Environmental Justice: The North Williams Traffic Safety Operations Project
Planners and advocates for urban sustainability policies often aim to depoliticize the issue, focusing strictly on infrastructure improvements to promote greener lifestyles, safety, energy efficiency, and economic development, easily visible markers of sustainability. This effort at depoliticization, however, has the effect of leaving out critical issues relating to just sustainability, including historical context, racism, and gentrification. This dynamic came to the forefront in the North Williams Traffic Safety Operations Project here in Portland, as outlined by Amy Lubitow and Thaddeus R. Miller in the article “Contesting Sustainability: Bikes, Race, and Politics in Portlandia.”
Portland has had a reputation for sustainable development and is known for improved cycling infrastructure compared to many cities in the United States. Banking on this reputation and in many ways taking public support as a given, PBOT embarked on the relatively mundane North Williams Traffic Safety Operations Project. The bikeway improvement project ran right through a historically black and rapidly gentrifying area of NE Portland. Though PBOT made efforts at community outreach, the initial stakeholder advisory committee only had 4 members of color out of 22 total members. This fact, along with the apolitical positioning of the project, quickly stirred controversy. Narratives began to emerge questioning why these improvements were coming now, when the neighborhood was whiter and more affluent. After all, safety concerns were just as valid before gentrification. Black residents were again being excluded from public input, as they had been during the urban renewal projects that had displaced so many and paved the way for gentrification. The city eventually redrafted their plans utilizing a more inclusive planning process.
The depoliticization of planning this project was clearly a mistake. Our transportation infrastructure does not exist in a vacuum. If we are truly to create just, sustainable cities, it is important that we consider historical and social contexts while utilizing truly inclusive methods of community engagement. Planners are vulnerable to tunnel vision and social isolation from the community at large, often times assuming that the rest of the community is just like them, often well educated and white. This results in less effective policy making that perpetuates inequities in our cities. Planning is inherently political, and that fact cannot be ignored.
Agyeman, Julian, Robert D. Bullard, and Bob Evans (eds.). Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
Lubitow, A., & Miller, T. R. (2013). Contesting sustainability: Bikes, race, and politics in Portlandia. Environmental Justice, 6(4), 121-126.
Thanks for sharing Simeon! I read about the North Williams Traffic Safety Operations project for another class and just found it disheartening. I hope to do work in transportation planning in the future and have so many mixed feelings about new active transportation projects. On one hand, it's great that Portland is trying to build and improve bike infrastructure. That's hopefully going to be a great boost to bike ridership down the line. However, like the North Williams project, it always seems like these projects are done at the expense of BIPOC communities. I definitely need to look up more info on funding streams for Portland transportation projects, but it makes me uneasy to see so much focus on improving white, affluent neighborhoods when so much of east Portland continues to be neglected.
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