Taming the Forces That Create the Modern Metropolitan Area

[Excerpt From Chapter Seven ]

Let’s take a drive out of Portland, past the suburbs and the highways and the new homes, out past the growth boundary. You’ll find your journey a pleasant one. You’ll drive over rolling hills of farms and forests, until you come to small towns, sitting compactly in the countryside. These small towns, like Yamhill, Dundee, or Forest Grove, will be surrounded by new development that hugs the existing town. You will not be greeted by the usual display of scattered subdivisions, Pizza Huts, and strip centers that now rings most smaller towns in the country. Because of this, the downtowns of these smaller towns are more viable and alive than most.

This landscape is as much a part of Portland, and its success, as its bustling downtown. Because these small towns are limited in their outward growth, there is no way they can pluck the growth off the metro Portland area, by standing just outside of it and feeding off of it, like parasites. A newcomer to Portland cannot buy a house outside a small town in a new development within easy driving distance of Portland, a development that would doubtless be followed by other developments until a sea of sprawl was built up.

This landscape shows that growth can no longer be controlled by a city itself, or even a metropolitan area. It must be done by an entity larger than the city or metro area itself, likely the state. A metropolitan area cannot effectively limit its own growth, because there is no way to get outside of itself. It’s a Zen thing. A tongue cannot taste itself; a metro area cannot limit itself. Wherever it draws a growth boundary, a developer can always go just on the other side and build houses that siphon off the growth pressure. Only a state can limit this kind of parasitic development.

Legally, it makes growth control both more difficult and more simple. If effective growth control must usually come from a state level, then activists have the sometimes more difficult, but conceptually easier, task of persuading the state to manage growth. It’s ironic that states have generally shown little interest in urban management. It’s ironic because legally, states have the rights and powers to do so, if they choose. Legally, towns and cities are creatures of our states. They have their existence only by authority of the state constitution, which usually grants the legislators the right to pass charters which delegate some of the powers of the state to a municipality. Theoretically, the state could revoke these charters and control the actions of cities directly, from school boards to cops.

In Europe, the more controlled nature of growth is due in part to the more clearly subordinate status of cities. Their growth is controlled and ordered by a larger entity, usually the nation-state itself. It seems odd that the states in the United States do not exercise powers that are available to them.

It’s important to realize that the forces that shaped Portland and Oregon were both progressive and reactionary in nature. That is, policy makers did not set out to create great urban places, although some were interested in that. They set out to stop certain things. Mostly, they set out to stop the hills, farms, and forests they love from being turned into shopping malls and freeways.

That, to me, is the ultimate irony of Portland and Oregon. We urbanists from all over the country turn to the area to see how we, too, can fashion great urban places. But those places are largely an afterthought, almost an unintended byproduct. The leaders and people of Oregon set out to protect the streams, rivers, farms, and mountains that they loved.

“They [growth boundaries] were means to an end,” said Ethan Seltzer, director of the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies at Portland State University, who often explains the area to visiting journalists. “The point was to call an end to farmland development. The kind of press we’re getting is mostly about what we’re doing, not why. The why is the incredible landscape of the Willamette Valley.

“This is not a city that stands back and looks at its skyline and says, ‘What a great city!’ It’s a city that stands back and says, ‘Look at those mountains!'”

As Seltzer and others explained to me, it was a coalition of farmers and tree huggers that got the state growth control laws passed and have kept them in place. Governor Tom McCall, the progressive Republican governor who led the fight for the statewide planning law in the early 1970s, was a nature lover first and a city lover a distant second. The group that has been so influential, 1,000 Friends of Oregon, is bound together by its members’ deep love of nature. The Friends have become true lovers of urbanism as they have seen how that is a means to their end. They have come to love urbanism, I believe, but it was a discovery, not a goal.

Robert Caldwell, editor of the editorial page for the Portland Oregonian and a native, talks of often seeing “a cowboy” or a blue-collar worker stooping to pick up a piece of litter, or sharply telling someone else to do the same.

To me, this trait is cheering, but it is also saddening, for it suggests Americans are unlikely to unite around an urban vision. Cities are still too misunderstood, still too prone to inspire suspicion, for people to unite around a goal of streetcars, walking streets, and the diverse milieu of urbanism. They may like it once they get there, and even come to love it, but it is unlikely to be a strong enough goal to inspire the necessary work.

It also suggests that place, in the urbanistic sense, cannot be built from scratch, but only preserved, enhanced, or rebuilt. A Greenwich Village or an East Side or even a midtown can evolve, change, building on its essential form of streets and buildings. A Portland can come back, resprouting and reinvigorating its old homes, and building new ones again. But I’m not sure such a place can be built again. Cities may be a dead art form, or a limited one. It may be possible, but I’ve never seen it. I haven’t seen any collection of streets and buildings built after World War II that has a coherent sense of place.