| Book Review | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 107.4

Reviews

CITY LIMITS: WALKING PORTLAND'S BOUNDARY

by David Oates

Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2006.Maps,
notes, bibliography, index. 125 pages. $18.95 paper.

The famous urbanist Lewis Mumford wrote: "Each generation writes its biography in the buildings it creates." His observation, made in all likelihood from a perch overlooking New York City's Central Park, reflected the role that skyscrapers and signature buildings played in defining the nature and destiny of a great city.

Here in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, we might make a slight modification to Mumford's quote: "Each generation writes its biography in the cities it creates." The challenge here is linking cities — built places — to spectacular landscapes. Mumford himself noted this, challenging his 1938 City Club of Portland audience to wonder whether what occurred here as city building was worthy, not of joining other buildings but of making the most of this landscape as a "home for man."

In that tradition, David Oates has provided us with a book about what it means to knowingly build a city in this landscape. In City Limits: Walking Portland's Boundary, Oates hikes the Portland metropolitan area urban growth boundary, treating us to his observations of the landscape and thoughts about boundaries.

One of the most significant aspects of Oregon's approach to land-use planning is that it was crafted from the outside, looking in. That is, instead of drawing a line around "prime" farm or forestland and treating the rest as basically up for grabs, Oregon has, since the 1970s, required urban uses to justify themselves. Urban growth boundaries are used to identify where rural transitions to urban.

This approach made Oregon different, for some a model and for others a pariah. Oregon made a conscious choice to make decisions about the future of the land in and around its cities. Perhaps most important, by looking from the outside in Oregon made the conversion of land from rural to urban uses subject to a tough test — the demonstration that harm would come to the urban area if rural land was not allowed to urbanize.

This is not the typical approach. The idea that Oregon communities would plan their futures and carefully regulate the spread of cities was more planning and government than some could handle. The Oregon land-use planning program was unsuccessfully challenged three times at the polls. Unable to get Oregonians to dump their approach to planning, opponents succeeded in getting Measure 37 passed under the appealing but totally misleading ballot title beginning with the words, "Government must pay."

Smack in the middle of the debate about how Oregon has planned its future lie the urban growth boundaries of the state and, perhaps most heatedly, the one that collectively surrounds Portland, twenty-four other cities, and parts of three counties. It stands as a potent symbol of what makes Oregon different, land-use planning effective, and land-use planning an emblem of the eternal conflict between individual choices and the common good.

As Oates so cogently describes, this boundary signals an important and inescapable fact whether you support or oppose planning, namely that we are all (literally) in this together. Urban growth boundaries are predicated on the fact that what happens in one part of our city affects what happens in another, that cities are really ecological units in the truest sense of the word.

This book is both the story of Oates's journey and a meditation on the interconnectedness of city life in this global, digital, and overhyped era we live in. His essays recount days spent on the "trail," sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of others, real and imagined, with something to say about what it means to live knowingly and consciously in a landscape and to do so collaboratively as members of something bigger than ourselves.

The best parts of this book are the ones that Oates writes in his own voice. Oates has a warm and engaging style, and the book would have been just fine with only the sound of his thoughts. In this book, the boundary emerges as a character, a neighbor, a reason for choosing to live here. That a planning tool would have, in the form of this book, a literature is nothing short of astounding. That in itself is a remarkable comment on who we are and what we are attempting to do.

That said, however, this book is not the most accurate source for information about the boundary. For one thing, this is not "Portland's boundary." Metro was not created to manage the boundary. Sherwood and Damascus are not all that different. Southeast Twentieth and Lincoln is not north of the Banfield. More maps would have been helpful. Don't ride the number nineteen bus if you want to go up Hawthorne. The history of the Sisters of St. Mary's property is more complex than presented here. The Metropolitan Housing Rule is not quite as described.

Yet, Oates captures the spirit of the boundary and what we might all gain by thinking it through. This is a thoughtful and important addition to what has already been written about the urban growth boundary. It will be useful to residents, students, and those seeking to make the boundary either the object of their affection or the specter of their dreams. In the end, it will make us all a bit more honest, and what more could be asked of a book of essays.

Ethan Seltzer

Portland State University

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