Читать книгу Discovering Portland Parks - Owen Wozniak - Страница 8

Introduction

When I moved to Portland in 2001, I was an ardent cyclist and mountain climber looking for places to ride or get into the wild. Local parks were not on my radar. Then I got a job with an organization that protects natural places to benefit people in urban areas. I started working on projects that involved acquiring vacant lots and overgrown bits of forest in Portland suburbs I hardly knew existed. The projects intrigued me, and their capacity to focus the civic energy of their communities inspired me.

Then I had a kid. Hours spent carrying an infant strapped to my chest or on my bike through local parks made clear—to the extent anything was clear during those sleep-deprived years—how critical parks are to making city life bearable. I have now visited the majority of the region’s five hundred–plus parks and dragged my wife and son to a significant number of them. I feel motivated and perhaps even qualified to share my passions and opinions with you.

I began this book during a summer of bike rides and canoe trips. I’m finishing it under a stay-at-home order due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I thus have a new and urgent reason to appreciate parks, this one tinged by tragedy rather than joy. If any good comes of this pandemic, I hope it includes a renewed wave of investments in parks. Do we need any more proof of how important they are?

PARKS FOR THE PEOPLE

Many of Portland’s parks are beautiful in the same understated way that Portland is beautiful. They reflect what I believe to be a core value of Portlanders: a desire to live in some kind of balance with the natural world.

How well the parks—and Portlanders—actually succeed in this respect is open to debate. Here is the evidence in favor: Our parks are full of green, low on frills and bling. Rare is the blockbuster play area or elaborate pavilion with a billionaire benefactor’s name plastered over it. Instead, parks highlight the amazing capacity of this climate to nourish plant growth. They invite people into nature for a few moments, a lunch hour, or a whole day.

They are truly parks for the people. That’s what landscape architect John Charles Olmsted proposed after his pivotal visit in 1903. His vision of a connected, natural, and democratic park system has stayed relevant, even as our culture and demographics have changed and our city has mushroomed into a sprawling metropolitan region.

Enjoying winter sun at Luuwit View Park

Region is a key word. The Portland region has over thirty different governments involved in the park business, from cities to park districts to the regional government, and even a handful of utilities. Yet the nature they all seek to sustain disregards jurisdictional boundaries.

So do many park users. Even folks living within a few blocks of the zigzagging border between Portland and Gresham would be hard-pressed to locate that line on a map, though the two cities take very different approaches to their parks. Likewise the western edge of Portland and its neighbor Beaverton, where a property tax–funded, directly elected parks district operates in a starkly different fiscal and political environment from Portland Parks and Recreation, which fights for resources alongside other city bureaus in a governance structure that virtually guarantees parks get short shrift.

This diversity of approaches has its upsides, but it complicates regional coordination. And coordination is imperative—to ensure equitable access to parks, to secure wildlife refuges and migration corridors, and to stay resilient in the face of climate change and other disruptions. In one sense, we are ahead of the curve, having long ago entrusted regional planning and open space conservation to a highly competent regional government called Metro. Yet the distance we still have to travel is obvious to anyone paying attention.

Portland is a case in point. Portlanders can be very parochial about their parks, in both good and bad ways. Many parks have a “Friends of” group, often run by a small core of super-volunteers. These groups are essential to keeping the wheels on our park system. Yet their highly place-specific passions can be a challenge for the chronically underfunded parks department in a city where consultation and egalitarian decision-making is prized. Portland Parks and Recreation must constantly navigate the challenge of distributing inadequate resources to seemingly infinite needs.

This challenge is most evident in Portland’s glaring park inequities. When I first moved here, I noticed how much more numerous and well equipped the parks on the west side of the river were compared to those in my Inner Southeast neighborhood. Only later did I realize that much of Portland east of me, especially the areas beyond 82nd Avenue, made my neighborhood look park-rich.

Outer neighborhoods like Lents, Powellhurst-Gilbert, and Centennial have a disproportionate share of kids and lower-income people, precisely the folks who most need a park nearby for their physical and mental health. Yet these neighborhoods have fewer parks and have consistently received less investment. About a decade ago, elected officials woke up to this fact and started rebalancing. There is a long way to go, though, before we reach anything resembling park equity.

Nevertheless, when it comes to parks, we have many reasons to love Portland. As voters, we consistently tax ourselves to preserve open space, restore natural areas, protect water quality, and secure access to nature. We have a tradition of leaders and philanthropists supporting the park system, citizens working at the grassroots level to expand and sustain it, and public servants thinking creatively to maintain and enhance it. Our parks speak well of us, imperfections and all.

I firmly believe Portlanders want this to be an inclusive, just, and sustainable region. These ideals aren’t yet reality, to be sure. But if they are ever achieved, it will be in large measure thanks to our parks. Does that sound like a bold claim? Well, get out and see for yourself.