Figure 18 - Portland's Urban Design Framework

Figure 18 - Portland's Urban Design Framework (Source: Portland Plan, 2012)

2. Increasing Access to Greens

Enhancement of parks and recreational facilities are yet an important focus of creating complete neighbourhoods. Although not all parks and green areas cannot be made equal, the strategy is to create a hierarchy of connected greenways and trails across the city to provide walkable and bikeable access to the parks and other public green spaces.

3. Increasing provision of ‘Local’ Amenities and Services

In terms of local amenities and services17, creating strong neighbourhood business districts is in focus. A hierarchy of business centres is proposed in the future development viz. neighbourhood centres, town centres, regional centres, and city centre. It is stated that it is not expected that all the neighbourhoods shall cover all the amenities required by households, and some neighbourhoods or districts may have concentration of specialised shops that attract people across the city. However, it is reasonable to expect daily needs to be closer to nearby, either in neighbourhoods or the district. These business centres shall be centred upon public transit with high density mixed use and connected with a mesh of greenways and civic corridors (arterial roads with car, bike, pedestrian, and wheelchair access) with ‘built to edge’ features promoting pedestrian retail in ground floor. These centres and civic corridors in turn shall connect all the neighbourhoods through a system of neighbourhood corridors. These neighbourhood and civic corridors shall be (re)designed as partly community spaces during weekends and holidays through Cities Liveable Streets framework (City of Portland, 2015a). To support the parameter of daily amenities in low density areas (specifically eastern neighbourhoods), where specialised services are difficult to install, a Neighbourhood Economic Development (NED) strategy was prepared to support local retail through a ‘multi-variable approach’ by measuring business vitality. The Strategy supports education, development, and promotion of enterprises in the neighbourhoods through participatory approach with emphasis on businesses with greater community good and sharing economy. The strategy mobilises incentives like reduced system development charges and permitting fees, tax abatement, technical assistance, contribution of building space/ land , reduced interest on bank loans, capital loans, assistance with unconventional financing etc. The objective of the strategy is to provide local employment opportunities to underprivileged households and retaining talent in the city (Portland Development Commission, 2010).

The city envisages to distribute full-service grocery stores within the city, which at the moment where outside the city limits housed in commercial centres or concentrated in the city centre and inner neighbourhood areas. Moreover, since scales of economy may not allow full-service grocery stores to be located in every neighbourhood due to currently underdeveloped density, the city is promoting development of alternative means to these traditional grocery stores to support its agenda

17 No explicit definition of amenities is mentioned in the analysed city documents apart from ‘full service grocery stores’

of healthy accessible food such as urban agriculture and community farming and weekly farmers’ markets in the neighbourhood centres. The city plans to promote The NED strategy emphasises that mobile vending structures play an enabling start-up business activity, and the temporary usage of spaces of urban spaces, public lands and abandoned buildings shall be according to the local context shall be adopted to community gardening, urban spaces, local economic businesses etc (Portland Development Commission, 2010).

4. Schools as strategic Locations

In complete neighbourhoods, Schools are identified as strategic locations to act as community centres and public aid centres to build social cohesion and resilience among communities. These (public as well as private) schools are intended to be converted into multi-functional urban spaces through co-location of activities, open to residents in off school hours, providing access to green and recreational spaces especially in the areas lacking green parks. Moreover, through safe routes to school, the areas near the schools shall be converted to only pedestrian spaces. The city, through a multi-government public and private partnerships, has created a program of ‘sun’ community schools to build community schools in eastern areas. It is noteworthy to mention that not all neighbourhoods shall have elementary schools, yet they may be provided at district level as a shared service among neighbourhoods.(City of Portland, 2015b, 2017; Portland Development Commission, 2020) The policy of Access to school encourages public school districts to consider ability of students to walk/ bike to schools and take into account attendance boundaries of schools while selecting location of new campuses. (City of Portland, 2015a)

5. Tackling Gentrification and Displacement

To counter the gentrification and displacement, increase of affordable housing stock and promoting neighbourhood economic vitality are the two principles directions adopted in the plan. It must be noted that the complete neighbourhood definition already has affordable housing as a one of the principles components, which is further strengthened by zoning reforms like ADUs and defining investment priority areas. The objective of Neighbourhood Economic Development strategy is also financial resilience apart from economic prosperity. It is based on community driven approach, to build local capacity and minimise involuntary displacement of small businesses by providing financial support, education and training. Through the household self-sufficiency program, home ownership is promoted. Planning procedural implications of policy include removing discriminatory barriers, careful monitoring and evaluation of impact of investment and plans on their impact on communities and businesses, etc. (Portland Development Commission, 2020) The city has created a monitoring framework with a set of core measures and their benchmarks as indicators of progress which define the completeness of the neighbourhoods. The survey-based indicators like resident liveability satisfaction, neighbourhood safety and use of sustainable transit provide a quality check of the services

from the perspective of the community. The city is also monitoring the demographic distribution across the city through diversity index indicator to continuously evaluate ghettoization process, since the city is highly racially divided. (City of Portland, 2017)

6.Feedback loops

For the regard of measurement of local use of services, a neighbourhood business leakage measurement indicator has been developed to monitor businesses leakages across neighbourhood. It is noted that while imbalance may persist due to metropolitan importance of some neighbourhoods and business districts like city centre, the intention of the indicator is to minimise the leakages across neighbourhoods for daily activities due to lack of services or lower quality services.