Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City

Portland, Oregon, is a successful city. Recent studies have repeatedly ranked it as one of the most livable of our major downtown metropolitan areas. It offers a prosperous downtown, vital neighborhoods, and a workable balance between a viable central city and growing suburbs.

Ranging over geography, planning, and politics, Carol Abbott explores the ways in which deliberate efforts by city planners, businessmen, and ordinary citizens have directed metropolitan growth. He finds that planners have been most successful in implementing their ideas when they have worked directly with or for specific interests or community groups.

The opening chapter is a profile of the "river city" ? an introduction to the social and physical geography of Portland in the twentieth century. The book then analyzes three stages in the evolution of Portland planning. From the magnificent Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905 through World War I, civic-minded businessmen took the lead in planning for Portland's future. From the 1920s into the 1960s, a core of professionals and committed citizens struggled to establish planning as an accepted function of local government. The period since the mid-sixties, in contrast, has brought planners and planning agencies to the center of decisions about the future of the city and metropolitan area.

The experience of Portland demonstrates that it is possible to preserve the human scale of the older "streetcar city" within a sprawling metropolis built around the automobile. Based on a broad range of local documents and interviews with people involved in creating modern Portland, this well-illustrated book will appeal both to Portlanders devoted to their city and to scholars and professionals seeking insight into urban history and city planning.