Nearly 200 community members, students, faculty and staff gathered for the inaugural event by the Portland Urban Design Collaborative, a new group of Portland State University faculty, students and community partners tasked with facilitating a dialogue about Portland’s urban design issues.
The March 4 virtual symposium, Learning by Doing: Streets for People, was the first of three events focused on urban design and adaptation.
“How we can help improve and adapt Portland’s public spaces — our streets, plazas, squares, alleys and promenades — to bring our community together and support economic activity as the city recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic?” said Ellen Shoshkes, coordinator of PSU’s Urban Design Certificate and an adjunct associate professor of Urban Studies and Planning. “With the availability of vaccines bringing us to the cusp of a post-COVID reality, it’s time to plan for our recovery.”
The group considered what lessons can be carried forward from the last year of experimentation, including adapting public space infrastructure to allow for a wider range of activities and how under-represented groups can be engaged to ensure more equitable placemaking processes and outcomes.
“This conversation with policymakers, practitioners, the private sector, community advocates and faculty and students from Portland State University and the University of Oregon will help identify issues and opportunities to collaborate on current and potential projects that test new ideas based on lessons learned,” Shoshkes said.
In his introductory remarks, PSU President Stephen Percy said that in recent years, the university has been thinking about resilience and more specifically, how PSU can come back from major challenges, disasters and crises.
“The need to mobilize resources and serve the needs of the city as we envision and recreate our community is very strong,” Percy said.
Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who oversees the Portland Bureau of Transportation and the Office of Community & Civic Life, also urged the group to think about Portland’s future and how the community can rebuild.
“For me, everything that I'm doing is through a lens of climate and racial justice, and if we don't change how we use automobiles in this city we will continue to have the fossil fuel that is damaging our climate, damaging our communities and damaging our ability to really move to multiple modal transportation options,” Hardesty said.
She also asked attendees to think big without getting bogged down in the way things have been done before.
Before joining five breakout groups focused on the topics equity and inclusion, placemaking and funding, PBOT Transportation Planner Mike Serritella spoke about the impacts of COVID-19 and how the bureau responded to crisis.
“I don't think any of us a year ago could imagine the scale of human health, emotional and economic impacts that this pandemic would have on our city, our community, our state in our country,” Serritella said.
In response, PBOT launched the Safe Streets Initiative, which includes more than 60 strategies aimed at supporting the city of Portland. One initiative is the Healthy Businesses program, which launched in May 2020 and created a streamlined permitting process to create new safe spaces for businesses to operate. Between May and October 2020, 688 permits were issued to create public plazas, outdoor seating, pop-up markets and pick-up/drop-off areas.
Art Pearce, Policy, Planning and Projects Group manager with PBOT, said one of the key takeaways they are already gathering is that because of the need to pivot in response to crisis, it’s clear that there's a possibility for more and varied uses for Portland’s streets.
The Streets for People event will be followed up by a project-based workshop in April and a presentation of findings in May or June.
“This conversation with policymakers, practitioners, the private sector, community advocates and faculty and students from Portland State University and the University of Oregon will help identify issues and opportunities to collaborate on current and potential projects that test new ideas based on lessons learned,” Shoshkes said.
Sy Adler, interim dean for PSU’s College of Urban and Public Affairs, said Streets for People and the collaboration between PSU and the city of Portland builds on years of partnership and is also enabled by the large number of CUPA alumni who now work at PBOT and in other city offices.
“Over time we’ve been able to make a serious contribution to the city of Portland,” Adler said.
This project exemplifies that PSU's mission, "Let Knowledge Serve the City," is a dynamic interactive process of mutual learning, Shoshkes added. By working together, the university, city agencies and community partners are continuously learning and improving.