Making the Portland Way of Planning: The Structural Power of Language

Portland, Oregon, has attracted continuing attention for its achievements in planning, urban design, and growth management, and for its participatory approach to this work. It has stopped freeways, rebuilt its 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, it has built an extensive and powerful structure of planning for neighborhoods, downtown, the city, and the metropolitan region. This article examines in detail two episodes in this process—the Northwest District Plan (1969-77) 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 practices. To suggest that language has structural power is to recast the arguments about the character and status of ostensible structural determinants of action.