The Urbanization of an Idea Imagining Nature Through Urban Growth Boundary Policy in Portland Oregon

Urban Geography
ISSN: 0272-3638 (Print) 1938-2847 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rurb20
The Urbanization of an Idea: Imagining Nature

Through Urban Growth Boundary Policy in
Portland, Oregon
Matthew T. Huber & Timothy M. Currie
To cite this article: Matthew T. Huber & Timothy M. Currie (2007) The Urbanization of an
Idea: Imagining Nature Through Urban Growth Boundary Policy in Portland, Oregon, Urban
Geography, 28:8, 705-731, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.28.8.705
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.28.8.705
Published online: 16 May 2013.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 640
View related articles
Citing articles: 1 View citing articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rurb20
THE URBANIZATION OF AN IDEA: IMAGINING NATURE THROUGH
URBAN GROWTH BOUNDARY POLICY IN PORTLAND, OREGON1
Matthew T. Huber2
Graduate School of Geography
Clark University
Timothy M. Currie
Department of Geography
University of Minnesota
Abstract: A concept of a specifically “urban imaginary of nature” is developed through a

dialectical (re)reading of Georg Simmel’s and Louis Wirth’s seminal texts on the nature of
urbanism. We then examine how this urban imaginary is mobilized through the politics of nature
in metropolitan Portland, Oregon. We demonstrate that the logic of Oregon’s “Urban Growth
Boundary” land-use policy promises the retrieval and spatial demarcation of a fading “nature”
threatened by urbanization itself. We then examine how Portland’s metropolitan planning
agency (“Metro”) imagines ways in which the urban growth boundary can reconcile and spa-
tially delimit an “invisible line” where the urban ends and nature begins. These policies set the
conditions through which Portland can market itself as the “green city.” We conclude by arguing
for a more radical and denaturalized political imaginary that takes into account the socioecolog-
ical constitution of the urban “metabolism” itself. [Key words: urbanization, imaginary, nature,
urban growth boundary, Portland (Oregon).]
INTRODUCTION
“We see nature through the geographical and historical experience of the urban.”
—Margaret Fitzsimmons (1989, p. 108)
“There is no city, no urban space without garden or park, without the simulation
of nature, without labyrinths, the evocation of the ocean or forest,
without trees tormented into strange human and inhuman shapes.”
—Henri Lefebvre (2003 [1970], p. 26)
1
The authors would like to thank Allison Hayes-Conroy, Hamil Pearsall, Kevin Keenan, and the five anony-
mous reviews of this manuscript for their insightful comments on previous drafts. We would especially like to
thank Susan Hanson for both her comments and insight, and for leading the urban geography graduate seminar
in the fall of 2005. The ideas presented here owe a debt of gratitude to the particular vibrancy of those early
morning seminar sessions. The second author would additionally like to thank Clark University’s School of
Geography for providing the intellectual home that made participation in projects such as this possible.
2
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Matthew T. Huber, Graduate School of
Geography, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, Massachusetts 01610; e-mail: mhuber@clarku.edu;
and/or Timothy M. Currie, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota
55455; e-mail: curri059@umn.edu
705
Urban Geography, 2007, 28, 8, pp. 705–731. DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.28.8.705
Copyright © 2007 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.
706 HUBER AND CURRIE
Though rarely acknowledged, contemporary politics of nature have emerged in

an urbanized and urbanizing world (United Nations, 2004). In his history of post-war
U.S. environmental politics, the prominent historian Samuel Hays asserted that—
environmental values are an integral part of an urbanized society … grow[ing] as urban-
ization has grown” (Hays, 2000, pp. 23–24). This appears to be a contradictory statement,
however, if the anti-urban American construction of “nature” (Cronon, 1991; Dowie,
1995; Keil and Graham, 1998) and its roots in romanticizing wilderness are considered
(Cronon, 1995). Hays’s claim is based upon the fact that mainstream environmental polit-
ical organizations, such as The Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, and The Audubon
Society, draw their membership (and thus financial) base from metropolitan areas in the
United States (Bosso and Guber, 2003). The question that arises is: what is particularly
urban about mainstream environmental values, and how has an urban social construction
of nature become politically and economically powerful in the production of space and
human and nonhuman nature both inside and outside the city?
To examine this question we consider the metropolitan region of Portland, Oregon,
often considered an exemplary of sustainable urban form (Abbott, 1997, 2001, 2002),
even if evidence suggests otherwise (e.g., Jun, 2004). We focus our analysis on how
urban imaginaries of nature stand in opposition to images of a denatured and encroaching
city, and consequently become mobilized into regional governance regimes that not only
pose clear and spatially demarcated boundaries between the realm of the urban and
nature, but also allow for the progressive “reinsertion” of nature into the urban itself (Keil
and Graham, 1998, p. 105) and imaginaries of a green and urban way of life.
METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL CLARIFICATIONS
In this article, we attempt to situate ideas of nature within the nexus of policy forma-
tion, capital accumulation, and everyday practices bound up in urbanization processes.
We believe that a dialectical perspective is best equipped to deal with these multifaceted
domains. A dialectical methodology approaches the world as always in a constant flux of
dynamic change, flows, and relations (Harvey, 1996; Ollman, 1976, 2002; Mann, 2007).
Through this framework, one attempts to outline the “common generative processes and
relations” at work in creating the appearance of a bounded “thing” or a “permanence”
(Harvey, 1996, p. 58). Indeed, any dialectician would view any such appearance as a
remarkable social creation. Thus dialectics both guides our broader discussion of the
urbanization and the social creation of a “thingified” nature, and provides a framework
for understanding the historically and geographically specific social relations bound up in
the mobilization of this nature in the context of Portland. Dialectics is a historically and
politically open perspective, which insists that however fixed rigid concepts become, they
are always open to a restless political contestation and reconfiguration (Mann, 2007, pp.
13–19).
Our theoretical discussion considers recent constructs of the imaginary (Peet and
Watts, 1996; Zukin et al., 1998; Gandy, 2006). The notion of “imaginary” we invoke is
simply a conceptual tool for understanding how commonsense, socially constructed
meanings become infused into fields of social power and material practice. Imaginaries
are discursive regimes—harnessed both by powerful institutional power/knowledge cen-
ters and everyday speeches and behaviors—that endow meanings with the status of truth
URBAN GROWTH BOUNDARY POLICY IN PORTLAND 707
and/or moral righteousness (Foucault, 1978). As Zukin et al. (1998, p. 628) point out,
“although the imaginary derives from poststructuralist, psychoanalytic discussions of the
unconscious, it is useful for demonstrating the social power exercised by cultural symbols
on material forms.” Therefore, it is important not to associate this concept with a resur-
gent idealism. Indeed, our approach could be lumped into the tradition of dialectical
materialism, but we would slightly amend that familiar label in favor of a dialectical
discursive-materialism. On the one hand, this positions the uneven metabolic relations
between society and nature in historically specific moments at the center of the analysis
(Foster, 2000; Keil and Boudreau, 2006; Swyngedouw, 2006), but, on the other hand, we
realize that such relations are always infused with social struggles over meaning. Thus
imaginaries are not simply reflections of material realities, but social products of histori-
cally contingent struggles situated on what Gramsci (1971, p. 178) referred to as “the
terrain of the conjunctural.” Imaginaries only cohere through a historically specific
assemblage of social forces, and they are always open to contestation. We seek to position
ideas of “nature” as both imbricated in the historically specific processes of capitalist
urbanization, and representing a potentially open “terrain” through which political chal-
lenges to those processes unfold.
For the purposes of this study, we build off notions of the environmental imaginary
(Peet and Watts, 1996) and urban imaginary (Zukin et al., 1998) from the peculiarly
divided nature-society and space-society perspectives in human geography (Hanson,
1999). We attempt to conceptualize a specifically urban imaginary of “nature”3 con-
structed by locating the urban as the antithesis of “nature” (Jacobs, 1961; Harvey, 1996;
Heynen et al., 2006), and more broadly associating nature with what humans do not con-
trol. This will be fleshed out in greater detail below, but we must emphasize here that the
primary starting point of this paper is that the category of “nature,” itself, is socially con-
structed or imagined (Cronon, 1995; Castree and Braun, 1998; Proctor, 1998; Escobar,
1999; Demeritt, 2002). Specifically, we hope to understand how discursive and material
aspects of an imagined nature are mobilized to construct, legitimate, and indeed become
emblematic of idealized forms of planning for sustainable urban environments (While et
al., 2004; Keil and Boudreau, 2006).
To deepen our understanding of this urban imaginary of nature, we engage literature
on the oft-claimed “green city” of Portland (Abbott, 1983, 1997, 2001, 2002; Harvey and
Works, 2002; Jun, 2004; Dundas, 2005; Works and Harvey, 2005). We will pose three
questions. First, as Alexander Wilson (1991, p. 25) put it from a historical standpoint,
“nature appreciation directly coincided with urbanization.” So how can ideas of nature be
understood through the historical specificities of capitalist urbanization? This question
can be informed by re-reading Simmel (1995 [1903]) and Wirth’s (1938) classic texts on
the nature of urbanism in conversations with Marxian dialectical theories of alienation.
Second, how do urban imaginaries of nature get translated into material practices and
spatial forms? This question will be answered through an historical examination of
Oregon’s “Urban Growth Boundary” (UGB) legislation as championed by environmentalist
3
This should not be confused with what Gandy (2006) calls the urban ecological imaginary, referring to the
mechanistic ecological metaphors used by the Chicago School and others to make sense of the interrelatedness
of the urban milieu.
Governor Tom McCall in the 1970s. We then move to examine the specific politics of the
UGB through Portland’s Metropolitan Service District (Metro)4 organization. We specif-
ically engage their “2040 plan”—a regional plan “outlining broad spatially defined goals
for accommodating anticipated growth over the next half of the century” (Abbott, 1997,
p. 30). We are particularly interested in how this document combines notions of neigh-
borhood alongside nature as green, open space enriching the urban milieu, in addition to
positioning ex-urban nature (forest and farmland) as made attainable through UGB policy
itself. And third, how are these urban imaginaries of nature and concomitant practices
intertwined within wider historical–geographical processes of capitalist urbanization?
Our argument aims to situate Portland within broader political–economic processes
creating opportunities to envision, plan, and market a specifically urban imaginary of
nature in ways that provide a “sustainability fix” for capital accumulation (While et al.,
2004). We also suggest that this particular form of urban “green governance” provides the
possibility for Portland to market itself as containing the conditions for a uniquely green
and urban “way of life.”
THE DENATURED METROPOLIS AND MENTAL WAYS OF LIFE
Georg Simmel (1995 [1903]) and Louis Wirth (1938) provide two classic perspectives
on the “urban question” (Castells, 1977; Saunders, 1981; Brenner, 2000). Wirth’s size,
density, and heterogeneity and reduced primary relations, and Simmel’s blasé outlook
and preponderance of money relations, provide with exemplary clarity what distinguishes
urban life from other spatial forms of human interaction. In this section, in addition to our
readings of Simmel’s and Wirth’s caricatures of urban life, we employ Marxian dialectics
to offer critical insight into how such constructions of urbanism create the conditions for
oppositional “imaginaries” to the high-paced, monetized relationships of the metropolis.
Although Simmel (1995 [1903], p. 45) claimed he sought only to “understand” the
mental life of the metropolis, there is a consistent sense of unease in his analysis. He
claims the metropolis is overflowing with human and nonhuman stimuli through which
the individual’s only rational, adaptive response is that of the “blasé outlook,” or an atti-
tude of indifference (if not aversion) toward people and things and the distinctions
between them. He asserts that the “money economy” provides the only means of differ-
entiating among “things”:
This psychic mood is the correct subjective reflection of a complete money econ-
omy to the extent that money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things and
expresses all qualitative distinctions between them in the distinction of “how
much.” To the extent that money, with its colorlessness and indifferent quality, can
become a common denominator of all values it becomes the frightful leveler—it
4
Metro refers to the regional governance institution that was created by voter initiative in 1979 to oversee the
development and administration of the aforementioned state-mandated land-use laws. Metro council’s juris-
diction encompasses 27 incorporated municipalities, with a current metropolitan Portland population of 1.3
million inhabitants.
hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their
uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair. (p. 36)
In his “frightful” language, Simmel seems to imply that the monetized urban realm
reduces the “manifoldness” and “core” of things—and the relations through which
production and exchange of things are mediated—into a single, objective, quantitative
determinant. Simmel also argues that individuals within the blasé and monetized urban
realm are also subject to the “objective” culture of the division of labor situating them as
only a one-sided “cog” to the urban machine (p. 44). Simmel suggests individuals cope
with mass similitude through “the extravagances of self-distanciation” (p. 42; e.g.,
through unique styles of dress and manner). Such action, however, cannot resolve the
depthless nature of metropolitan relationships among “things” and people. Simmel seems
to imply that the one-sidedness of city life may also yield a yearning imaginary for some
deeper qualitative relationship with not only “things” but human beings themselves.
Simmel argued that metropolitan relations are reduced to a struggle among individuals
in the absence of nature: “The decisive fact here is that in the life of the city, struggle with
nature for the means of life is transformed into a conflict with human beings and the gain
which is fought for is granted, not by nature, but by man [sic]” (p. 42). Urban social
relations are therefore constituted by conflict, or more accurately, competition among
increasingly atomized individuals over money, commodities, and space in the absence of
nature. Thus, in Simmel’s depiction nature is irrelevant to the metropolis, both in
concrete struggles over “gain” and in the clustering of quantitative exchange relations.
For Simmel, the city is beyond and apart from “nature.”
Louis Wirth’s (1938) “urbanism as a way of life” is less frightful in tone, and even
celebrates “the urbanization of the world” as “one of the most impressive facts of modern
times” (p. 1). His modernist outlook, however, does not cloud his judgment of what the
urban way of life lacks: “nowhere has mankind [sic] been farther removed from organic
nature than under the conditions of life characteristic of great cities” (pp. 1–2). For Wirth,
this might be a positive attribute of cities, but he reaffirms Simmel’s erasure of nature
from the urban. In order to understand what this lack of nature might mean in Wirth’s
assessment of “urbanism,” we must unpack his theories on relations among people.
Wirth argues that the combination of population size, density, and heterogeneity in
urban areas produce a particular condition of “urbanism.” He suggests that face-to-face
primary relations of the rural past are supplanted by fleeting and impersonal interactions
of the urban present. Like Simmel, Wirth highlights the superficiality of social interaction
in the city. Leaving aside the empirical validity of Wirth’s characterization of urbanism
(cf. Guterman, 1969, for discussion), we contend that Wirth’s conception of “primary”
social relations is analogous to society–nature relations. Wirth says:
Characteristically, urbanites meet one another in highly segmental roles. They are,
to be sure, dependent upon more people for the satisfactions of their life-needs than
are rural people and thus are associated with a greater number of organized groups,
but they are less dependent on particular persons, and their dependence on others is
confined to a highly fractionalized aspect of the other’s round of activity. This is
essentially what is meant by saying that the city is characterized by secondary
rather than primary contacts. The contacts of the city may indeed be face to face,
but they are nevertheless impersonal, superficial, transitory, and segmental. (p. 12)
Wirth’s description of mere “secondary” social contacts can be extended to the world
of “organic nature,” which in the built urban environment putatively exists in processed,
“secondary” forms. Indeed, urbanism can be also understood as lacking “primary con-
tacts” with “organic nature,” as Simmel discussed above. As Pred (1998, p. 153) pointed
out, everyday life in urban settings is flooded with contact with commodified versions of
“nature once removed.”
Although Simmel and Wirth do not name them as such, the metropolitan social rela-
tions they describe are thoroughly capitalist ones. To elucidate our conception of the
imaginary, we link Simmel and Wirth’s erasure of nature from urban realms with Marxian
conceptions of alienation under capitalist social relations—that is, the process through
which the social and natural world becomes foreign to the individual and is imagined to
stand in contradiction to her/him (Ollman, 1976; Marx, 1978 [1844]). In fact, this follows
Biro’s (2005) recent work suggesting that the alienation of nature bound up in the gener-
alization of capitalist social relations leads to very particular, contingent, and sometimes
problematic ideas of what constitutes “nature” itself. Following Marx through his explic-
itly political economic texts (Marx, 1976 [1867]), capitalism is characterized by commod-
ity fetishism, wherein the real, definite social relations between labor and nature are
mediated through exchange relations between commodified “things” (pp. 170–171).
These exchange relations veil and obscure the social and ecological relations that make
urban life in capitalism possible (i.e., the transformation of nature fuels urbanization, or
what urban political ecologists call the urban “metabolism”). Following this logic, since
cities are the centers of capitalist exchange, they are concurrently centers of alienation and
fetishism, where nature and community are seemingly lost yet still really exist under the
surface. Simmel understood that these exchange relations are highly intensified in cities,
but he did not consider their real social and ecological basis (e.g., Heynen et al., 2006;
Swyngedouw, 2006). Wirth both eschews the sociality of the secondary contacts and dis-
places nature from the city. Both Simmel’s (1995 [1903]) and Wirth’s (1938) accounts
thus reify such alienation and acquiesce to the apparent absence of nature and primary
social relations in the capitalist metropolis. Indeed, part of what makes capitalist urbaniza-
tion capitalist is that the majority of people living in the city do not posses any means of
producing their own livelihood without the wage relation. The capitalist city, therefore,
presupposes that the majority of individuals are, firstly, alienated from the results of the
labor process and, second, dependent on, and alienated by, Simmel’s world of exchange
relations vis-à-vis the wage relation for their most basic needs (Marx, 1976 [1867]).
We follow Marx and assert that this type of narrow and alienating conception of urban
life, where cities and humans are seen as separated from nature, will present political
opportunities for various social forces seeking to reconcile the conflictual and superficial
aspects of the metropolis. The contradictory and uneasy feeling of separation from nature
will produce a valuable thing, an imagined other, to remedy the feeling of uneasiness. In
Simmel’s case, the conditions producing a particular type of blasé, monetized mental life
hasten counter-imaginaries that seek more communal, cooperative social relations not
only between humans but also with the world of nature, which have been abstracted and
reduced to money. For Wirth, the lack of “primary contacts,” or highly meaningful
relations of interdependence in cities,5 will allow for counter-imaginaries constructing

ideals of more authentic, primary social relations. An obvious example, relevant to urban-
ism, is the ideal of “community” (i.e., local, cooperative kinship networks grounded
in place) that negates urban “society” (i.e., competitive occupational networks flowing
in space; Tonnies, 1957 [1887]). But equally salient is the ideal of nature. Indeed, the
seeming absence of nature in cities overflowing with fetishized commodity relations
facilitates the construction of an ideal of nature. Our reading of Simmel helps us explain
the romantic construction of nature as something external to cities (Cronon, 1991)—
some un-monetized, lost land that we must recover and reconnect with (Cronon, 1995;
Merchant, 1995)—whereas Wirth’s “organic nature” gets reified as a thing, external not
only to the individual urbanite but to the entire urban spatial form itself. Such opposition
(urban/community; urban/nature), if considered dialectically, discloses their mutual con-
ceptual constitution and, moreover, reveals “community” and “nature” as mere antitheti-
cal reflections of Simmel and Wirth’s particular and historically contingent conception of
the urban. The key is to consider these conceptual dualisms as part of the socioecological
process of urbanization itself (cf. Heynen et al., 2006, p. 3).
The seeming absence of material nature upon which humans can labor—and thus
reproduce themselves—lends itself to a specifically urban imaginary of nature, whereby
cities often stand in as a contradictory antithesis to a construction of pristine nature (e.g.,
wilderness spaces). Such a thingified nature cannot, however, be reclaimed in the urban
workday realms of commerce and production: there it is lost. Rather, nature is dialecti-
cally incorporated into esthetic and recreational commodities serving to reinvigorate the
spirit from the urban severance of authentic nature–society relations.6 Lest we be misun-
derstood, this apparent absence of nature does not refute the real socionatural metabolism
of nonhuman beings, materials, energies, and wastes that are mobilized through the
uneven geographies of urbanization. Rather, our concern is with how the seeming urban
erasure of an imagined “nature,” creates the political space for struggle over reclaiming
or reinserting that very “nature” into and around the urban realm.
It is important to understand how cities attempt to overcome their contradictory rela-
tion with an imagined external nature. Keil and Graham (1998) argue that the separation
of nature and the city “creates nature as a cultural artifact ready to be reinserted into the
urban by way of symbolic action” (p. 105). Although this “reinsertion” is not new,7 recent
discourses of environmentalism and sustainability with roots in the 1970s have propelled
nature further into the urban agenda (Keil and Graham, 1998; Gibbs and Jonas, 2000;
While et al., 2004). Indeed, the yearning for nature in the urban milieu imagined as “dena-
tured” creates strong cultural, political, and economic forces that mobilize and struggle
over particular imaginaries offering reclamations of a lost primary relationship with
nature. This is emblematic of the dialectical “negation of negation” (Ollman, 1976;
5
The empirical validity of this claim is highly disputed (e.g., Jacobs, 1961; Fernandez-Kelly, 1994), but its
cultural salience is more important for our purposes.
6
See Williams (1973) for a detailed discussion of how nature is represented in literary texts as a consumption
artifact in the countryside, while unnatural, vice-ridden production remains in the city.
7
Any knowledge of the history of urban park movement and Frederick Law Olmstead’s ideology of nature
belies this idea. Gandy (2002) gives us an appropriately politicized account of Central Park’s construction in
New York City.
Young, 1990)—the negation of the urban in the imaginary of nature requires the further
negation of the denaturalized urban form, allowing for the proliferation of hybridized
urban–nature spaces (Swyngedouw, 2004). This mobilization, of course, has led to the
preservation of wilderness spaces and other exurban recreational landscapes (Cronon,
1995), but also, increasingly, to making space for imagined nature within cities them-
selves. For example, the recent “new urbanism” school constitutes a powerful example of
urban planning wherein residents are offered green spaces and environmentally friendly
transportation options (McCann, 1995; Harvey, 1997; Till, 2001). When discussing the
ecological crisis he positions as internal to industrial urbanism, Alexander Wilson (1991,
p. 203) gives us a specific political proposal of how nature can be “reinserted”:
in the city, the key work to be done is the reintroduction of healthy natural ecosys-
tems: urban forests and wetlands, meadows and prairies … food production must
be brought back to the city, especially the raising of fruit and vegetables, poultry
and fish. These old skills need to be recovered and propagated.
This study deals with precisely these types of political aspirations in the context of
the oft-claimed “green city” of metropolitan Portland. We will attempt to show that the
material-symbolic construction of nature in Portland is very much parallel to the urban
imaginary of nature we obtained from the above reading of Simmel and Wirth. Once
that connection is made, Portland’s nature imaginary can be situated into broader
geographical–historical context of neoliberal capitalist urbanization.
SPATIALIZING URBAN IMAGINARIES OF NATURE:

URBAN GROWTH BOUNDARY POLICY IN PORTLAND
Oregonian Nature as a Governable Object Threatened by Urbanization
In the context of Portland, we will see how constructions of a denaturalized urban

realm can lead to powerful counter-imaginaries of nature mobilized into policy. The link-
age of nature and a sense of being Oregonian, as explicit policy doctrine, originated with
the Oregon Legislative Assembly’s (OLA) 1973 enactment of Senate Bill 100 (OLA,
1973a, 1973b; Walth, 2000; Harvey and Works, 2001; Abbot, 2002; Works and Harvey,
2005). It is important, however, not to see the rise of specific forms of environmental
governance in Oregon, and subsequently Portland, as uninfluenced by or removed from
broader political economic and social crises of the late-1960s through the 1970s. Indeed,
prior to the sixties, environmentalism had largely been enacted as policy interventions to
conserve natural resources, on the one hand, and preserve “wilderness” areas, on the other
(Cronon, 1995; Dowie, 1995; Hays, 2000; Gottlieb, 2005). As Roger Gottlieb (2005)
reveals in much detail, the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1960s must
be seen as a response the sanguine attitudes of the 1950s toward unending industrial and
urban growth. Mass mobilization alongside landmark works such as Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring (1962) and Donella Meadows et al.’s The Limits to Growth (1972), forced
policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels to enact measures that attempted to
regulate that growth and assure an anxious public that the health of themselves and the
environment was a top priority. As we will see below, the urban imaginary of nature in
this context becomes one that is threatened by unchecked urban growth.
It is within this context that the antecedents of current land-use policy in the Portland
metropolitan area took shape, beginning with the 1969 passage of Oregon Senate Bill 10
(SB 10, OLA, 1969). This bill attempted to codify much of the language of preservation
and conservation discussed above by establishing that every county develop comprehen-
sive land-use plans. Though SB 10 had little effect in the actual governance, it gained
considerable traction in the design of policy interventions seeking to check the malevo-
lency of resource and wilderness overconsumption upon which the productive capacity of
the state of Oregon had long been imagined, through economic dependence on agricul-
ture, timber, fisheries, and, increasingly, tourism (Robbins, 1997). The most foundational
of these interventions was the 1973 passage of Senate Bill 100 (SB 100; OLA, 1973a),
against which much of the subsequent 35 years of land-use planning and management
have buttressed. To preface our discussion of SB 100 it is informative to reconsider the
then Governor Tom McCall’s infamous speech, chastising law makers in his January 8,
1973, opening address to the Oregon Legislative Assembly (OLA):
There is a shameless threat to our environment and to the whole quality of life, an
unfettered despoiling of the land. Sagebrush subdivisions, coastal “condomania,”
and the ravenous rampage of suburbia in the Willamette Valley all threaten to mock
Oregon’s status as the environmental model for the nation. We are dismayed that
we have not stopped misuse of the land, our most valuable finite natural resource.
We are in dire need of a state land-use policy, new subdivision laws, and new stan-
dards for planning and zoning by cities and counties. The interests of Oregon for
today and in the future must be protected from grasping wastrels of the land. We
must respect another truism: that unlimited and unregulated growth leads inexora-
bly to a lowered quality of life. (DLCD history)
It is clear here that Governor McCall similarly echoed the claims of Simmel and Wirth
discussed above, which cast urban forms as antithetical to the resource base and imagi-
nary of nature on which a certain Oregonian style and quality of life were directly contin-
gent. McCall’s reproach of the OLA depicts a distinctly Oregonian “way of life”
threatened with alienation from the very means of producing, both materially and discur-
sively, what it means to be Oregonian (i.e., beautiful natural scenery, and perhaps more
importantly, productive working landscapes based on agricultural and timber production;
cf. Vickerman, 1998). Constitutive of this discourse was an imaginary framing of urban
areas as antithetical to the rural systems of production that underpinned Oregon’s imagi-
nary of nature. Senate Bill’s 10, 100, and 101 set multiple goals governing urbanization
and the preservation of productive resource lands (OLA, 1969, 1973a, 1973b; Abbott,
1983, 2001; Works and Harvey, 2005) to counter the threat of unnatural and unchecked
urban development.
Behind McCall in support of SB 100 was a “unique coalition of [Willamette Valley8]
farmers and environmentalists” (Metro, 2000, p. 2) who championed the aggressive
8
The Willamette Valley is the rich farmland at the terminus of the Oregon Trail that was sought by settlers
more than 150 years ago. An imaginary of nature thus has historical roots much deeper than we discuss here. It
is important to know that Metropolitan Portland is situated in this natural Eden at the outlet of the Willamette
River where it joins the Columbia River.
protection of the state’s natural beauty and easy access to natural resources from a “rising
tide of urban sprawl” (ibid.). Whereas the urbanization of Simmel and Wirth is character-
ized by dense agglomerations of exchange-focused and ultimately unnatural activities,
for McCall, environmentalists, and farmers the unnatural processes of urbanization were
positioned as an expanding, rising tide of condomania, subdivisions and, of course, the
ravenous rampage of suburbia, spreading to threaten that which is not urban, and there-
fore natural. Key is that Senate Bill 100 invoked an imaginary of nature that not only
considered an esthetic value of open and green spaces, prevalent in much urban and other
land-use planning literature (Burgess et al., 1988; Gibbs and Jonas, 2000; Harvey and
Works, 2002), but more specifically focused on nature as the critical component, the
resource, constituting the very means of producing Oregonian livelihood and continued
prosperity. SB 100’s language attempted to create the conditions through which objects
and areas could be rendered visible and thus governed by the state; which in turn is crucial
to the production of Oregonian imaginaries of nature (e.g., agricultural areas, estuaries,
scenic rivers, wilderness, recreational areas, unique wildlife habitats, transportation
infrastructure). Additionally, SB 100 created the institutional and bureaucratic mecha-
nisms (i.e., the Department of Land Conservation and Development [DLCD], and
Land Conservation and Development Commission [LCDC]) through which land use,
development, preservation, and conservation were to be coordinated in concert with local
citizen-dominated committees. In the words of the LCD’s Oregon’s Statewide Goals and
Guidelines: “Urban growth boundaries should be established to identify and separate
urbanizable land from rural land” (2001 quoted in Abbot, 2002, p. 213). And along with
this explicitly spatialized separation emerged the political possibility of managing a spe-
cifically urban imaginary of nature protected from the “ravenous rampage” of unnatural
urbanism.
Later that same year, Senate Bill 101 (SB 101; OLA, 1973b) codified the links
between SB 10 and SB 100, and placed explicit emphasis on the role of prime agricultural
land in conserving natural resources constitutive of an “important physical, social,
esthetic and economic asset to all people of the state, whether living in rural, urban or
metropolitan [sic] areas of the state” (OLA, 1973b, p. 3). The Bill’s text further states that
such agricultural lands were in short supply and should be preserved in large blocks ded-
icated to “farm use” to better conserve the “necessary” role of the agricultural economy,
which was being eroded by the disconcerting expansion of urban development (ibid.).
The enactment of SB’s 10, 100, and 101 linked imaginaries of economic and environ-
mental integrity (and prosperity), and set into motion a regime of green governance
(Gibbs and Jonas, 2000; While et al., 2004; Keil and Boudreau, 2006). These urban imag-
inaries of nature produce “local politics of distinctive material and discursive practices”
(Gibbs and Jonas, 2000, p. 301) enshrined in urban policies, which in turn shape the way
in which nature is imagined. Thus, “nature” becomes a discursive and political terrain to
be struggled over and spatially demarcated, and, as we shall see, those demarcations do
not go without contestation. Oregon’s green policy regime necessitated that all cities and
counties establish urban growth boundaries (UGBs) to spatially delimit the extent of
unnatural urban growth (Metro, 2000; Harvey and Works, 2001; Works and Harvey,
2005). For our own purposes, we are most interested in how this state-level policy regime
became manifest in the metropolitan Portland context. We now move on to consider how
the institutional result of these policy moves—the Metropolitan Service District
(Metro)—emerged to promote itself as the democratic medium through which urbanism

and nature could resolve their inherent antithetical relations.
Metro or, the Democratic Reconciliation between Urbanization and Nature
The extension of imaginaries of nature, as codified in the early 1970s, to the largely
urbanized metropolitan Portland region featured, as Abbott (1997, pp. 32–33) described,
[a]n ideological consensus about regional growth policy … [that] developed [a]
regional political coalition [where] the majority of citizens … share[d] a basic
vision of a metropolis that above all else is “not Los Angeles” and “not Seattle.”
They agree that the best way to avoid endless suburbs [threatening nature] … is to
actively support compact land development within … constraints of [an] UGB.
One can see immediately how the inception of Portland’s UGB was framed as the
protection of “nature” in opposition to those unnatural metropolises (Los Angeles and
Seattle). The alienation from nature that those urban complexes represented—and
McCall and his contemporaries feared—was uncontrolled “ravenous” urban growth and
sprawl that could threaten the material nature of the state’s resource-based economy.
Such conceptions reinforce Simmel and Wirth’s constructions of urbanism as dense,
nature-less centers; but in this moment, the urban is expanding and threatening the
organic nature around it.
In the greater Portland area, UGB planning is taken up by the Metropolitan Service
District (Metro). In an era otherwise characterized by the “new localism” of municipal
politics (Brenner and Theodore, 2002b), it is a peculiarity of the relative political har-
mony throughout the Portland metropolitan region that a regional-scale metropolitan
agency was given such power with regard to land-use policy (Abbott, 1997, 2002). This
region, which includes but differs from the City of Portland encompasses 27 incorporated
municipalities, straddling 3 counties, with a current combined population of approxi-
mately 2 million people (Metro, 2000; Works and Harvey, 2005). This amalgamation of
localities into the metropolitan governance institution became the coordinated policy
mechanism with which to achieve the aforementioned statewide land-use policies. At the
core of its charter, Metro’s purpose is to plan and manage land use (including transporta-
tion, garbage disposal, the Oregon Zoo, and the Oregon Convention Center) and to better
preserve, conserve, and utilize open spaces as well as natural resources in the production
and enhancement of an Oregonian way of life for ourselves and future generations
(Metro, 2003). Space here does not permit an extensive discussion of the relationships
between state intervention, citizen participation, planned land-use, and governance to
address environmental concerns in the Metro region—although its roots stretch back at
least to the 1920s when worries over automobile-driven suburbanization prompted state
investigatory committees (MacColl, 1979; Abbott, 1983; Knapp and Nelson, 1992).
As a level of government, Metro officially began operation on January 1, 1979, after
being approved by voters a few months earlier. The history of regional-scale institutions
like Metro, however, is rich and not without dissonance. Indeed, as Abbott (2001, 2002)
meticulously detailed, the history of urban life, landscape, and governance in metropoli-
tan Portland is filled with contestations over power replete with political rivalries and
alliances among interest groups, municipalities, the state legislature, and citizenry to
address the principal concerns of effective and comprehensive regional coordination and
planning. The coordination presupposed by something as expansive as a metropolitan
growth boundary could not be forged without significant political coalitions between and
among the business community, civic leaders, and environmental and other planning
organizations such as “Livable Oregon” and “STOP” (Sensible Transportation Options
for People), and sometimes even the “Metropolitan Homebuilders Association” (Abbot,
2002, p. 230). For instance, Abbott (2002, p. 215) recounts how without business and
civic leadership on the delicate politics of promoting strong public transportation systems
(e.g., light rail developed in the 1980s) and preservation of inner-city neighborhoods, the
urban growth boundary would be “hard to sell to residents and hard to enforce against the
market forces of decentralization.” In 1995–1996, when certain proposals were flouted
around expanding the UGB, numerous business leaders and elected leaders rallied sup-
port around “freezing” it, and only allowing growth to concentrate within. To thunderous
applause, Portland’s Mayor Vera Katz proclaimed “Your city council is committed to the
invisible line called the urban growth boundary” (quoted in Abbott, 2002, p. 219). For our
purposes, these struggles over a UGB expansion or freeze are part and parcel of Metro’s
mandate to spatially demarcate where the urban ends and Oregonian “nature” begins. But
the presupposition of this “invisible line” is a conception—much like Simmel and
Wirth’s—of an unnatural urbanism.
Metro policies have been enshrined through the “Regional 2040” 50-year plan for
growth and development, which can be examined through the plan’s principal policy doc-
ument, The Nature of 2040 (Metro, 2000). Although Metro originated in 1979, because
of the recession of the early 1980s, the politics of the UGB only started to take off in the
late-1980s, making the 2040 plan a crucial moment in UGB policy formation (Abbot,
2002, p. 217). The preamble to the 2040 plan explicitly implies that through proper plan-
ning and governance the development of the built environment can produce an ideal
social, political, and economic urban esthetic and way of life; “[o]ne of the most effective
ways to protect our environment and livelihood, both in the built and natural worlds we
inhabit, is by planning for the future” (Metro, 2000, p. 1). The 2040 plan, and Metro as its
administrator as well as nature’s gatekeeper, is consistently couched as mobilizing the
Portlander’s democratic right to influence the values determining the region’s growth and
future (Metro, 2000; Harvey and Works, 2001). Accordingly, public outreach surveys,
town-hall meetings, and neighborhood focus groups to ascertain basic livability questions
were administered to the general public in 1992 (Metro, 2000). In 1994 alone, Abbott
(2002, p. 217) reports that Metro received 17,000 questionnaire responses on regional
planning issues. Key values established through this input were a sense of community;
the preservation of natural areas, forests, and farmlands; ensuring quiet neighborhoods
with easily accessible business, education, and recreation opportunities; a regional “feel”
where open space and scenic beauty fuse into a small-town atmosphere; the protection of
an individual community’s character and assets; and a balanced system of transport
providing multiple mobility options (i.e., buses, bikes, cars, and walking; Metro 2000).
Figure 1 illustrates how Metro imagines the reconciliation of vibrant urban communities
over here (e.g., bikers, cars, transit), and untrammeled nature over there (e.g., forests,
fish, birds) reconciled and harmoniously situated side by side. This imaginary became
Fig. 1. A policy for people places—open spaces. Cover from Metro’s 50-year plan for managing regional
growth depicts imaginaries of untrammeled and productive nature harmoniously coexisting with the vibrant,
urban communities of metropolitan Portland in the shadow of Mt. Hood.
both the mandate and purpose of the institution’s activities. A mandate that can be mea-
sured through something as simple as Portland’s emblematic view of Mt. Hood:
Our ability to continue to enjoy the view of the mountain visible from just about
anywhere in the region, may well indicate whether we’ve succeeded or failed in our
efforts to balance our concerns for the environment with our need to live and flour-
ish in this region. (Metro, 2000, p. 1)
The 2040 plan literally enshrines both the oppositional urban imaginaries of commu-
nity and nature simultaneously, intimating that through democratic planning these
ideals—at first, so seemingly absent from the urban realm for Simmel and Wirth—are
immediately attainable, or better, “balanceable.”
The Metro governance regime is always self-conscious about the possible alienating
aspects of the urban realm. Within metropolitan Portland, it was clear that an almost unur-
banized, imagined nature had to be “reinserted” (Keil and Graham, 1998, p. 105). As
such, overcoming this contradiction of alienation among urban residents and nature
required that the urban realm be rendered nonthreatening—not a metropolis, in the
Simmelian sense—but still separate from the natural rural hinterlands through which
Oregon’s communal spirit and livelihood were produced. Metro’s “concept map” illus-
trated in grayscale in Figure 29 shows the geographic sophistication of this vision: not
only is the managed urban core surrounded by a bright green periphery (dark gray in Fig.
2), but within the urban itself, we see sparse sprinkles of green space, always available for
refuge from the adjacent lighter-colored urban centers. In accordance the SB 101’s valu-
ation of open space and what it means to be Oregonian, Metro has a long history of pub-
licly funded acquisitions of land within the UGB to establish areas where nature cannot
only be imagined but materially experienced (via parks, bike and trail paths, and rivers).
The logo and motto, which Metro retains to this day, depicts an environment where
nothing is unnatural about the urban form. Nature, and un-alienated relationships to it, is
very much a valuable and recognizable aspect of the Portland “way of life.” Thus part of
Metro’s purpose is not only establishing boundaries to the urban outside of it, but also
within:
An important component of the growth concept is the availability and designation

of lands that will remain underdeveloped, both inside and outside the urban growth
boundary. Rural reserves are lands outside the UGB that provide a visual and phys-
ical separation between urban areas and farm and forest lands. Open spaces include
parks, stream and trail corridors wetlands and floodplains. (p. 11)
As Richard Walker (2007) has shown in the different, though related, context of the
San Francisco Bay Area, the protection of these “green” spaces should not simply be
viewed as some bourgeois ploy to provide recreational landscapes for the consumer elite.
Rather, it should be emphasized that this space—albeit not entailing the reorganization of
the capitalist system—has to be politically achieved through the struggle and organizing
of environmentalists, farm boards, citizen groups, and interested business groups. What
we hope this illustration has shown is just how politically powerful—and thus open to
contestation, reconfiguration, and change—the urban imaginary of nature really is. We
believe it to be central to the remaking of Portland’s land-use policy that both spatializes
the dividing line between urbanism and nature and the materiality of lived space in parks,
farms, and forests.
Despite the political achievements rendered by this reinsertion, metropolitan Portland
is still very much an agglomeration of cities and increasingly dominant suburbs of more
than 2 million people unified under a regional banner (Jun, 2004). It harbors and pro-
motes many of the basic everyday patterns of massive energy and materials consumption
characteristic of “American” lifestyles. The question of whether or not the struggles over
the urban imaginary of nature are in fact a harbinger of just and sustainable socioecolog-
ical change is another question entirely. As we will see in the next section, the emancipa-
tory political potential of this “imaginary” is certainly not exhausted through its present
form and function.
9
The color map can be accessed online at http://www.metro.dst.or.us/library_docs/land_use/concept.pdf
URBAN GROWTH BOUNDARY POLICY IN PORTLAND
Fig. 2. Metro’s geographic impress. Concept map from Metro’s 2040 growth plan depicts the composition of Metropolitan
Portland’s counties, cities, industrial and residential neighborhoods, and transit infrastructure, as well as “rural reserves” where
productive and untrammeled nature are preserved beyond the “imaginary line” of the UGB that checks urban expansion.
719
MARKETING THE GREEN CITY AS A WAY OF LIFE
“The Contradictions of the ‘Green City’

… the UGB is not only a planning tool, but also a symbol.”
—Carl Abbott (2002, p. 231)
The UGB is indeed laden with symbolism and characteristic of what Abbott (2002)
calls the “moralistic” nature of Oregonian politics. This symbol—the UGB—becomes a
terrain of struggle over what “nature” means in the context of urbanization and how the
apparently unnatural processes of urbanization can be managed. For opponents, it is a
symbol of yuppie, environmentalist elitism restricting middle-class Americans from
achieving the suburban dream. For supporters, it symbolizes community resolve to pro-
tect uniquely Oregonian environments against the relentless market pressures of urban
development.
But discursive and symbolic politics do not emerge out of a vacuum. Thus far, our
argument could be construed as largely cultural—imaginaries of an alienated urban realm
yield oppositional imaginaries of nature and community, which we argue mobilized
through political struggle over the meaning and lived content of urbanized “nature.” The
question remains as to how such imaginaries emerged with broader and historically
specific processes of capitalist urbanization. Although we lack the space to extrapolate in
depth on these processes, our engagement with the Portland context identifies wider
processes reflective of what has been called the post-Keynesian (Harvey, 1985, 1989),
and more recently (and assertively) the neoliberal city (Peck, 2001; Brenner and
Theodore, 2002a, 2002b; Jones and Ward, 2002; Keil, 2002; Swyngedouw et al., 2002).
The neoliberal city is characterized by increasing privatization of public services, socio-
economic polarization between salaried affluent consumers and a working poor who
service their lifestyles, and the increasing power of the urban scale of governance in light
of a retreating nation-state (Harvey, 1989; Dear and Flusty, 1998; Sassen, 2000; Brenner
and Theodore, 2002a, 2002b). For the sake of clarity and brevity, we only wish to empha-
size two processes critically at work here (i.e., urban entrepreneurialism and a growing
spirit of consumer sovereignty; Harvey, 1989; Hall and Hubbard, 1996; Sassen, 2000;
Luke, 2003; While et al., 2004).
As interurban competition for capital investment intensifies (Harvey, 1989), cities
must “market” themselves in terms of the amenities they offer not only for capital but,
perhaps even more crucially, labor (cf. Florida, 2005). In this perspective, cities appear
as individual actors, á la corporations, and compete with other cities for investments to
“sustain” the image with which they market themselves (While et al., 2004). This is
reflective of the neoliberal retreat of the nation-state and the increased importance of the
local and global (or glocal) scales of governance mediating the competition of cities in a
transnational arena (Brenner and Theodore, 2002b; Keil, 2002; Swyngedouw et al.,
2002). As the urban scale of governance has become exceedingly important, urban gov-
ernance regimes such as Portland’s Metro must effectively construct and articulate their
image. As Hall and Hubbard (1996) explained,
City images, cultures, and experiences have become every bit as important to
the accumulation of social and political power by hegemonic groups as more
traditional material concerns, with the careful orchestration of city image designed
to foster civic pride and galvanize local support. (p. 162)
Cities must thus stay attuned to the task of not only marketing the urban area and its
amenities, but also enacting policies that reinforce and conserve the images and resource
bases that make the city marketable in the first place.
While et al. (2004) suggest specifically that recent discourses calling for the reinser-
tion of nature into cities provide a “sustainability fix” for capital accumulation. They
claim “it would appear that urban entrepreneurialism itself might depend on the active
remaking of urban environments and ecologies” (p. 550). Portland is exemplary in this
respect. As Abbott (1997) claimed, “Portlanders are proud of themselves” (p. 11) for their
ability to conserve a community based “sense of place” (p. 12) in the downtown area,
alongside preserving nature and rural livelihoods with compact city development vis-à-
vis the UGB.10 In fact, the Metro 2040 plan unabashedly provides the link in their box
titled “2040 means business”—“the stability that Portland’s urban growth boundary
provides makes the city attractive for investment” (Metro, 2000, p. 15). Indeed, as the
previous section showed, the UGB provides a stable management of what was otherwise
conceived as an inherently unstable nexus between nature and the urban. Metro and the
UGB provide capital with the assurance that the Portland metropolitan region represents
a site through which capital can invest and market itself to workers, the state, and citizen
groups as a vibrant part of the stable protection of the natural Oregonian livelihood—an
investment site where community and nature are not lost, but literally infused in the cen-
tral city and its surrounding suburban ring. Thus metropolitan Portland’s most marketable
trait becomes its ability to proclaim the reconciliation of the unnatural aspects of the
metropolis noted by Simmel and Wirth.
It should thus come as no surprise that Portland attracted, in the entrepreneurial spirit,
an enormous inflow of high-technology capital investment during the 1980s (Abbott,
1997). The unity between the imaginary of nature and Portland’s high-tech boom is per-
haps most glaringly obvious in the colloquial term for metropolitan’s Portland’s suburban
technopole, “Silicon Forest.” In short, Portland successfully mobilized the oppositional
urban imaginary of nature to market itself as a “green city.” It is not a city that stands in
contradiction to nature (it is “not Los Angeles”), but an urban area of un-alienated con-
nection to nature.
Ironically, the Portland region has benefited from this type of neoliberal interurban
competition with what some might refer to as an old-school Keynesian, state-led manage-
ment of urban growth. But the stability provided by the Urban Growth Boundary comes
not without its contradictions in a neoliberal era in which any form of taxpayer funded,
state-sponsored planning and management of lived space gets viewed with a jaundiced
eye as a possible threat to individual property rights. In November of 2004, 61% of
Oregonian voters approved “Measure 37,” a property rights ballot initiative that allows
individual property owners to demand “just compensation” for land-use regulations that
10
Even if the UGB does not stop “sprawl” and auto-centered transport (Jun, 2004), Portlanders are still “proud”
of its significance (Abbott, 1997).
can be seen as “takings” of the productive potential of particular land uses. As the text of
the law states,
If a public entity enacts or enforces a new land use regulation or enforces a land use
regulation enacted prior to the effective date of this amendment that restricts the use
of private real property or any interest therein and has the effect of reducing the fair
market value of the property, or any interest therein, then the owner of the property
shall be paid just compensation. (OSS, 2004, p. 103)
The measure reflects the larger neoliberalization of the concept of “takings,” through
which any attempt by government to mandate certain land uses by individuals will have
to pay for it. In the words of Dale Riddle, a lawyer for a timber company, “If you are
going to restrict what someone can do with his [sic] land, then you have to pay for it”
(Harden, 2005, p. A01).
The spatial reach and coordinated large-scale vision of the UGB governance regime
hinged on its ability to effectively manage space, and thereby provide a “stable” demar-
cation between what is “urban” and what is “nature.” It is clear that not all property own-
ers share this coordinated vision and individual horror stories have become common in
the local press of hard-working (often rural) private-property owners bankrupted because
of strict limitations on the use of their property. Property owners on the urban fringe who
want to use their land for residential home building can hypothetically retort, “How dare
you deem my property ‘nature’.” An interesting cleavage emerged over Measure 37
among farmers. Some claimed Oregonian land-use policy threatened their private prop-
erty rights to build houses and other urban amenities, while others asserted that approval
of 37 threatened the massive transformation of farmland into subdivisions and big box
stores (Measure 37, 2004a, 2004b). The success of “Measure 37” illustrates perfectly the
contradictions of neoliberalism: just as metropolitan Portland markets itself as the “green
city” through which nature and urbanization are extensively co-managed, broader neolib-
eral antigovernment ideologies rise to challenge the very basis of that co-management.
The contradictory tide is turning back, however. In November 2007, voters weighed in
on “Measure 49,” which purports to only allow compensation to property owners threat-
ened by land-use regulations that limit residential, farming, or forest practices, not com-
mercial and industrial uses. For supporters of Measure 49, Measure 37 had been a ploy
for suburban developers to gobble up land for development, “largely on valuable farm-
land, forestland, along precious waterways, and in water-restricted areas … [and] …
allow large housing subdivisions, big-box stores and strip malls where they don’t belong”
(Oregon Environmental Council, 2007). Central to this measure is correcting provisions
in 37 that are seen as aiding urban development interests in asking for “compensation” for
their inability to develop in areas “where they don’t belong” (i.e., those areas imagined as
part of the natural Oregonian heritage). While giving lip service to the importance of
property rights, Measure 49 supporters claim to be reasserting the uniquely Oregonian
“balance” between urban growth and nature. They rein in the powerful narrative that
Measure 37 has provided the opportunity for anti-environmental developers to spoil what
is uniquely Oregonian (forests, farmlands, and waterways) but still providing recourse
for the non-urban developer/property owner to receive compensation for land-use
regulations.
Green Urbanism as a “Way of Life”
Metropolitan Portland’s UGB policy not only provides “stability” for investment, but
through that stability purports to offer a distinctly urban “way of life” (in the Wirthian
sense) that infuses the urban imaginary of nature and community into the complex inter-
stices of everyday practice. Or, as Metro’s 2040 plan states, the region, “provides a life-
style … deeply rooted in the environment” (p. 2). Portlanders can enjoy Forest Park, the
largest inner-urban green space in the United States, complete with over 70 miles of hik-
ing and biking trails (Friends of Forest Park, n.d.), and an expansive, environmentally
friendly public transit network. What is key is that this life is envisioned as specifically
urban (mixed-use neighborhoods, sustainable consumption, mass transit) but commensu-
rate with its unnatural tendencies. For example, Portland-area residents, not to mention
other cities across the developed world (Bryant and Goodman, 2004), are increasingly
seeking out “local” produce, which is envisioned as both more valuable due to the prox-
imity to productive nature and part of the rich economic and natural history of Oregon
itself (Works and Harvey, 2005). In fact, some have documented that “local” produce is
superseding “organic” as the ethically preferred mode of consumption in an era in which
the energy costs of “food miles” are of central concern (Dundas, 2005; Works and
Harvey, 2005; Pollan, 2006). And the paradoxical extra money it takes to purchase local
food is well worth it to some, and in fact emblematic of Portlander “choice” and support
of the farms that Metro helps protect. Here local produce becomes a commodified
medium through which Portlander’s can buy the results of the UGB—agricultural land-
scapes protected from the rising tide of sprawl.
We contend that the spatial demarcation between the urban and the natural provides
the unique conditions through which a putatively “green” lifestyle can emerge. Where
previously the Keynesian city attempted to spread consumption relatively equally in a
mass, homogenized form (Harvey, 1989, p. 38), the post-Keynesian/neoliberal city is
increasingly characterized by socioeconomic polarization between the salaried classes of
consuming elites with differentiated, niche tastes, and the impoverished wage-workers
who live alongside them and service their lifestyles (e.g., Harvey, 1989; Dear and Flusty,
1998; Sassen, 2000). In metropolitan Portland, consumers who trade off high-priced
quality food as an “opportunity cost” that precludes the purchase of new electronic equip-
ment, as one person interviewed by Dundas (2005) recounts, can be seen as a part of these
“niche markets.” Although more research admittedly needs to be done on exactly whose
cultural preferences are being served with the rise of regional food economies in metro-
politan areas like Portland,11 even anecdotal examples such as the $3 tomato (Dundas,
2005) point to specific niche consumption practices unavailable to large groups of the
region’s population.
The consumption practices centered in urban environments offer commodified ver-
sions of the urban imaginary of nature as a medium through which to overcome urban
11
Works and Harvey (2005) give us no data to this effect, implying throughout that these consumption patterns
are widespread and available to the “general public.” They do point, however, to the practice of “direct mail
marketing” to consumers. A class analysis of who exactly receives these mailings could reveal, perhaps,
exactly which stratum the farmers themselves consider their socioeconomic base.
alienation from nature. David Harvey (1989) asserted further that demand-side urbaniza-
tion and the transition to the more polarized “niche” markets of the post-Keynesian city,
depend on the “mass mobilization of the spirit of consumer sovereignty” (p. 40). It is
worth quoting Harvey’s (1985, pp. 255 and 257, emphasis added) expansion of this spirit:
The sovereignty, though fetishistic, was not illusory … new kinds of community
could be constructed, packaged and sold in a society where who you were seemed
to depend more and more on how money was spent rather than on how it was
earned … and the degraded relation to nature in production was increasingly sup-
planted by a relation to nature packaged as a consumption artifact.… Consumer
sovereignty, if taken seriously, presupposes, after all, a certain popular empower-
ment to shape the qualities of life directly and to drive beyond the pathologies of
urban anonymity, monetized individualism, a degraded relation to nature, and
profit maximization.
Thus, in Portland, Metro not only provides a governance regime through which the
unstable and contradictory relations between the urban and “the natural” are reconciled;
it also provides the ground through which Portland itself can market a unique and envi-
ronmentally ethical consumer lifestyle. In the neoliberal city, consumers can reconnect
with their own particular imaginary of nature through atomized consumption acts
wherein community and nature are recovered through consumption practices. Harvey
addresses directly how this “spirit” drives “beyond the pathologies” or alienation of urban
life highlighted specifically in the classic works of Simmel and Wirth examined above
(e.g., anonymity, monetized individualism, lack of nature) to produce a guise of un-
alienated, primary relations among humans and nature through a particular consumption
driven way of life. In the Portland region consumers exercise this spirit en masse in places
like the New Seasons Market, which markets itself as a “locally friendly” consumption
outlet. Again, this spirit of consumer sovereignty is only largely available to a select few
who by virtue of their disposable income can afford to reclaim a lost nature that is other-
wise negated by urbanity. For them, whether or not you are in touch with nature is a
matter of individualized consumer choice. As Works and Harvey put it (2005), “a way of
buying landscapes,” a “morally selved” exercise of consumer power (Cloke, 2002;
Barnett et al., 2005).
CONCLUSION
As Williams (1980, p. 67) famously put it, “[the idea of] nature … contains an extraor-
dinary amount of human history.” In this study, we have drawn attention to the historical
constitution of ideas of “nature” and, moreover, situated such ideas at the center of pro-
cesses, such as urbanization, that are constructed as most unnatural. At its core, the urban
imaginary of nature can be seen as reflecting the clustering of fetishized exchange rela-
tions in cities, masking the real dependence of the city on social relations between labor
and the material world. We demonstrate how a certain alienating imaginary of the urban
as denaturalized and contradictory to nature, comes alongside counter-imaginaries of
unalienated realms—not only nature, but also, community and the local—that position
themselves as antithetical to threatening cities. As these counter-imaginaries of nature
proliferate in the urban realm, they become reinserted into the city through conservation
policies and cultural symbols offering reclamation of this nature.
Just as processes of capitalist urbanization in the time of Simmel and Wirth mediated
their constructions of urbanity and “nature,” it is important to understand how urban
imaginaries of nature today are mediated by geographically and historically specific
processes and circumstances. Metro’s attempt to spatially delimit and protect a uniquely
Oregonian “nature” only emerged in an era in which urbanization was not only envi-
sioned as an unnatural process, but a spreading, “ravenous rampage” of suburban expan-
sion. This very protection came to be a central marketing ploy for the image of Portland
as the “green city.” This should not be read as vilifying Portland’s oppositional imaginar-
ies of nature as simply veiling the effects of exploitative capitalism. At the same time,
however, the policies and practices discussed above cannot be viewed in isolation from
capitalist social relations of production and consumption. We argue that these relations
are as much a part of metropolitan Portland as any imaginary, and, in fact, it is capitalist
relations that render urban nature marketable. What we have hoped to achieve is a
demonstration of the politics inherent in ideas of “nature.” The 2040 plan, though elitist
to some, represents a mobilization and spatial demarcation of an imagined, and uniquely
Oregonian, nature that, for better or worse, attempts to collectively set barriers and
conditions to the constellation of exchange relationships that Simmel recognized as trans-
forming the “mental life” of the metropolis. Indeed, is this not centrally part of what is at
stake in what Henri Lefebvre (1996, pp. 147–159) called “the right to the city”—the polit-
ical creation of spatial arrangements reflecting more stable and collectively agreed upon
use-values against the further monetization and privatization of city life? The politics in
support of the UGB seems to claim that not only do urbanites deserve a right to the city,
but also a right to nature in the city.
Although we want to emphasize the political possibility in oppositional ideas such as
“nature,” we also want to point out that this politics does not go far enough, and is not
radical enough. For us, and the many other critical accounts of the social construction of
nature (e.g., Cronon, 1995; Castree and Braun, 1998), the idea of nature itself often serves
to obfuscate the socioecological relations that make the city what it is. Indeed, unlike
Simmel and Wirth, we agree with Harvey (1996, p. 186) when he famously claimed,
“there is nothing unnatural about New York City.” UGB policy that proclaims to demar-
cate “the invisible line” between the urban and the natural, forgets the immense energies,
materials, pollution, and toxic releases that go into making the urban itself. Thus, while it
may offer protection to certain naturalized spaces (forests, farmlands, rivers), it forgets
the environmental justice and sustainability problems that afflict denaturalized urban
spaces. In fact, the globally expansive and locally felt problems of social inequality and
climate change are much more pressing in these denaturalized spaces.
Whereas this article offers a critical account of the politics of the urban imaginary of
nature, we would like to end by suggesting that a more radical urban-environmental pol-
itics might consider a more denaturalized politics (cf. Biro, 2005) focused on what urban
political ecology scholars are beginning to call the “politics of the urban metabolism”
(Heynen et al., 2006). A politics of the urban metabolism would not only privilege the
maintenance and protection of “green” naturalized spaces threatened by “urbanization,”
but also seek to contest and reform the socioecological constitution of the urban itself (cf.,
Luke, 2003). Such a politics, however, would depend on the proliferation of metabolic
“imaginaries” that, like the urban imaginary of nature, provide the discursive terrain for
forging broad political coalitions across a variety of social interests and perspectives. The
question is: can an urban imaginary of the metabolism be as powerful as the imaginary of
nature? We hope so.
REFERENCES
Abbott, C., 1983, Portland: Planning, Politics and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City.
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Abbott, C., 1997, The Portland region—Where cities and suburbs talk to each other—
And often agree. Housing Policy Debate, Vol. 8, 11–51.
Abbott, C., 2001, Greater Portland: Urban Life and Landscape in the Pacific Northwest.
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Abbott, C., 2002, Planning a sustainable city: The promise and performance of Portland’s
urban growth boundary. In G.D. Squires, editor, Urban Sprawl: Causes, Conse-
quences, and Policy Responses. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 207–235.
Barnett, C., Cloke, P., Clarke, N., and Malpass, A., 2005, Consuming ethics: Articulating
the subjects and spaces of ethical consumption. Antipode, Vol. 37, 23–45.
Biro, A., 2005, Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: Alienation from Nature from Rousseau
to the Frankfurt School and Beyond. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Bosso, C. and Guber, D., 2003, The boundaries and contours of American environmental
activism. In N. J. Vig and M. E. Craft, editors, Environmental Policy: New Directions
for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 79–102.
Brenner, N., 2000, The urban question as a scale question: Reflections on Henri Lefebvre,
urban theory, and the politics of scale. International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, Vol. 24, 361–378
Brenner, N. and Theodore, N., 2002a, Cities and the geographies of “actually existing
neoliberalism.” Antipode, Vol. 34, 349–379.
Brenner, N. and Theodore, N., 2002b, Preface: From the “new localism” to the spaces of
neoliberalism. Antipode, Vol. 34, 341–347.
Bryant, R. and Goodman, M., 2004, Consuming narratives: The political ecology of
“alternative” consumption. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol.
29, 344–366.
Burgess, J., Harrison, C., and Limb, M., 1988, People, parks and the urban green space:
A study of popular meanings and values for open spaces. Urban Studies, Vol. 25, 455–
473.
Carson, R., 1962, Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Castells, M., 1977, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. London, UK: Arnold.
Castree, N. and Braun, B., 1998, The construction of nature and the nature of construc-
tion: Analytical and political tools for building a survivable future. In B. Braun and N.
Castree, editors, Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London, UK, and New
York, NY: Routledge, 3–42.
Cloke, P., 2002, Deliver us from evil? Prospects for living ethically and acting politically
in human geography. Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 26, 587–604.
Cronon, W., 1991, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York, NY:
W.W. Norton
Cronon, W., 1995, The trouble with wilderness; or getting back to the wrong nature. In
W. Cronon, editor, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New
York, NY: W.W. Norton, 69–90.
Dear, M. and Flusty, S., 1998, Postmodern urbanism. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, Vol. 88, 50–72.
Demeritt, D., 2002, What is the “social construction of nature”? A typology and sympa-
thetic critique. Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 26, 766–789.
Dowie, M., 1995, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the
Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dundas, Z., 2005, Attack of the $3 tomato: How Portland’s snooty tastes are saving
Oregon farms, luring kids back to the land and even-gasp!-teaching Republicans and
Democrats to get along. Willamette Week, August 17, p. 1.
Escobar, A., 1999, After nature: Steps to an antiessentialist political ecology. Current
Anthropology, Vol. 40, 1–16.
Fernandez-Kelly, P., 1994, Towanda’s triumph: Social and cultural capital in the transi-
tion to the urban ghetto. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol.
18, 88–111.
Fitzsimmons, M., 1989, The matter of nature. Antipode, Vol. 21, 106–120.
Florida, R., 2005, Cities and the Creative Class. London, UK, and New York, NY:
Routledge.
Foster, J. B., 2000, Marx’s ecology. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Foucault, M., 1978, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Friends of Forest Park, n.d., Accessed September 21, 2007, at http://www.friendsof-
forestpark.org/
Gandy, M., 2002, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Gandy, M., 2006, Urban nature and the ecological imaginary. In N. Heynen, M. Kaika,
and E. Swyngedouw, editors, In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the
Politics of the Urban Metabolism. London, UK, and New York, NY: Routledge, 63–
74.
Gibbs, D. and Jonas, A., 2000, Governance and regulation in local environmental policy:
The utility of a regime approach. Geoforum, Vol. 31, 299–313.
Gottlieb, R., 2005, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environ-
mental Movement. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Gramsci, A., 1971, Selections From the Prison Notebooks. New York, NY: International.
Guterman, S., 1969, In defense of Wirth’s “Urbanism as a way of life.” American Journal
of Sociology, Vol. 74, 492–499.
Hall, T. and Hubbard, P., 1996, The entrepreneurial city: New urban politics, new urban
geographies? Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 20, 153–174.
Hanson, S., 1999, Isms and schisms: Healing the rift between the nature-society and
space-society traditions in human geography. Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, Vol. 89, No. 1, 133–143.
Harden, B., 2005, Anti-sprawl laws, property rights collide in Oregon. Washington Post,
February 28, p. A01.
Harvey, D., 1985, Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Baltimore, MD: The John
Hopkins University Press.
Harvey, D., 1989, The Urban Experience. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Harvey, D., 1996, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
Harvey, D.,1997, New urbanism and the communitarian trap. Harvard Design Magazine,
No. 1, Winter/Spring, pp. 68–69.
Harvey, T. and Works, M., 2001, The Rural Landscape as Urban Amenity: Land Use on
the Rural–Urban Interface in the Portland, Oregon, Metropolitan Area. Cambridge,
MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Working Paper.
Harvey, T. and Works, M., 2002, Urban sprawl and rural landscapes: Perceptions of land-
scape as amenity in Portland, Oregon. Local Environment, Vol. 7, 381–396.
Hays, S., 2000, A History of Environmental Politics Since 1945. Pittsburgh, PA: University
of Pittsburgh Press.
Heynen, N., Kaika, M., and Swyngedouw, E., 2006, Urban political ecology: Politicizing
the production of urban natures. In N. Heynen, M. Kaika, and E. Swyngedouw,
editors, In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Metabo-
lism. London, UK, and New York, NY: Routledge, 1–20.
Jacobs, J., 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, NY: Random
House.
Jones, M. and Ward, K., 2002, Excavating the logic of British urban policy: Neoliberal-
ism as the “crisis of crisis-management.” Antipode, Vol. 34, No. 3, 473–494.
Jun, M.-J., 2004, The effects of Portland’s urban growth boundary on urban development
patterns and commuting. Urban Studies, Vol. 41, 1333–1348.
Keil, R., 2002, “Common-sense” neoliberalism: Progressive conservative urbanism in
Toronto, Canada. Antipode, Vol. 34, 578–601.
Keil, R. and Boudreau, J., 2006, Metropolitics and metabolics: Rolling out environmen-
talism in Toronto. In N. Heynen, M. Kaika, and E. Swygedouw, editors, In the Nature
of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London,
UK, and New York, NY: Routledge, 41–62.
Keil, R. and Graham, J., 1998, Reasserting nature: Constructing urban environments after
fordism. In B. Braun and N. Castree, editors, Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millen-
nium. London, UK, and New York, NY: Routledge, 100–125.
Knapp, G. and Nelson, A. C., 1992, The Regulated Landscape: Lessons on State Land
Use Planning from Oregon. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lefebvre, H., 1996, Writing on Cities (translated and edited by E. Koffman and E. Lebas).
Malden, MA Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H., 2003 [1970], The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press
Luke, T., 2003, Global cities vs. “global cities”: Rethinking contemporary urbanism as
public ecology. Studies in Political Economy, No. 70, Spring, 11–33.
MacColl, E. K., 1979, The Growth of a City: Power and Politics in Portland, OR, 1915
to 1940. Portland, OR: Georgian Press.
Mann, G., 2007, Our Daily Bread: Wages and Workers in the Political Economy of the
American West. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Marx, K., 1976 [1867], Capital Vol. I (translated by B. Fowkes). New York, NY: Vintage
Books.
Marx, K., 1978 [1844], Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. In R. Tucker,
editor, The Marx-Engels Reader. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 66–126.
McCann, E., 1995, Neotraditional developments: The anatomy of urban form. Urban
Geography, Vol. 16, 210–233.
Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J., and Benrene, W. W., 1972, The Limits to
Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind.
New York, NY: Universe Books.
Measure 37, 2004a, Arguments in Favor. Accessed from Oregon Elections Division
September 21, 2007, at http://www.sos.state.or.us/elections/nov22004/guide/meas/
m37_fav.html
Measure 37, 2004b, Arguments in Opposition. Accessed from Oregon Elections Division
September 21, 2007, at http://www.sos.state.or.us/elections/nov22004/guide/meas/
m37_opp.html
Merchant, C., 1995, Reinventing Eden: Western culture as a recovery narrative. In W.
Cronon, editor, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New
York, NY: W.W Norton, 132–170.
Metro, 2000, The Nature of 2040: The Region’s 50-Year Strategy for Managing Growth.
Portland, OR: Metro.
Metro, 2003, Metro Charter. Accessed September 21, 2007, at http://www.metro-
region.org/library_docs/about/charter.nov2000.may2002.clean.03.pdf
OLA (Oregon Legislative Assembly), 1969, Enrolled Senate Bill 10: Oregon Legislative
Assembly. Salem, OR: OLA.
OLA (Oregon Legislative Assembly), 1973a, Enrolled Senate Bill 100: Oregon Legisla-
tive Assembly. Salem, OR: OLA.
OLA (Oregon Legislative Assembly), 1973b, Enrolled Senate Bill 101: Oregon Legisla-
tive Assembly. Salem, OR: OLA.
Ollman, B., 1976, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Ollman, B., 2002, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method. Champaign, IL: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press.
Oregon Environmental Council, 2007, Vote Yes on Measure 49. Accessed September 21,
2007, at http://www.oeconline.org/salem/yeson49
OSS (Oregon Secretary of State), 2004, State of Oregon: Voters’ Pamphlet, Volume 1—
State Measures. Salem, OR: Office of the Secretary of State.
Peck, J., 2001, Neoliberalizing states: Thin policies/hard outcomes. Progress in Human
Geography, Vol. 25, 445–455.
Peet, R. and Watts, M., 1996, Liberation Ecology: Development, sustainability, and
environment in the age of market triumphalism. In R. Peet and M. Watts, editors,
Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development and Social Movements. London,
UK, and New York, NY: Routledge, 1–45.
Pollan, M., 2006, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New
York, NY: Penguin Press.
Pred, A., 1998, The nature of denaturalized consumption and everyday life. In B. Braun
and N. Castree, editors, Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London, UK,
and New York, NY: Routledge, 150–168.
Proctor, J. D., 1998, The social construction of nature: Relativist accusations, pragmatist
and critical realist responses. Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
Vol. 88, 352–376.
Robbins, W. G., 1997, Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800–1940. Seattle,
WA: University of Washington Press.
Sassen, S., 2000, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Saunders, P. R., 1981, Social Theory and the Urban Question. New York, NY: Holmes
and Meier.
Simmel, G., 1995 [1903], The metropolis and mental life. In P. Kasinitz, editor, Metrop-
olis: Center and Symbol for Our Times. New York, NY: New York University Press,
30–45.
Swyngedouw, E., 2004, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Swyngedouw, E., 2006, Metabolic urbanization: The making of cyborg cities. In N.
Heynen, M. Kaika, and E. Swyngedouw, editors, In the Nature of Cities: Urban Polit-
ical Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London, UK, and New York, NY:
Routledge, 21–40.
Swyngedouw, E., Moulaert, F., and Rodriguez, A., 2002, Neoliberal urbanization in
Europe: Large-scale urban development projects and the new urban policy. Antipode,
Vol. 34, 542–577.
Till, K., 2001, New urbanism and nature: Green marketing and the neotraditional com-
munity. Urban Geography, Vol. 22, 220–248.
Tonnies, F., 1957 [1887], Community and Society: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (trans-
lated by C. P. Loomis). East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.
United Nations, 2004, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision. New York,
NY: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
Vickerman, S., 1998, Stewardship Incentives: Conservation Strategies for Oregon’s
Working Landscape. Washington, DC: Defenders of Wildlife.
Walker, R. A., 2007, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay
Area. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
Walth, B., 2000, Blazing trails in the 1970s. In B. Walth, editor, An Oregon Century: A
100 Years of Oregon History in Words and Pictures. Portland, OR: The Oregonian.
While, A., Jonas, A., and Gibbs, D., 2004, The environment and the entrepreneurial city:
Searching for the urban “sustainability” fix in Manchester and Leeds. International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 28, 549–569.
Williams, R., 1973, The Country and the City. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Williams, R., 1980, Problems in Materialism and Culture. London, UK: Verso.
Wilson, A., 1991, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscapes from Disney to
Exxon-Valdez. Toronto, Canada: Between the Lines.
Wirth, L., 1938, Urbanism as a way of life. The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 44,
1–24.
Works, M. and Harvey, T., 2005, Can the way we eat change metropolitan agriculture?
The Portland example. Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments,
No. 17, Fall/Winter, 134–145.
Young, I. M., 1990, The ideal of community and the politics of difference. In L. J.
Nicholson, editor, Feminism and Postmodernism. London, UK, and New York, NY:
Routledge, 300–323.
Zukin, S., Baskerville, R., Greenberg, M., Guthreau, C., Halley, J., Halling, M., Lawler,
K., Neiro, R., Stack, R., Vitale, A., and Wissinger, B., 1998, From Coney Island to Las
Vegas in the urban imaginary: Discursive practices of growth and decline. Urban
Affairs Review, Vol. 33, 627–654.

The Urbanization of an Idea Imagining Nature Through Urban Growth Boundary Policy in Portland Oregon

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Urbanization of an Idea Imagining Nature Through Urban Growth Boundary Policy in Portland Oregon

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Urban Geography

ISSN: 0272-3638 (Print) 1938-2847 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rurb20

The Urbanization of an Idea: Imagining Nature

Matthew T. Huber & Timothy M. Currie

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.28.8.705

Published online: 16 May 2013.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 640

View related articles

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Abstract: A concept of a specifically “urban imaginary of nature” is developed through a

Though rarely acknowledged, contemporary politics of nature have emerged in

METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL CLARIFICATIONS

THE DENATURED METROPOLIS AND MENTAL WAYS OF LIFE

relations of interdependence in cities,5 will allow for counter-imaginaries constructing

SPATIALIZING URBAN IMAGINARIES OF NATURE:

In the context of Portland, we will see how constructions of a denaturalized urban

(Metro)—emerged to promote itself as the democratic medium through which urbanism

Metro or, the Democratic Reconciliation between Urbanization and Nature

An important component of the growth concept is the availability and designation

MARKETING THE GREEN CITY AS A WAY OF LIFE

“The Contradictions of the ‘Green City’

Green Urbanism as a “Way of Life”

You might also like