Making the Portland way of planning: the structural power of language : stories from community planning, 1969-2001

Abstract

Portland, Oregon has attracted continuing attention for its achievements in planning, urban design, and growth management, and for its participatory approach to this work. They have stopped freeways, rebuilt their downtown, resurrected neighborhoods, built public transit, designed urban villages, and drawn urban growth boundaries. More than that, over the course of more than three decades they have built an extensive and powerful structure of planning for neighborhoods, downtown, the city, and the metropolitan region. This dissertation examines in detail two episodes in this process---the Northwest District Plan (1969--1977) and the Southwest Community Plan (1994--2001)---as a means of demonstrating how this structure is actually the cultural product of the concerted mobilization of meaning through the use of language in planning, organizing, democratizing and institutionalizing these practice. To suggest that language has structural power is to recast the arguments about the character and status of ostensible structural determinants of action.