Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/112499
short walk of the Village. A few stops east is Commercial Drive, where one is as likely to hear bongo drums in the park as voices cheering on soccer matches from its Italian and Portuguese caf��s. Just 15 minutes south via the new Canada Line is Richmond���s Aberdeen Centre, a sleek, sexy Asian mall where dried herbs and ginseng emporiums rub shoulders with Hong Kong haute couture and Shanghai noodles. Then there���s downtown���s inner-city neighbourhoods: Yaletown (the former CPR-warehouse-cum-SoHo district), Gastown (anchored by some of Vancouver���s most iconic landmarks, including the flatiron-style Europa Hotel and the Woodward���s Building), Chinatown (North America���s second-largest after San Francisco���s) and Concord Pacific Place (bookmarked by Science World���s glittering steel dome and the Granville Bridge). All of which also supports Owen���s density theory: as Lower Mainland residents reverse their exodus to the suburbs to flood into Vancouver���s dense downtown peninsula, the city finds itself voted among the most livable in the world. The Retrofit City PORTLAND There���s no question Vancouver is leading North America on the greenhouse gas-reduction file and urban livability, says Clark Williams-Derry, programs director at the Sightline Institute. (The American think-tank charts progress on a range of sustainability issues, from water and energy use to health and livability.) So who���s in second place? Seattle gets points for switching to hydro dams decades ago while Portland still depends on carbon-spewing coal-fire plants. But if we focus only on urban design and its impact on climate and livability, Portland pulls into second place after Vancouver because the schemes that have made ���Portlandia��� America���s greenest city have also made it uniquely dynamic. Back in the 1970s, the State of Oregon forced Portland to create urban-growth boundaries to save farmland and put a corset on sprawl. More recently, the city invested in light rail and streetcars. Together, these initiatives have fuelled an inner-city renaissance resulting in billions of dollars of investment along streetcar lines downtown. The Pearl District, for example, formerly a shadow land of underused warehouses and empty lots, is now alive with spiffy apartments, pocket parks and a rousing restaurant scene. Thanks to shorter commutes, Portlanders are saving more than $1 billion a year on gas ��� meaning they have more to spend on food, entertainment and, yes, all that micro-brewed beer. The result: Portland has more restaurants per capita than any other large city in the U.S. other than Seattle and San Francisco. Portland���s soul, though, is in the local, recycled and repurposed. To experience it, one must go beyond the trendy Pearl District to the soft zone between downtown and suburbia. Places such as Mississippi Avenue, a market street punctuated by storm-water planters (sidewalk mini-swamps designed to absorb drain water), tattoo studios, comic shops and independent institutions such as the ReBuilding Center, a huge emporium of used building and remodelling supplies that also sells elegant furniture built entirely from recycled materials. Or to Northeast Portland, where entrepreneurs have repurposed a century-old disused elementary school into a mecca for arts, food and beer. The Kennedy School now houses a microbrewery, a clutch of small bars, a hotel and a movie theatre, proving that city spaces can be transformed in ways our forebears never imagined. In fact, Portlanders��� enthusiasm for repurposing, and their impatience with government, has led to a unique form of DIY urbanism. Take Sellwood, a leafy neighbourhood on the edge of the slow-moving Willamette (Granville Island cyclists) Paul Gordon/ACP, (Portland���s Pioneer Courthouse Square) Charles Montgomery p28-31,36-37,44-45_Cities.indd 31 River, south of downtown. Here on an otherwise quiet Sunday, I find a crowd rolling coats of electric pink, turquoise and leafgreen paint onto the intersection of Southeast Sherrett Street and Southeast 9th Avenue. Someone���s kid hands me a brush, and together we craft a giant lily pond spreading out from the manhole in the middle of the intersection. This paint fest has been an annual ritual for more than a decade, ever since the locals decided they would rather have a piazza at the heart of their neighbourhood than an intersection. They built a telephone-boothsized library on one corner of the intersection, so people could come and trade books. They built a message board and chalk-stand on a second, a produce-sharing stand on another, and on the fourth corner a tea kiosk with a Thermos that is still kept full of hot tea. And though those early street renegades stopped short of blocking traffic, officials with Portland���s Office of Transportation threatened to fine the neighbours and sandblast the painted piazza right off the street. The intersection was a public space: ���That means nobody is allowed to use it!��� one city staffer infamously declared. But the neighbours loved the way their intervention slowed cars down, making the place safer for children. And they loved the way it brought them together. They dubbed it Share-It Square and refused to back down. ���Before we built this place, nobody around here really talked to each other,��� one of the retrofit���s instigators, Mark Lakeman, told me. ���Now this place [the intersection] is more like a village. We all know each other.��� Lakeman eventually convinced City Hall to legalize the changes and the neighbours launched a movement they call City Repair, whose members have now ���repaired��� a hundred-odd intersections around Portland. And they���re having an amazing effect: crime plummets on the streets near them. In fact, researchers have found that people who live around intersection ���repairs��� are healthier and have more friends than people in other neighbourhoods. They also worry less about the future. They even sleep better. Portland���s road-retrofitters are in good company, too, with cities around the world squeezing new plazas and pedestrian spaces out of their roads. In New York a swath of Manhattan���s Broadway was closed to automobiles in 2009, giving thousands of sky-gazing visitors breathing room in Times Square. Continued on page 37 WESTWORLD >> F A L L 2 0 1 2 31 12-08-17 3:40 PM