Figure 1: Public and private organizations for urban green spaces in Portland
Portland is an interesting place to situate urban green space research. It is important to note that Portland is already a popular place for urban green space research and has several reports and journals written about it. This vast body of research includes work by groups such as the Coalition for a Livable Future, the Urban Greenspaces Institute and Green Streets. This is due, in part, to Portland having a very high ratio of green spaces to grey spaces, especially with Forest Park, one of the largest urban parks in the US. Additionally, urban green spaces bring up issues of public health, ecology, and community, all issues that Portland citizens tend to be concerned with.
Portland is also unique in that is has struggled more than most cities with issues of gentrification and its urban growth boundary for decades. Portland is considered one of the most gentrified cities in the US, and its distribution of green spaces has played an interesting role with this. For example, most minorities live on the east side of the Wilamette, while most of the green spaces lie on the west side. Also, Portland is one of the first US cities to implement an urban growth boundary to help protect against urban sprawl, but it has changed and grown dozens of times since it was first implemented. Portland is also home of several urban green space advocacy groups; Urban Greenspace Institute, the Intertwine, Friends of Trees, Depave, and others. All of this makes Portland a unique and critical location to study how urban green spaces relate to urban sprawl and changing demographics.
As mentioned, extensive research has been conducted on the implications of Portland’s urban green spaces. One group that specifically focused on issues of equity is the Coalition for a Livable Future through their Regional Equity Atlas. This data provides a valuable starting point, so we can focus our research on areas that have already been identified as having unequal access to green spaces. For example, the neighborhoods with the lowest composite scores for green spaces with limited public access were often in Clark county. Areas with the lowest access to green spaces were often in industrial areas that were not as densely populated. This ties back to issues of gentrification that Portland has experienced because these are areas with lower property values and less desirable housing.