners' imagination feelings and talk. Disentangling this intangible realm can be an elusive goal; grounds and figures on the other hand may produce tangible results."

A grid alone is not the recipe for success, and in practice there are few pure iterations of the grid, with zigs, zags, curvy spots, the axial geometry of Ladds addition, and many other quirks. As a fan of the grid for wayfinding and layout, there's something to be said for the rigorous adherance to the formality, which much theory has been laid out in curvy, suburban blah. Some support of the grid: "The degree of connectivity of the street network could count as another practical reason. 'Network', by definition, is a set of linked components, whether a spider-net, a fishnet, or the Internet - all networks connect. What distinguishes them is the manner, geometry and frequency of connection: leaf, tree, blood vessels, telephone and web networks are dendrite, hierarchical (fractal) but fishnets are not. Portland’s is a dense fishnet with nodes at every 200 feet, which produce 360 intersections per square mile -- the highest ratio in America, and 3 to 5 times higher than current developments. For example, older and newer areas in Toronto, typical of most cities, range from 72 to 119 intersections per square mile in suburbs and 163 to 190 in older areas with a grid. As connectivity rose in importance as a planning principle, Portland’s grid emerges as a supreme example.

Coupled with connectivity, its rectilinear geometry is indisputably more advantageous for navigation on foot, car or bike than any alternatives. Visitors often feel lost and disoriented in medieval towns and in contemporary suburbs and this feeling leads to anxiety and even fear and a sense that all is not well."

The grid is rightly stated as derived by speculators for maximum corner lots - not in the grand plan of some more model communities. The fact is, again, that the grid can improve or degrade the urban environment, as the authors mention, but success is not inherently depending on that as the only criteria. "Evidently, Portland’s founders either understood little about infrastructure costs or judged them irrelevant; a judgment that no planner, developer or municipality today would take at face value. When economic efficiency matters, Portland’s grid fails the grade."

In a theoretical sense only. There's comments from Sitte and Duany on the lack of art in the grid... but really is urban planning about art? Is curvy and artistic more successful in an urban context? I doubt it. Anyway, the fact that our grid, much like the national grid system, is overlaid on a extant topography in somewhat irresponsible ways have led to issues with erasure and negative impact on natural hydrologic patterns, which only bend when topography and streams are too steep or significant to pipe, grade, and cover over. Also, the sheer amount of street paving is significant, as our small blocks lead to significantly more stormwater impacts. This however, has been the genesis for innovative strategies such as green streets to combat this - sort of making a silk purse out of a bad grid.



While it may be easy to ignore progress in combating our bad grid, it's again a pointless thought exercise (these adaptions in the following paragraph are the lifeblood of modern urbanism, as we can't recreate what has already been created). Thus, it's interesting to think of ways of refuting the present by showing how the past is flawed: "The ordinary impression on the ground that the Portland grid 'works' in contemporary traffic conditions is casually taken as a sign of suitability. This view obscures an entire century of engineered physical, mechanical and management adaptations which are overlaid on the 1866 platting. Remove these (in a thought experiment) and imagine the outcome. Clearly, an ill-suited geometry is made to work with interventions such as dividing lines, medians, traffic signs, traffic lights, directional signs, bollards, street widening, one-ways, traffic circles or roundabouts and many others."

I think that's called adapting to change, but then again, it's a thought experiment, so fun nonetheless. As the authors conclude: "For reasons of land efficiency, infrastructure cost, municipal expenses, rainwater management, traffic safety and flow, and the demand for increased pedestrian share of public space, the praised, pure Portland platting will likely not find new followers. Portland will remain a adored and beloved by urbanists, but her Hippodamian grid layout seems destined for the archives, abandoned as a good idea of a byegone era. This transcendence leaves urbanists, who seek to regenerate a contemporary urban pattern that is as pure, complete and systematic, looking for alternatives: ones which excite the same first blush of adoration and delight and lead to a deep abiding love, but also hold up to intense scrutiny of their economic, social and environmental performance."

I agree with the main tenets of their thesis (and it's a great notion and read) and frankly think the grid is a pain in the ass, but it's one of those theoretical arguments that really doesn't mean much in terms of modern urbanism, particularly in a city that plans things to death and beyond. Few if any new cities are built from scratch with no existing contextual framework - so maybe in the few new communities, a particular utopian grid system can be applied - probably modeled after the latest New Urbanist theory. It'd be interesting to imagine a re-thinking of the 'Hippodamian' grid being retrofit, as is, into something else in Portland - elongated, filled in, abstracted into a more pure and reasonable pattern, with streets removed to be open spaces, bikeways, and other green infrastructural systems. But the question is moot, a thought experiment if you will, and like it or not we are stuck with our pattern.

We deal with it, we plan around it. We love its street/building staccato chatter back and forth, with our 360 intersections per square mile, and we curse the stop sign hovering on your bike every 200 feet, waiting for that car to come zipping by take you out. It makes life exciting. But, in general it doesn't mean much, and isn't as derogatory to a high quality public realm as implied. Portland isn't to be copied for urban form, and really shouldn't be degraded for a grid system that was done without regard. We're known for for innovation and foresight in policy, transportation, stormwater management, and other factors. Many of these come from the very problems that arise from our back-assward small grids. But it works, because sometimes a grid is just a grid.

Read More

Size Does Matter, or Not

An interesting article in Planetizen called "Beloved and Abandoned: A Platting Named Portland" investigates one of the unique, frustrating and beloved quirks of Portland. This is, our slicework of 200 foot square blocks... making for a lot of roads, and development of tiny blocks. It's our burden to bear. The article is a fascinating ride - so check it out.


:: all images via Planetizen

The authors discuss the 'Hippodamian' grid, which is an interesting way of saying square, and relate it to current urban design theory and practice. "Current planning literature brims with references to "the grid" in juxtaposition with curvilinear and dendrite conventional suburban layouts. The "grid" as a network concept has been widely accepted and is now regarded as a superior geometry for laying out greenfield and infill sites."



There is also the reference to the success of Portland directly related to these small blocks, which I'd disagree with (as the authors soon do). I'd say Portland succeeds in spite of this phenomenon, and the issues pervade - as is shown with a reference to successful urban grids, mostly those of the non-square ilk. "Urbanists and romanticists have expressed equally strong sentiments about Paris, London, Barcelona, Curitiba, Amsterdam and Venice. Of the six, only Barcelona adopted the Hippodamian grid in 1859 for its vast expansion, and Venice, without a classic grid, is the preeminent pedestrian haven, yet neither city matches the urbanist’s praise for Portland. Whatever the mix of reasons, Portland dominates the American planners' imagination feelings and talk. Disentangling this intangible realm can be an elusive goal; grounds and figures on the other hand may produce tangible results."

A grid alone is not the recipe for success, and in practice there are few pure iterations of the grid, with zigs, zags, curvy spots, the axial geometry of Ladds addition, and many other quirks. As a fan of the grid for wayfinding and layout, there's something to be said for the rigorous adherance to the formality, which much theory has been laid out in curvy, suburban blah. Some support of the grid: "The degree of connectivity of the street network could count as another practical reason. 'Network', by definition, is a set of linked components, whether a spider-net, a fishnet, or the Internet - all networks connect. What distinguishes them is the manner, geometry and frequency of connection: leaf, tree, blood vessels, telephone and web networks are dendrite, hierarchical (fractal) but fishnets are not. Portland’s is a dense fishnet with nodes at every 200 feet, which produce 360 intersections per square mile -- the highest ratio in America, and 3 to 5 times higher than current developments. For example, older and newer areas in Toronto, typical of most cities, range from 72 to 119 intersections per square mile in suburbs and 163 to 190 in older areas with a grid. As connectivity rose in importance as a planning principle, Portland’s grid emerges as a supreme example.

Coupled with connectivity, its rectilinear geometry is indisputably more advantageous for navigation on foot, car or bike than any alternatives. Visitors often feel lost and disoriented in medieval towns and in contemporary suburbs and this feeling leads to anxiety and even fear and a sense that all is not well."

The grid is rightly stated as derived by speculators for maximum corner lots - not in the grand plan of some more model communities. The fact is, again, that the grid can improve or degrade the urban environment, as the authors mention, but success is not inherently depending on that as the only criteria. "Evidently, Portland’s founders either understood little about infrastructure costs or judged them irrelevant; a judgment that no planner, developer or municipality today would take at face value. When economic efficiency matters, Portland’s grid fails the grade."

In a theoretical sense only. There's comments from Sitte and Duany on the lack of art in the grid... but really is urban planning about art? Is curvy and artistic more successful in an urban context? I doubt it. Anyway, the fact that our grid, much like the national grid system, is overlaid on a extant topography in somewhat irresponsible ways have led to issues with erasure and negative impact on natural hydrologic patterns, which only bend when topography and streams are too steep or significant to pipe, grade, and cover over. Also, the sheer amount of street paving is significant, as our small blocks lead to significantly more stormwater impacts. This however, has been the genesis for innovative strategies such as green streets to combat this - sort of making a silk purse out of a bad grid.



While it may be easy to ignore progress in combating our bad grid, it's again a pointless thought exercise (these adaptions in the following paragraph are the lifeblood of modern urbanism, as we can't recreate what has already been created). Thus, it's interesting to think of ways of refuting the present by showing how the past is flawed: "The ordinary impression on the ground that the Portland grid 'works' in contemporary traffic conditions is casually taken as a sign of suitability. This view obscures an entire century of engineered physical, mechanical and management adaptations which are overlaid on the 1866 platting. Remove these (in a thought experiment) and imagine the outcome. Clearly, an ill-suited geometry is made to work with interventions such as dividing lines, medians, traffic signs, traffic lights, directional signs, bollards, street widening, one-ways, traffic circles or roundabouts and many others."

I think that's called adapting to change, but then again, it's a thought experiment, so fun nonetheless. As the authors conclude: "For reasons of land efficiency, infrastructure cost, municipal expenses, rainwater management, traffic safety and flow, and the demand for increased pedestrian share of public space, the praised, pure Portland platting will likely not find new followers. Portland will remain a adored and beloved by urbanists, but her Hippodamian grid layout seems destined for the archives, abandoned as a good idea of a byegone era. This transcendence leaves urbanists, who seek to regenerate a contemporary urban pattern that is as pure, complete and systematic, looking for alternatives: ones which excite the same first blush of adoration and delight and lead to a deep abiding love, but also hold up to intense scrutiny of their economic, social and environmental performance."

I agree with the main tenets of their thesis (and it's a great notion and read) and frankly think the grid is a pain in the ass, but it's one of those theoretical arguments that really doesn't mean much in terms of modern urbanism, particularly in a city that plans things to death and beyond. Few if any new cities are built from scratch with no existing contextual framework - so maybe in the few new communities, a particular utopian grid system can be applied - probably modeled after the latest New Urbanist theory. It'd be interesting to imagine a re-thinking of the 'Hippodamian' grid being retrofit, as is, into something else in Portland - elongated, filled in, abstracted into a more pure and reasonable pattern, with streets removed to be open spaces, bikeways, and other green infrastructural systems. But the question is moot, a thought experiment if you will, and like it or not we are stuck with our pattern.

We deal with it, we plan around it. We love its street/building staccato chatter back and forth, with our 360 intersections per square mile, and we curse the stop sign hovering on your bike every 200 feet, waiting for that car to come zipping by take you out. It makes life exciting. But, in general it doesn't mean much, and isn't as derogatory to a high quality public realm as implied. Portland isn't to be copied for urban form, and really shouldn't be degraded for a grid system that was done without regard. We're known for for innovation and foresight in policy, transportation, stormwater management, and other factors. Many of these come from the very problems that arise from our back-assward small grids. But it works, because sometimes a grid is just a grid.

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Big Box Surplus Space

One of the major 'big ideas' of our Integrating Habitats competition, or the idea of reinventing suburbia in general, is the reduced parking need over time - and what to do with the leftover paved areas. An article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows this idea isn't merely peak oil induced futurism, but a more current reality. From the article: "Ever think a Home Depot parking lot is too sprawling and vacant? Home Depot does, too. 'A number of stores have barren asphalt, and it’s not in anyone’s best interest to leave it sitting there,' said Mike LaFerle, Home Depot’s vice president of real estate."


:: image via ajc

It's not a surprise, when at least 1/3 of all the properties for big box stores are for parking and many stores downsizing or at least getting much less traffic, that valuable land starts looking desirable. Continuing: "But Home Depot has land, and lots of it. In its most recent annual report, the company said it owns 89 percent of its 2,274 stores chainwide (including stores in Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico). That’s 212 million square feet of real estate — not including parking lots and garden sales areas. The value of Home Depot’s land assets totaled $8.3 billion, the report said, and building assets are $17 billion."

What might this mean in terms of area? "Few big box stores have as much parking as a Home Depot, he noted. Home Depot typically buys about 12 to 15 acres per store, he said, at an average cost of $500,000 per acre. He estimated Home Depot could sell the acreage for about that much, and raise tens of millions of dollars with the asset sales."

At 2000 stores, that's between up to 30,000 square feet of pavement ready for repurposing in full or in part.
Oddly enough (or perhaps not surprising) the ideas of how to reuse these spaces, mostly with more of the same (in a smaller variety): "Despite the general retail slowdown, chains that are still expanding — such as Chick-fil-A, Arby’s and El Pollo Loco — may jump at the chance to be near a Home Depot store, he said. “It’s a good strategy,” he said. “It’s no different from a power center anchored by a Target or Kohl’s, with small tenants like Sally Beauty Supply as a co-tenant.”


:: the cat box? - image via lowering the bar

Or as I mentioned in an email recently. That's like cleaning all the dogshit out of the backyard, then dumping the catbox in a pile in the front yard... or something like that :)

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