Transportation Livability Hub

Beyond the Motor City Portland Screening

OTREC and Architects Without Borders-Oregon are hosting an evening of ideas with a screening of Beyond the Motor City,a new documentary directed by filmmaker Aaron Woolf (INDEPENDENT LENS “King Corn”). This film examines how Detroit, a grim symbol of America’s diminished status in the world, may come to represent the future of transportation and progress in America. As an example, the picture on the left shows how the once great Michigan Theatre is now a parking lot. The film will be shown one-time only in Portland on June 29th, at McMenamins BAGDAD THEATER. Doors open at 5:30 pm & screening begins at 6:30 pm. Admission is FREE. A panel discussion to follow with Aaron Woolf (filmmaker), Bob Hastings (TriMet Architect), and Gil Kelley (Loeb Fellow, Harvard University). You can view the trailer below:

New Visions for Suburbia

Suburban multifamily housing makes up the fastest-growing housing market in the country. Townhouses, condos and apartment complexes bring density to suburbia. They are also often located close to commercial areas. For these reasons, they offer the potential for active transportation and mixed-use development. Yet this potential rarely becomes a reality. Professor Nico Larco’s OTREC project explores why inaccessible, disconnected forms of suburban multifamily development dominate. The project draws on interviews with architects, planners, developers, and property managers of developments in four states. It proposes ways in which current practices might shift in order to create more livable, less congested, and multi-modal suburban communities. To read the report in it's entirety go to: http://otrec.us/project/152

Telling Oregon’s Transportation & Land Use Tales

To look at how buses, light rail, street cars, and bicycling have all become prominent modes in Portland, you need to trace back to important land use decisions made three decades ago. In 1974, Oregon adopted statewide land use planning goals. These goals shifted planning efforts away from freeway-building, toward investment in alternative forms of transportation. Since then, Oregon has been a leader in pushing back against car-centric landscapes and lifestyles. In this OTREC project, Professor Carl Abbott and Sam Lowry of Portland State University traced the history of land use planning in Oregon from 1890-1974. One of the project’s aims is to make transportation planning relevant and compelling to a broad audience. To do so, Abbott and Lowry gathered stories and information from a wide range of sources who enthusiastically shared their knowledge of transportation history. You can download the report to read more: http://otrec.us/project/138