Constructing new neighborhoods and nature: Planning for redevelopment and livability on the waterfront in Portland, Oregon

Given Portland, Oregon's reputation as a progressive, well-planned city, two prolific redevelopment projects that replaced industrial landscapes with new urban neighborhoods present the opportunity for a critical examination of urban regimes, governance and planning. This research analyzes transformations in the River District and the South Waterfront, former industrial areas on the edges of Portland's downtown. Visions of the new neighborhoods capitalize on and reinforce particular forms of nature, which are linked to specific types of marketable urban revitalization that reflect desires for post-industrial cities. This research moves beyond blanket assessments of gentrification to consider waterfront redevelopment through the discourses of sustainability and liveability, while maintaining a political commitment to reinsert histories of industry and urban social change into the accounts of urban renewal. This conceptualization of urban political ecology allows for the demonstration of how nature and society are intimately intertwined in the reinvention of these spaces. Redevelopment regimes articulate a spatial politics of memory, scale and care, highlighting sanitized histories of the areas while avoiding troubling ones, and draw on normative social and environmental ideologies within Portland's mythology to displace issues of social justice. Selective engagements with environmentalism and valorizations of historic structures as markers of 'authenticity' in the landscape are used to draw in desirable citizens. Public money is justified to secure public greenspace and environmental restoration and discussion of these features has been used to shape expectations and soften criticisms of other aspects of development plans. This research reclaims the waterfront as a site of social and ecological politics to foreground who has been rendered unlivable or erased from the pat accounts of new neighborhoods springing from a landscape of seeming ruin or decay.