Eco City Dreaming | Orion Magazine

...soon my eyes are drawn up to glass and steel. The John Ross turns its thirty-one-story oval elegantly sideways to the view, imperial, convincing. Its neighbor, Atwater Place, is all Bauhaus severity, but two other towers, Meriwethers West and East (where I’m staying), are faced in granite of a soft, almost buttery color. Is this really a “neighborhood,” as the real-estate brochures insist? Four condo towers in varying states of habitation and emptiness, two more half-built, and a medical high-rise linked by its glamorous new aerial tram to Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), up on the crowding hills just behind: South Waterfront we suddenly call it, this wide wedge between Portland’s Willamette River and Interstate 5. It was industrial low-rises and forgotten brownfields until planners and developers noticed the potential for better things so very close to the river, to OHSU, to downtown.

I’m a nature writer come home to the city, dazzled by comfort and the utopian promise of green buildings, sustainability, transit. It’s a vision of urban yet eco-friendly living—in this case a gleaming playground for the rich, yet (in theory) also an answer to calls for environmental justice and social equity. It is the odd beast of metro-centric environmentalism, a new way to live in the postsuburban age.

via www.orionmagazine.org