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Portland is at the forefront of an effort to maintain a sense of the natural world in urban areas. Green building, sustainable business principles and protection of parks, open spaces and wildlife habitats are practices commonly incorporated into construction projects in the city.
But are those practices frequent enough or widespread enough to make a difference? How can new construction be planned to minimize the loss of natural spaces inside existing metropolitan areas?
Tackling that question is Dr. Rutherford H. Platt, a geographer and lawyer in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Platt is developing a program called the Ecological Cities Project, a research and outreach effort that seeks to promote the sharing of knowledge among cities regarding new approaches to the creation and management of green spaces in an urban setting.
Platt will be in Portland next week to deliver a presentation titled “Ecological Cities: No Longer an Oxymoron.”
That title, though, is not quite true yet, said Mike Houck, an urban naturalist with the Audubon Society of Portland and a member of Platt’s national steering committee for Ecological Cities.
“It still is an oxymoron to some planners, elected officials and the business community,” said Houck.
“But,” he added, “efforts are afoot to make the title a truism.”
Platt’s message will likely vary for the different audiences he will speak to including Metro Council members, Portland State University faculty and students, and the city of Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development.
When addressing Metro and the city, Platt will likely focus on certain efforts by Portland’s governments to maintain green spaces, such as Metro’s urban growth boundary and Portland’s green building and clean rivers initiatives.
At PSU, Platt may discuss the university’s role in assisting the city and the region in becoming more ecologically focused in planning, surmised Houck.
“The whole point behind this is to get information out to the general public, academics and planners regarding efforts underway in Portland and other cities in America to achieve the ideals of an ecological city by integrating the natural with the built environment,” said Houck.
Houck added that he hopes building industry professionals attend Platt’s lectures because those are the people who really need to hear about this concept.
“There are some folks in the building community that get it and understand that the economy and the environment around their developments are totally intertwined,” said Houck.
Others show an ongoing antipathy toward environmentally friendly development, which Houck said he finds perplexing.
“We ought to be really strong allies,” he said.
The beginning of Platt’s Ecological Cities dates back to the 1990 Sustainable Cities Symposium in Chicago, which spurred the award-winning book, “The Ecological City: Preserving and Restoring Urban Biodiversity”.
After the book, the Ecological Cities Project was initiated with a line of funding from the U.S. Forest Service Urban Forestry Program. The project involves research, teaching and outreach on efforts to promote ecological friendly development in cities.
Ecological Cities has held two regional conferences at Boston College in 2000 and the University of South Carolina in 2001.
In June 2002, Platt organized a two-day conference at the New York University Law School complex called The Humane Metropolis: People and Nature in the 21st Century City. A book on the conference, The Humane Metropolis, is in the works.
Currently, the Ecological Cities Project is working on a national study of new approaches to urban watershed and estuary management, funded by a National Science Foundation grant.
Details on the project can be found at http://www.umass.edu/ecological cities.
Platt has scheduled four presentations next Thursday and Friday in Portland.