Re-presenting the post-industrial neighborhood: Planning and redevelopment in Portland's Pearl District (Oregon)

Portland's Pearl District, a former railroad and warehouse zone located adjacent to the downtown core, provides an excellent example of processes associated with the creation of a post-industrial urban neighborhood. The redevelopment of this area demonstrates a conscious attempt to create a specific conception of urban place vital to Portland's image as the capital of good planning. Study of the emergence of this neighborhood reveals ways through which changing understandings of the Pearl's character condition decisions about local investment, shape the form of renovated and new buildings, and structure lifestyle choices.; Fundamental to the transformation of the Pearl District are the interaction between planning, redevelopment, and various representations of the district's physical and social fabric. The Pearl is presented and re-presented simultaneously as a landscape of discarded structures and marginalized social groups, as an area of rich local architectural heritage, and as a model for post-industrial urban living. These representations serve to define the Pearl District in the multiple discourses surrounding development in the Portland region. They are used to promote dominant urban interests and to sustain the practice of manipulating cultural forms in the selling of redevelopment projects. Additionally, discursive analysis of Pearl District planning and redevelopment efforts reveals the area's role as a critical component in Portland's efforts to present itself as a well-designed and efficient city, as a model of compact urban growth, and as the capital of good planning. At the same time, these representations help to shape a politics of resistance to the dominant interests of post-industrial redevelopment operating in the Pearl.; From individual recountings, of local events and practices to regional and statewide policy pronouncements, the Pearl District is represented to fit specific understandings about the city and urban form, about urban growth and the character of neighborhoods, and about the place of planning and late-twentieth-century redevelopment in a city that in many ways, is marketed through the quality of its planning agenda. All of these understandings serve to shape the transformation of the Pearl District into a post-industrial neighborhood while simultaneously reflecting the redevelopment interests operating to create this new urban landscape.