Industrial parks have always held a fascination for me. I’ve previously written about the role of industrial parks as a prototype for form-based-code principles. I think the notion deserves more examination, especially as it relates to how industrial parks and their child, the business park, have become economic engines, and at the same time examples [...]

Certainly, downtown Portland has always been a center of metropolitan political and economic power, but policy makers and political movers-and-shakers must not forget that the true center of politics in Portland does not lie in glass office buildings. Instead, it lies in the inner neighborhoods that developed in the early 20th century along the streetcar [...]

Anyone who is a transportation and transit geek has likely heard arguments about the superiority of buses over rail. Usually the argument is based on a notion known as “bus flexibility,” the idea being that buses can reroute to meet changing market demands.
At least in the case of Portland, however, this idea may need revising. [...]

Prior to the recession, much of the buzz in the Portland food scene revolved around the latest and greatest in haute cuisine. Newsmakers were places like Higgins, Blue Hour, ClarkLewis, the ill-fated Lucier, or the all-too-LA-for-Portland Departure at The Nines Hotel (what the rest of us will always call Meier & Frank). Named star chefs [...]

Last week, Rafe Needleman at CNET had an interesting article on open data and transit agencies. The long and the short of it is that while some agencies (such as our own TriMet and San Francisco’s Muni) are at the forefront of making their data available to the public, other agencies are going the opposite [...]

I’ve been watching the progress of WES, TriMet’s first commuter rail line, with great interest since its opening in February. One of the many aspects of it that strikes me as fascinating is the total lack of understanding by some of the function of commuter rail. On more than one occasion, I have heard people [...]

Last week’s news was a bit of a shocker in the region, as Washington State went through its primary election. Voters seemed to be bludgeoning incumbents, from rural port commissioners through to mayors of significant municipalities. As Jeff Mapes put it, it was a bad day for incumbents. The biggest upset, however, was the defeat [...]

Previously, I talked about how to illustrate the transition of an area in relation to building forms and mass. Displaying anticipated or proposed changes such as these to the public can be fraught with conflict, as citizens display community change adversity in the face of what feels deceptively like a cohesive civic juggernaut.
Another example [...]

Planners have what I consider to be one of the toughest jobs in government. They are charged with charting long range courses that are often beyond visualization to all but a few dreamers, and often those very dreamers are either cranks or, well, other planners. (Please hold all cynical remarks, thank you!) But what makes [...]

Industrial parks have fascinated me for a long time. They are largely an artifact of the 20th century, but with their arrangement of small-to-medium industrial buildings and extensive rail infrastructure, in many ways they were the last expression of 19th century economics, philosophically obsolete from the moment they were built. A visit to the average [...]