Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign the City the BABA Podcast where we bring together top actors in the smart city arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations.
I am your host Tamlin Shimizu and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
Smart in the City is brought to you by Babel Smart Cities. We enable processes from research and strategy development to co creation and implementation. To learn more about us, please visit the Babel platform @babel smartcities eu so welcome back to another episode of Smart in the City. We're continuing our journey across the United States virtually this time to speak speak with local leaders shaping the future of our cities. Today we're headed to Portland, Oregon, a city known not just for its bike culture coffee. Also for bold ideas and big shifts in how urban life can work.
Also I might add, for being a little bit weird.
So I'm really excited to speak also about how cities manage change, not just surviving it, but actually shaping change.
With me for this topic and to give us insight into Portland, Oregon is none other than Art Pierce. He's the Deputy Director of Planning Projects and Programs at the Bureau of Transportation for the City of Portland, Oregon. Welcome Art.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Thank you. Happy to be here.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Happy to have you. Long time coming. Really excited about also digging into Portland. Actually, fun fact, I was raised in Portland from when I was about three years old to seven years old. So it is a place that's near and dear to my heart.
And I'm really excited to learn more from you about what you're doing in the field.
Before we get started, I have to warm us up a little bit with a bit of a teaser question. The teaser question for you I have today is if Portland were a type of pizza, what toppings would be on it and why?
[00:02:12] Speaker B: Oh, that's a very good question.
You know, we are definitely a weird city and I think an eclectic city. So I think we might mix together a lot of the vegetables and a lot of the meat products together to sort of stack the layers.
We have actually some pretty renowned pizza that it brings in spice like jalapeno peppers, those kind of things together with, you know, sort of more conventional toppings. So I think that Portland would be proudly a confusing pizza. A pizza that really made you wonder.
We would be pretty proud of that.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: You would be a pizza that maybe some drunk person made with lots of different toppings on top.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Exactly. Perfect.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: Perfect. I love it. I agree. Also, I took from your presentation that you sent me on change management. And you have a picture of a pizza. So I took inspiration from that for the teaser.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Right, right, right.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: We'll get into that.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Yes. Yeah.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: So first, I want to learn a little bit more about you as a person.
And I'm sure everyone wants to get to know you as a person. So tell us a little bit about you, where you're from, what's your background, how did you get into your role today?
[00:03:27] Speaker B: Sure, sure. Well, in a broader scale, I grew up in Ithaca, New York, and upstate New York, and so was surrounded by a university town where Cornel.
And so that definitely had some deep imprinting on me. And my actually my father went to planning school at Cornell. And so that also, I think, was a deep part of my orientation. He was very focused on affordable housing. And actually that sort of passed on to me. I was very sort of focused on that. And I studied urban studies at the College of Worcester in Worcester, Ohio, first with an interest in affordable housing as where I sort of wanted to put my most of my energy. And I came with that interest as I moved to Portland and so worked for some years. Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon focused on supporting their various direct service programs and was also on the board of a local housing provider. And I think during that time is really when I started being sort of attracted to transportation, you know, and so that is sort of part of this journey that brought me there to transportation. Really was actually an interest in broader outcomes and seeing how transportation is just so powerful to shape the landscape of cities.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Really interesting background. Yesterday I also was talking with a city in Washington and she was also a transplant from the east coast and she wouldn't decide is east coast or west coast better?
[00:04:47] Speaker B: Oh, I'm pretty drawn to the West Coast.
To be so connected with nature while contributing to a city I think is unparalleled with the West Coast.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: I love the Pacific Northwest, so I have to agree with that. But I am more and more drawn also to the east coast, so there's a healthy rivalry there.
Quick follow up question from that. I'm just wondering, from your perspective, how does housing and transport interact?
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Oh, sure. Land use and transportation planning and the way we lay out our cities and the mobility demands are just deeply, deeply linked. And so if we lay out our city in such a way that it's hard to connect between points if it's not accessible as a pedestrian or a cyclist or as a transit rider, we've made it the job of mobility just very, very.
And it's making it very, very challenging for someone to choose a means other than driving. We're essentially setting up a city that is deeply understood as a place that you need to drive to access opportunity. And that's both inequitable and unsustainable and ineffective as you lay out a system. And so laying out cities into dense urban centers, connecting them through transit, making the local network walkable and easy to cycle, is deeply part of our mobility strategy as well as our land use strategy.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I love how you explain that. I mean, we're in the middle of a housing crisis at the same time as we drastically need to shift the way that we move.
So really interconnecting these is really important, I imagine, for your role, but also for us to remember and carry with us in many different ways.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: And I think when we're looking at that overall household budget, you're, you're putting together a whole set of monthly demands and there's trade offs between the decision or the need to own and maintain two vehicles and pay for gas, or perhaps living closer in and being able to access less expensive means of transportation. And so we, I don't think we make that explicit and understood enough as we're, you know, communicating with people that there's a, there's a built in choice and that's part of our. Yes, we all want to have a backyard, but we are also making a set of choices in that choice to have more space.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I think you've already painted somewhat of a picture for us as Portland as a pizza, but maybe also to paint a broader picture on the work you're doing more directly within transport.
How does Portland look like? What are you dealing with on a regular basis? Just kind of paint the picture of Portland, I guess.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. You know, Portland and Oregon in particular is a state and a city that's deeply grounded in this land use and transportation policy.
It's really stemming from a realization in the 1970s of the preciousness of farm and forest land and the need to plan our cities more comprehensively, both land use and transportation, in order to use our, our systems effectively and be able to maintain these wonderful bounded of beauty around us.
And so, you know, in Portland we're very focused on creating this balanced transportation system, emphasizing walking, cycling and transit as sort of, you know, a core to our strategy.
And you know, I think it relates well to our individual, individualistic and entrepreneurial culture as well. You know, people live here for the surrounding lifestyle, the connection to nature, their attractiveness, you know, to the lifestyle that they might be able to live here and be able to live in a city and have a balanced life. There's, there's been the long standing joke of people come to retire in their 20s in Portland, but that's really meaning that they're coming to have a balanced life. They're coming to be able to, to, you know, live out their daily existence not in, just in a chore, but actually really enjoying that.
And so I think that sort of individual, individualistic nature and this really interest in creating a, a sustainable city leads to a sort of stubborn ardent as a city also though, and sometimes that ardent gets us stuck. We are so committed to our long term policy outcomes or our values as a city that we have a hard time moving forward.
And I think as someone who's been, I've worked for the city now for 27 years, for a number of years as a transportation planner and then as a project manager.
And you know, that is the sort of the enterprise that we are engaged in is how do we take these long term goals and outcomes and deliver them through action.
For about the last 10 years I have been in this, in this position where we're integrating planning, project delivery and programs all into one unit. And that's very intentional and in fact I even describe it sometimes as a change management office for the Transportation Department.
We're trying to connect those long range outcomes with physical change projects that we can design and build and people based programs that help people adapt to a changing city and take advantage of the mobility that we're providing for them.
And that's really deeply rooted in culture change, understanding of culture as something that needs to be curated, it needs to be shared and repeated if we're going to be able to shift in the direction we want to go.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Yeah, this is really a fascinating topic and one that I want to dig into more.
I also have to preface it with saying that I had friends move from Colorado in their 20s to Portland and I feel like that actually is true what you said before about retiring in your 20s. So just to, just to put that out there. But I want to dig into the change management topic. You've proposed that as a lens for this episode and a lot of what your work centers around, like what you just explained. Explained.
What does that mean? What is change management and what does it entail?
[00:11:01] Speaker B: Right, right.
Well, you know, I've been fascinated with sort of the ingredients in a city and how either the, the culture of a moment, the leadership of a moment, the, the challenges of a moment lead to Some cities evolving and making really rapid step change in other cities, either not making any progress at all, or making short lived progress and then sliding back. And so as I've been thinking about what does it mean to force cities to change, I started realizing that there was a lot of literature about organizational change. You have a new CEO, that CEO gives a new direction for the company. The discussion of change management is passing down that CEO's vision to staff, getting them aligned, those various things.
But there really isn't good literature or very good dialogue around what it means to change cities and what are the ingredients to changing the city.
We often point to a singular leader, but I really actually think that's a false premise. Individual leaders, smart leaders, are seeing the context well enough to know what they can catalyze into change.
They're responding to the environment around them. They're not putting out something that is not ripe for progress, and they're finding ways then of making something ripe for progress. How do they warm up a topic, get society believing this is a critical issue, and then starting to offer solutions to push that change through.
And so this change management for cities concept, it really started honestly, during COVID when you have a little extra time to think. I started developing this process and produced a presentation that I shared with a later iteration of with you, really, for staff who are also stuck at home wondering how they're going to contribute to their city. And there's various roles. And so this was my sort of, I guess, attempt at giving them some context to the world that we're working in and giving them some feeling of agency of how they can contribute.
And in general, it's not rocket science. This is not actually that bold of a notion. It's really just pulling back the veil and reminding us all that systems thinking, understanding of related issues and constraints are what is keeping innovation from occurring, from progress, of occurring. And so how do we attend to those constraints?
And of course, critically not forget that all change is people based. And we need to attend to people's needs and emotions in the process or we're not going to be able to make forward progress.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: I really love how you've brought this forward as an important topic for public sector to really look at as ones that have to really address change very well and very effectively to make the progress.
You've also distinguished between change and transition, structural versus psychological shifts. Can you highlight these distinctions for us?
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah, sure. And this came as I was trying to research, realizing that when I googled change management for cities, nothing came out there. Was nothing there. So I started thinking about, all right, what is the literature? We have change management for organizations literature. And so this specific piece around change versus transitions was adapted from William Bridges book Managing Transitions, which I highly recommend.
And it does really help daylight for us that change is situational. It's the specific factual change that's happening. A new boss, a new project that needs to happen, a new set of influences, new policies, those elements. But transition is the psychological process that people go through and as they're adapting to that new situation. And so change, change is the external, transition is the internal.
And change management in the end is the process of guiding change to fruition through both the literal change and that psychological transition process. I think it's important to note that when you host a community meeting talking about a new project, each person is coming in at a different stage of that change management process. And when they talk about change management cycles, the first stage is denial. It is that there's loss and ending or fear of loss and ending before you can hand it into what they call the new beginnings.
And so we're helping people through understanding that there might be change required of them for living in a city. Maybe it requires changing your travel patterns or adjusting to sharing roads in a different way than you're used to.
And how do we help highlight that there's an opportunity at a broader societal level, perhaps, and bring people through that process on a kind of individual basis. And I think if we forget that. And one of the dangers is that people who are deeply ingrained in the process have already made that full transition.
You know, as a planner, you're already visualizing the future street that was in the plan rather than the street that is here today. And you lose track of the fact that not everyone has been along on this journey. And there's always new entrants into a conversation that need to be sort of helped through the full cycle all the way back from the beginning to really understanding what the change means.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: So really meeting people where they are instead of expecting them to be where you are. Right, Absolutely.
Let's put this into a bit more practical terms too. I really love this approach. So you're doing this in Portland and you've referenced Vision Zero, NYC's public space evolution.
How can we and others learn from the way your city frames and implements change?
[00:16:50] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I guess one of the very first key parts is if you're not articulate about what you're trying to do, it is of course not at all a surprise that the private sector innovators and people are offering new products to market.
The development community and the community at large is not going to be following along on where we're trying to go, and we're going to have constant misalignment if we're not just being clear and explicit. And I think that's one of the initial failings I see in a lot of government settings.
Or we go from being really, really coy about what we're trying to do to being really bold in one proposal.
And so someone feels like this is coming out of nowhere. So Vision Zero is an example. If we're attending to traffic fatalities and serious injuries on our roadway networks, it's deeply grounded in data.
It's deeply understood as something that should be a societal value, that no one should die or be seriously injured on our roadways.
But if the first way someone understands this is they see their road reduced to a single lane in each direction, where they're seeing the speed limits change, and there's no context for why that is happening, we're going to have backlash, people. You know, outrage comes out of that lack of contextualization and understanding.
And so, you know, it takes, you know, again, process to work through those steps. And so the examples that I had been thinking about as I was framing this up, I had an example from Los Angeles with Vision Zero where there was some backlash to some of the changes to streets. And then use the example of New York City's public space transition, where while there was still concern and pushback, and I think, you know, definitely at the sort of right moment, in the right time of shared values for New Yorkers wanting to have more shared space together.
But, you know, New York City has successfully made just progressive, progressive steps one after another of transitioning really large roadways to vibrant public spaces.
And I think they were successful because they attended to the broader set of concerns and influences along that change cycle, rather than just saying, we're doing it. You know, you can call the mayor if you don't like it. They luckily had Mayor Bloomberg. I think that did help that there was a mayor who said, no, I get, you know, we're doing this either way.
But the attendance to all those steps, as exhausting as it can be, sometimes, is essential to not end up finding yourself undoing something that is probably right for society, but maybe not right for the moment.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Yeah. And what I'm hearing from you also is that there's a big emphasis on co creation. Right. So you're doing this together with community, together with the innovators, with Private sector.
This is a method of change. So can you also. I love going into examples. I'm sure you have a lot of them. Maybe can you share another example or two on when this has worked really well?
[00:19:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And so this notion of co creation, I actually made this. The team goal for my team for the year is embracing co creation.
And in part because I do think that we're a little bit stuck in the moment societally with creating shared outcomes. But I think if we think about co creation with community, one of the great examples we have here in Portland is partnerships with groups like Better Block which allow for tactical urbanism changes to our streets. So we have street repainting. Individual neighbors together are able to paint their intersections and essentially claim that intersection as a plaza even though it hasn't been shut off to traffic. And then we have a ton of public space creation efforts going underway where we're working with adjacent businesses to be. To create public space together.
And we've also used that Better Block partnership to test street changes informally. So working with Portland State University, using hay bales to demonstrate what a different street might look like, testing it for a week and then getting feedback. And so rather than spending a year talking about it, let's just put something out there and get some understanding of how well it works. And we've had great success with that turning into permanent infrastructure. After doing the collaboration and testing on the private sector, I certainly spent many years working on developing new districts. So Portland South Waterfront District and the Pearl District where we are bringing together transformative infrastructure such as reintroducing the modern streetcar into the United States. Portland was the first place to do that, to use that as an anchor for creating new districts and then working with the private sector to invest in the development, development adjacent to that, to make a community together. But creating set asides for public parks and those kind of spaces together lead us to a successful place in the sort of immediate sense. One of the places that we're working a lot on co creation and really about district transition has been the decarbonization of the logistics sector.
Is trying to think about how can we help our freight and logistics sector work its way from something that is heavily, heavily reliant on large trucks and diesel fuel to something that is able to be using lower carbon mechanisms, incorporating cycle logistics, those kind of elements. So we have a partnership with a local cycle logistics company and we've been testing a zero emission delivery zone and using their, their delivery pathway where goods can be delivered to their consolidation center and then brought into the urban core as a way of demonstrating the potential for us to transition the logistics sector and have hopefully it become a new, profitable way of doing business in the process.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Cool. Thanks for sharing those examples.
Really inspired by the way you're working externally now. I also wanted to ask you, internally, there's a lot of barriers, right? So when you're doing change management between departments, bureaucratic hurdles, mismatches of expectations, maybe timelines, what's your strategy for getting this alignment internally as well?
[00:23:24] Speaker B: Yeah, and actually now we're back to the pizza analogy, because the pizza dough slide that I had was using the analogy of the first time you make pizza at home. You have a cold ball of dough and you're trying to figure out how to massage it into a platform for all those toppings.
And if you are too aggressive with it, either you tear the dough or it starts to fight back and it becomes even tighter than it was before. And I think bureaucracy is like pizza dough if you're not massaging it carefully.
Bureaucracy learns to be fearful through being told that there can be no mistakes in the public sector, through a bad newspaper article, all those various things. It teaches bureaucracy to be really, really careful and fearful rather than relaxed and willing to experiment.
And there's of course, limits to that. But I think as we're talking with staff about how can they, on the inside of a machine, help coax it into a frame of collaboration?
I describe to them creating conspiratorial relationships where we are looking at bureaucracy as something that we collectively need to help along.
It is a very fearful, badly designed machine that we need to help into forward progress.
We're making partnerships externally and also within city departments, across departments.
And I think in particular, as we're coaxing bureaucracy into a sort of a bolder life, it's mid level managers and mid level staff that have the greatest power and agency in that space. They know how the machine works, they know where the levers and dials are. And together they can make hard things easy and essentially offer solutions upward to leadership who are very busy and want to be helping make forward progress, but are also very worried. And the last thing they need is another problem offered to them. But if you offer them a solution that has been well thought out, they're excited to become a champion for something that is going to make them, perhaps even make them look good. If we're attending to people who want to get reelected and those various things, if they're able to demonstrate their bold leadership by us attending to the various factors and Doing things successfully, you know, they're going to be happy and they're going to want to do more. And so, you know, I've been at this a long time, 27 years, and definitely have examples of where we've done a terrible job at that and a good job of that. And I think that's, you know, part of learning and you know, sort of the continued trial.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: I love the way that you phrase things like coaxing bureaucracy into a bolder life. I love that imagery with the pizza dough. So it's, it's a, it really sticks with you, right?
[00:26:07] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: So, yeah, love that example and terminology as well.
So I also want to ask maybe with this co creation piece with communities, businesses and also internally that some might argue, right, this takes time that we don't have, it can dilute ideas or maybe slow us down. How do you avoid this consensus paralysis then when you're trying to co create with so many different and coaxing bureaucracy with so many different people and all of these things.
[00:26:43] Speaker B: And I wish I could claim that I've successfully done this all the time, but I think it is being, I guess, ardent and continuing to push along, knowing that we have to make forward progress, but also pacing ourselves.
And I think you are right though. Many advocates in community would say that we could be making more and more expedient progress if we didn't have to bring everyone along.
But I do think that you don't end up with a society that's happy with its product if it doesn't feel like a shared product. And so it really is essential in that, that regard. I actually was just in the Netherlands last month and they described the polder model which is really founded in the shared action of the Dutch to keep water from is there below sea level, keep water from flooding their cities and villages. But it has led them to this understanding of collective decision making that can be slow and deliberate and needs to give a moment for every voice to be heard. But then they move ahead with this shared understanding.
And I do think that that is why they have made so much progress as the Dutch as they have done so with very deliberative thinking. They're just incredibly sort of matter of fact about the trade offs.
They were describing that they don't have large scale groceries through much of the Netherlands because it wouldn't be good for their vibrant urban cities. And it's like, wow, that's such a bold statement to make as a society.
[00:28:22] Speaker A: They're very bold and direct.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: And what an incredibly un American thing to say of Course. Right. You know, but like thinking about that, that is also what has led them to focusing so much on cycling, creating public space, really focused on small business, and having really vibrant retail centers, excluding cars from those retail centers to make them very comfortable. All those things are know, part of what are the ingredients that they've figured out how to move ahead. And I would say so back to, back to the Portland part.
You know, Portland is a very process heavy city and it is true change can be sort of painfully slow at times, but I think we probably do emulate the Dutch in that way that we have gone through a lot of deliberative policy thinking and we have a relatively strong shared understanding of the direction we're going to.
And so the key, and certainly I see as one of my key roles in this process, is to continue to articulate that direction and make sure that we're keeping the vision alive of where we're heading and then attending to alignment and misalignment both with city agencies and departments as well as with community or private sector. And then I really focus on then supporting my staff who are actually doing the work.
If we're going to be keeping making progress, we need staff who feel inspired and empowered to, you know, try hard and make some mistakes and have not everything go well. That has to be just understood as an accepted part of our culture.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: I can imagine you're, you're, you have a really good way of leadership with your staff. So I really appreciate that.
I also want to touch on a subject that you mentioned as well, around curb management as a high leverage point for cities.
So why do you think that the curb is so powerful and how is Portland using it to influence behavior, innovation and more?
[00:30:22] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, the curb really is an essential element of it. It is the place of transaction within our transportation system. And so it is a finite point of delivery for both people and for goods.
And it is also, I think, very important business. A place in which government has, I guess, historic long standing control and a history of regulation. Because it is a location that has been over submitted, subscribed for many demands for many years, just even focusing in on vehicle parking versus vehicle throughput. That alone has a lot of demands. But then if you start bringing in the questions of place creation or trees or these various other needs that also could go in the same curb zone.
It is the most dynamic location within a city's ecosystem and there's a lot of inefficiency there. There's a lot of.
It's a place where you can just park for a second, but you're sitting in a freight loading zone. So suddenly the truck then is double parked in the street, which ripples into traffic down the block. Like just little disruptions in the way that curb management is operated and inefficiencies and misuse ripples through the system.
It's also, I think, a place where the environment is really quickly changing and there's a lot of of startups and long standing companies that are working on ways of doing digital tracking of use of the curb zone.
I'm involved in the Open Mobility foundation. And so we have two data standards. One is the mobility data standard mds, but there's also a new standard called cds, which is the curb data specification. And so that is helping us even to digitally track the indices of the curb at such a granular level that we can then start to think about how to manage manage it more effectively with both carrots and sticks. What are the ways that we can bring motivation for good use and push away from any misuse?
There's just a ton of possibilities using the curb zone as that management space.
[00:32:37] Speaker A: Yeah, really interesting. I don't think I think about curb management enough now. I'll be dreaming about it also tonight. I think so. Yeah, but really interesting.
You also have a checklist for innovation and of course innovation is a field that I do think about a lot.
Can you describe this checklist and especially note the items that you think most cities might skip or underestimate, right?
[00:33:01] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. And this again was trying to help staff think through sort of more explicitly what is the thought process they should go through if they're trying to come up with a way of implementing a bold new cool thing.
And so of course it has to start with a clear policy foundation. We need to be explicit that we are intending to do things along this style and have that validated from our policy. So is that our legislature is that our city council and mayor and need to be working through that process to make sure there's a shared understanding that there is a problem to be solved and there's urgency related to that problem and then working through displaying clear information about what are the impacts of those choices. So we're again bringing people along through the journey, psychological journey first to then enter into what are the tools that we could bring to this shared dilemma that we agree we have a shared problem.
I think one of the problems that I will often see is someone will offer a solution which is like stage six of this process, both from the public sector and the private sector staff will say, well, we just need to get this one widget or do this one innovation. But they haven't walked through the series of inferences that prove that it's a needed tool and it's a tool we should spend money on. And I think without being clear upstream with those things we end up with, I end up going to a lot of conferences where there's people selling new products, new innovations, and they're kind of shopping for a problem to offer it to rather than having it created together with cities. And it's deeply rooted in a known validated problem.
And so I think that's that like that shift of process can be really frustrating. I would think that someone has spent a lot of energy producing either their project idea internally within government, whatever it would be, or a program idea or a product idea where you've spent perhaps millions on that product and you just can't believe no one wants this product. But you didn't spend the time essentially with market research in cities to confirm that this is something that is enough of a problem that we can justify the budgetary trade offs to spend money on it. There's always those trade off choices.
I think that if we're thinking about, I guess another piece of it is thinking about timing, it could be a good idea, but it could not be a great time for that idea. And so certainly as we're looking at having new political leaders, new directors or new sort of cultural moments is what is ripe then based on the surroundings we have to make progress on.
We could get a new commissioner for transportation and they're very interested in transit. Oh great.
We have a whole lot of work to do on transit. Let's emphasize and help that leader put their mark on that set of systems, end up with a new one and they want to focus on public space. Great. We have a lot of progress to make on public space too.
I think staying nimble and knowing timing wise like so, for instance, during COVID one of the opportunities that I really seized on was public dining in the right of way. We couldn't have indoor dining during COVID So Portland was one of the vanguard cities, I would say probably globally in terms of just wiping away all of the rules for allowing businesses to create outdoor vending in the right of way. And that was somewhat intentional that, that we could then validate that as a desired use and keep that as a long term value. And so Portland, now we have a formalized outdoor dining permit program and now have a public space creation and plaza creation team really stemming out of that Covid moment of people really realizing that they would like to have more shared outdoor public space. Whether we have Covid as a constraint or not, like that is the, you know, that that is a shared value.
And so. So I think in terms of what are sort of the dangers, I think it's when you skip understanding the systems and the system constraints and skip the correlated actions and move right to the final product that you're missing. That whole journey of bringing people along together with you to be validated as something that is of a priority is worth putting all the effort into. And instead you're pitching aware. That feels kind of out of context.
[00:37:29] Speaker A: Really interesting. I'm definitely going to share this also internally with people as well with your checklist, if I may, because I think it's really interesting.
So with that, I would also ask you, what do you think is really one of the biggest challenges still facing Portland and what tools are you missing to accelerate change?
[00:37:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Such a good question and such a hard one. I don't know how much you've been tracking Portland, but Portland's had a hard five years or so. We were kind of at the top of our game in 2019, and I think we were hit especially hard with COVID and isolation and civil unrest.
We also, just before COVID hit at a state level, decriminalized a number of drugs.
And I think it was a sort of a worst case alchemy that led together into us really, I think having a lot of challenges right now as a city. And I think what I'm sort of putting it in context, I think it's very hard to be a compassionate city in this current moment in the world, certainly in the US and so I think we in Portland and other progressive cities have found ourselves with the systemic inability to attend compassionately, but proactively to mental illness, addiction and homelessness in particular.
Market forces are leaving a whole set of people marginalized and isolated and we just don't have the resources and tools to help them and they're ending up on our streets. So you combine that through work from home. For Covid, Oregon has the second highest work from home rate in the country right now.
We have incredibly high office vacancy rates.
And so that has severely weakened the social contract and people's understanding of what it means to go into a city or be part of a city in those ways. And people are much more connected to their neighborhoods or their suburban environments. And we've sort of lost, I would say, some shared confidence in the Portland story right now.
And A loss in belief in the sort of core value proposition of your taxes being a contribution that's getting you enough worth out of that and starting to. Starting to wonder if it's possible to have quality.
And so I actually gave a presentation over the winter, which I feel a little embarrassed to tell you the title, but I'll say it anyway, and it was called Embracing Co Creation to Help Portland out of its trance of Unworthiness.
So I was asserting a little bit provocatively that Portland is in a state of a trance of unworthiness, which is a Tara Brock reference who's an inspirational speaker from the East Coast.
But this idea of being stuck in a trance of unworthiness means that you've endured hardship and you start to no longer feel worthy of having quality things in your life. And I think Portland is a little stuck in that feeling and has forgotten that we were so much at the top of our game just five years ago where we didn't believe we could do anything wrong and we've just sort of fallen. And we need to rebuild our confidence that the core principles and the core collaborations are still of value and need to sort of rebuild that shared enterprise. And that's where the idea of co creation as our sort of theme for the year came from, is we need to be, through small gestures, rebuilding our belief that government, community, government, private sector together can produce a better city.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: Really, really interesting. Also changes that Portland has gone through.
Just want to hear your thoughts on the tool though.
Do you feel like you're missing a tool from your toolbox to be able to deal with this?
[00:41:24] Speaker B: Well, it's maybe too easy of an answer, but we have been in an incredibly hard number of years in terms of funding.
We are still in Portland in particular reliant almost exclusively on gas tax and parking revenues for our revenue streams to do any of our work. We don't receive any of the general fund taxes or business license taxes or taxes from utilities. Any of those spaces are going to other, other means. So as we're producing value in the city, we aren't. We don't have a means of capturing that value to invest in staff and programs and more work.
And so I think, I'm sure I'm not alone in this thinking that we need to shift our structural funding model for the transportation sector so that we have base funding to then leverage to do these bold things. And so, yeah, I think finding ways so that it's not just people who drive and park that are helping underwrite our transportation system, but it is every Everybody who, you know, we all want to enjoy a functioning transportation system, whether we walk, cycle, take transit, drive, use, use a freight logistics vehicle is probably the biggest tool that we really need to shift for.
[00:42:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I know that that's a common tool that a lot of people tell me.
Now, I just want to ask you. We talked about a lot of topics, but you also, you have a lot within your presentation. You talk about a lot of topics. You're doing very. A ton of really interesting things. Did we miss something that you think is really important to put out there? I'd love to give you the open floor right now in case there is a topic that you say, oh, the listeners need to know this.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: You know, I do think that I've used this presentation sometimes to people within the government sector and in part because I do feel like. Like we find ourselves in a position that we didn't believe we were heading into. We entered into public sector because we wanted to contribute to cities, and then we find ourselves being the man where you end up needing to explain all the rules to various parties and be really nervous about all the rules, and you've got all this oversight.
And I think we need to talk about that and figure out how to shift that dynamic so that practitioners within government feel empowered to really be making the change that's expected of us rather than sort of feeling stuck inside of a machine that was not what we envisioned working on.
[00:44:07] Speaker A: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And yeah, these are common challenges and things I also see talking to so many different people working in cities, so I think very, very relevant for the listeners.
With that, we get to go to our fun segment. Now, not that the rest wasn't fun, but now we get to play a little bit of a game. The one that I've brought for you is probably my favorite segment. It's called Roll with the Punches.
Roll with the punches.
Answer this or that questions quickly and with your first instincts.
Are you ready?
[00:44:43] Speaker B: I'm ready.
[00:44:45] Speaker A: Okay, perfect. Early bird or night owl?
[00:44:47] Speaker B: Owl. Oh, night owl.
[00:44:51] Speaker A: Bike lanes or bus? Rapid transit?
[00:44:55] Speaker B: I'm going bike lanes. That's my favorite way to get around.
[00:44:59] Speaker A: Pilot project or policy reform?
[00:45:02] Speaker B: Pilot project.
[00:45:05] Speaker A: Vision zero or 15 minute city?
[00:45:08] Speaker B: Oh, 15 minute city.
Good.
[00:45:14] Speaker A: Change or transition?
[00:45:16] Speaker B: Ah, great one.
Transition. Yeah.
[00:45:21] Speaker A: Move fast or move together?
[00:45:23] Speaker B: Move together.
[00:45:25] Speaker A: Leading with urgency or leading with empathy?
[00:45:29] Speaker B: Love that. Leading with empathy.
[00:45:33] Speaker A: Tactical urbanism or long range planning?
[00:45:38] Speaker B: Actually, long range planning for the. That one. Yep.
[00:45:41] Speaker A: Leslie Leslie Knope or Ron Swanson?
[00:45:45] Speaker B: O. Leslie Knope, for sure. I've, as you saw in the presentation, I have a slide that says, what would Leslie Knope do?
[00:45:52] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
Pineapple or hazelnuts on pizza?
[00:45:58] Speaker B: Ooh, actually, hazelnuts sounds delicious.
[00:46:02] Speaker A: We read somewhere when we were preparing for this episode that in Portland you put hazelnuts on pizza. And I was like, I, I've never seen that in Portland, but let's go with it. I guess it sounds kind of Portlandy.
[00:46:13] Speaker B: For sure that it sounds delicious.
[00:46:17] Speaker A: And that was it. That was the roll of the punches. Are there any answers that you want to explain?
[00:46:25] Speaker B: Actually, you know where I said long range planning?
I think that we underestimate how important it is to lay the framework for the change that we want to see and really be explicit and deliberative there. And so while I'm sort of existing in a world of urgency right now and trying to move solutions along, it's only possible because I spent years focused on long range planning and shepherding in a new version of our transportation system plan that has the foundational direction for all the things that I'm trying to do right now.
[00:46:59] Speaker A: Yeah, very, very good.
With that, we come to our final question. It's a question we ask every single question. Guest and it is to you. What is a smart city?
[00:47:10] Speaker B: Well, based on this conversation, this will not surprise you, but I really think it's a. It's a city that successfully co creates solution between government, private sector, higher learning and community. It's. It's that shared product and a shared pride in that shared product that I think really is what makes a vibrant city successful.
[00:47:30] Speaker A: Very good. And yes, people rarely surprise me after I talk to them for the whole episode about what they say because. But it's always really interesting all the different definitions that we have.
So with that I just have to give you a big thank you and a round of virtual applause for sharing all of your thoughts today. I really love the way that you look at things. For sharing all of your expertise. It's really been wonderful to talk to you. So thank you so much for coming on.
[00:47:56] Speaker B: Oh, it's so appreciated. Thank you for asking me. I really enjoyed it.
[00:48:00] Speaker A: And of course, thank you to all of our listeners. It wouldn't happen without you. Don't forget you can always create a free account on Babel Smart Cities eu. You can find out more about projects, solutions, implementations and more. Thank you very much.
Thank you all for listening. I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban life.
It.
