Downtown to Waterfront: The Urban Core As a Riverside Neighborhood

It's time to transform downtown's most underwhelming amenity, Waterfront Park. City of Possibility offers a primer.

Downtown Portland historically has been a place to work, shop, and attend events. A good place to live? Not so much.

To truly embrace the new normal of fewer office workers and large-scale retailers, our downtown needs to become more like Portland’s other great neighborhoods: a great place to live and to visit, bring your family, shop a little, play . . . and just hang out . . . simply to enjoy yourself.

Key to this transformation will be a major rethink of downtown's most underwhelming amenity, Waterfront Park. City of Possibility is organizing a series of workshops, talks, and in, December, an interactive exhibit devoted to how the park — and the connections to it — can play a major role in the future of downtown.

Downtown to the Waterfront will offer a primer with: 

• Lora Patiño Lillard, Capital Project Manager, Portland Parks & Rec, on the upcoming national competition to redesign Waterfront Park

• Art Pearce, Deputy Director of Planning, Projects, and Programs, PBOT, on his bureau’s effort to rethink the 40% of downtown in public ownership—the streets.

• Leading urban designers Shannon Simms, Mark Raggett, Charles Kelley, and Tiffany Swift on the results of City of Possibility's “Downtown to the Waterfront” design workshop.

• Christina Fuller, of Fuller Events, who produces the Waterfront Blues Festival, Rose Festival, Portland Pride and other festivals, and arguably has produced more Portland waterfront events than anyone over the last decade.

The Governor’s Task Force on the Central City recently released report that argues for positioning “the Central City as the region’s gathering place, its hub of innovation and opportunity, and its home to tens of thousands of Portlanders who value its amenities.” 

Let's design and build it — together.