• SW Montgomery: brief background and its potential
• Beautiful alleys and street art
• Play structures – swings, hammocks, etc
• Placemaking and parklets
• Trees and living walls
• Urban nature scenes and proposals that will blow you away
• Night lights: such a simple and effective idea
• Linear parks
• Actually *celebrating* water, for once
• Inspirations found in Portland itself
• Great visions proposed for SW Montgomery by PSU students
• Singapore, where human-enhanced “nature in the city” is unparalleled

---

SW Montgomery: brief background and its potential

I wrote a long blog post that envisions a car-free SW Montgomery corridor through the heart of the Portland State University campus. And now that the idea has a lot of momentum and support, my goal is now to showcase many examples from around the world of great placemaking to inspire people to come up with ideas for transforming Montgomery St, especially the KEY block between 6th and Broadway.

As my earlier blog post goes into in detail, SW Montgomery is the natural, beautiful east-west heart of the PSU campus. It’s the only corridor containing all four of PSU’s green spaces, and it connects to downtown Portland’s beautiful South Park Blocks:

Pettygrove Park marks the eastern edge of the SW Montgomery corridor through the PSU campus:

SW Montgomery continues west, right through PSU’s beautiful Urban Plaza, seen below:

SW Montgomery then turns into THIS utterly wasted block that’s used for a few cars per hour to cut through—in the exact CENTER of a campus with 30,000 students!! This is what MUST be fixed immediately:

Literally steps from the awful block above, SW Montgomery continues its beautiful people-friendly (and car-free) connection to Smith Student Union, the South Park Blocks and the PSU Farmers Market:

Again, to quickly recap, the pictures below show the transition SW Montgomery makes from beautiful car-free plaza to nasty car-cut-through and immediately back to people-friendly connections to the union and park blocks:

OK, now let’s gather inspiration for how to fix that horrible block of SW Montgomery from all the sections below! 🙂

---

Beautiful alleys and street art

OK, it’s time to get SERIOUSLY INSPIRED by beautiful alleys, chalk art and other creative installations—both temporary and permanent—from around the world!! 🙂

Portugal’s not the only place that’s adorned streets and public squares with umbrellas. Many other examples exist, such as Hongdae in Seoul. Much more from Seoul in later sections:

Street art can also be used extremely effectively and whimsically to transform basic plumbing and electrical equipment found on every block of every city into art! New York City street artist “Tom Bob” (instagram: tombobnyc) has done dozens of beautiful transformations such as going from this:

to this! And now there’s no way to “unsee” that toothbrush that was just *waiting* for someone to repaint it! 🙂

Back to alleys… There are thousands of incredible alleys all over the world, mainly *outside* of the U.S. I’ve taken over 1000 pictures of alleys in Stockholm alone. But here’s one most Americans aren’t familiar with: a 2000-year-old continuously inhabited narrow corridor in Pingle, in China’s Sichuan province:

Back in North America, we’re unfortunately MUCH more devoted to CARS than PEOPLE. But we can even turn these lemons into lemonade. For example, below are some of the world’s most beautiful highway pillars. They’re in by FAR my favorite historic city in North America: Quebec City! I wrote all about them here.

And Mexico City is turning as many as *1000* highway pillars into over 600,000 square feet of vertical gardens! It will improve both air quality and urban aesthetics. The pillars will produce oxygen for over 25,000 poeple while sucking up 27,000 tons of harmful gases and 11,000 pound of dust each year. EVERY city should be doing this with their highway pillars—or at least painting them:

---

Play structures – swings, hammocks, etc

These should DEFINITELY be incorporated into the now-dismal block of SW Montgomery! Which of these inspire you?

Speaking of the Seattle area, Bellevue’s new Inspiration Playground & Sensory Garden is an inclusive play environment where all ages and abilities can play together:

Dozens of nationalities are represented every day at Bellevue’s Inspiration Playground on Seattle’s Eastside:

And what’s cooler than colorful play areas? SUSPENDED colorful play areas!

These popular swings are at the beautiful new “Porch” at Philadelphia’s busiest train station: 30th Street Station. Wouldn’t it be great if every major train station (or obvious spot in the middle of a super crowded college campus, hint, hint, PSU) had something like this?!?

Yoga in the streets is always a hit. And, yeah, you just knew this would be included. 🙂

The PSU campus is full of 1970s-style concrete overhead walkways. Maybe we could put them to use by adding a zipline or two. 🙂

And you KNEW that ziplines would eventually be a thing in Vegas. There are actually two rows of them on Fremont Street; the higher one is scarier and much faster.

---

Placemaking and parklets

Since these examples are on a much smaller scale, they could much more easily be applied to that key block of Montgomery in PSU.

For example, it wouldn’t be difficult at all to surround some of the large trees on that block with benches like this:

And what could be easier than a “bottle tower” that nurtures artistic vertical gardens? SW Montgomery used to be known as a “Green Street,” after all:

And the U.S. has an insane over-abundance of empty shipping containers. Many cities around the world have converted them into creative shopping areas, such as this one in Buenos Aires:

Even Kansas City got into the game. I’ve also seen amazing examples in Las Vegas, Memphis, London and other cities:

BoxPark in London is probably the world’s most extensive container park. The world’s first pop-up-style shipping container mall is two levels and three blocks long. It’s in by FAR my favorite London neighborhood: Shoreditch High Street:

I couldn’t resist including this one. 🙂 Contrast the “highway to hell” from popular music to the narrow gate to heaven. 🙂

Speaking of streets…Placemaking Week took place in Nairobi, Kenya, in November 2017 to celebrate Nairobi’s public spaces and highlight streets as true *places* where walking, biking, activation of spaces, physical activity, safety, and random interactions on the street are encouraged. It’s how streets naturally functioned before cars took over.

Dallas (yes, Dallas!) is making some HUGE strides lately with people-friendly infrastructure: building massive new parks downtown, covering a freeway, getting rid of part of a freeway, etc. Below is beautiful One Arts Plaza:

Portland leads the world in painted intersections. But many European and Asian cities do a great job at painting entire STREETS. This is in Switzerland.

Philadelphia’s Spruce Harbor Park is a MUST-see. They’ve done some incredible placemaking at this park.Sorry for the small preview image; I’m not sure why this happens sometimes. But as always, click on the image to get the full-sized version:

Philly’s Spruce Harbor Park at night, with its floating barge, HAMMOCK FOREST and more! Philadelphia has, in fact, become a major center of placemaking in the U.S. I could devote a massive post to its renowned Mural Arts Program—or its incredible collection of public statues.

“The Oval” is another example of great placemaking in Philadelphia. The Oval is located right below the “Rocky Stairs” at the Philadelphia Art Museum:

And San Francisco clearly leads the U.S. in PARKLETS! Let’s add MANY more of these, Portland and Seattle!

Sometimes San Francisco combines its parklets with Little Free Libraries. And people in cities need more places to SIT! We treat CARS much, *much* better than we treat PEOPLE! And that includes *housing*. Think of all the cheap housing for CARS, compared to people…

Below is obviously a larger-scale project. It’s a proposed redevelopment of South Bay Galleria in Redondo Beach, California, by Forest City developers:

Again, I’m a HUGE fan of street seats…

Copenhagen does some of the greatest work of any city on Earth at making fun placemaking for adults. This is Red Square in Superkilen Park, which is an incredibly long linear park:

Switzerland also does an incredible job with placemaking. This is St Gallen Street Lounge:

Australia has some of the world’s most beautiful alleys! This is “120 Hanging Birdcages” in Sydney. Again, this would be so EASY to incorporate on SW Montgomery or really ANY block of downtown Portland!

Janette Sadik-Khan and her team famously transformed car-clogged Times Square into a place that attracted way more *people* and was infinitely more FUN!

Incredible before-and-after images of Times Square:

I don’t think that ANYONE would want to re-introduce cars to Times Square:

Vancouver, BC has radically stepped up its game on the placemaking and alley activation front. This is “Picnurbia”  – so cool! Again, I don’t know why some of the previews show up small like this, but the full-sized versions are fine:

And this is Vancouver’s “Porch Parade”:

---

Trees and living walls

This section *screams* Portland! Let’s get inspired by some of these ideas! Like yarn-bombing a tree’s entire trunk. 🙂

Or, as Salem (Oregon’s capital, just down the road) did: creating a park way back in 1936 that’s 12 by 20 feet—just enough to contain the footprint of a Giant Sequoia that was planted there in 1872. What if we made this the centerpiece of that block of SW Montgomery? 🙂

Just a few blocks south of Waldo Park are the “Star Redwoods,” whose silhouette (when viewed from the ground) forms a star! Salem is the world’s only capital whose Capitol building is thoroughly dominated by a set of trees across the street. Maybe PSU could adopt something like this on SW Montgomery:

Or we could take a more artistic approach. Patrick Dougherty does *gorgeous* “stick art” throughout the world. This is from a recent visit to Orenco Woods Nature Park, in Portland’s western suburbs. I *highly* recommend a visit to this park:

And since PSU is entirely located within the long-sputtering “South of Market Ecodistrict,” we could incorporate lots of “living walls.” Here’s one at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. There are numerous living walls in Portland (including what will soon be the world’s tallest: 240 feet!). But we could always use way more of them!

And this is my favorite living wall on Earth. It’s in Paris, and it’s one of my living walls created by the amazing Patrick Blanc:

Many other cities around the world are dramatically stepping up their vertical gardens games. Milan’s Bosco Verticale is a pair of residential towers that contain 900 trees, 5000 shrubs and 11,000 floral plants—*above* ground:

Urban forests are *incredibly* promising; a new study found that Britain’s urban forests can store nearly as much carbon per acre as tropical rainforests.

And I couldn’t NOT include TREEHOUSES! Oregon is probably the nation’s capital of super tall & creative treehouses. And we already have giant concrete walkways suspended over SW Montgomery, along with big trees on the north side. Maybe we could cantilever some treehouses and treehouse paths over that block! 🙂

And lastly, this is a beautiful treehouse courtyard at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem:

---

Urban nature scenes and proposals that will blow you away

OK, these projects are WAY too huge for a single block on the PSU campus, but I wanted to include these partially because they’re fun as hell to look at but also to get the mind going and the heart inspired even further! 🙂

Vancouver, BC is as fitting a starting point as any on Earth. This is a new bridge in Capilano Suspension Bridge Park that’s suspended outward from a cliff. It lies 300 feet above the bottom of the canyon:

And below is one of the most gorgeous tree tunnels on Earth. I know—I’ve searched seemingly EVERY single one of them online for a month. 🙂 And yes, I know that one in Ukraine and the dozens of others you’re thinking of right now. 🙂 Anyway, this is in Costa Rica’s Parque Francisco Alvarado:

Back to Copenhagen…I can’t emphasize enough how great a job the Danish are doing with placemaking that brings people of all ages into nature, near and right in the city. This is a proposed 150-foot-high spiral treetop walkway!

This is yet another part of Denmark’s massive proposed treetop walkway network:

And NO mention of “fun in the trees” would be complete without mentioning Michigan’s Electric Forest Festival! I have pictures of it in the previous section, as well:

And since this is PORTLAND, what on Earth could be better than combining books and trees?!? Portland’s home of the world’s largest bookstore, as well as America’s Literary Row (SE Hawthorne), and it has the nation’s tallest trees in an urban area. Electric Forest can inspire us once again, this time with its “Mysterious Shambala”:

Taking inspiration now from much farther afield, specifically to the Persian Gulf, Influx Studio has proposed a huge public square in Manama, Bahrain (just north of Qatar). Open on all four sides, it offers passive cooling and shading:

The rooftop has an integrated photovoltaic system that allows light (but not Bahrain’s blisteringly hot direct sunlight) to filter throughout the space. Seven sunken gardens showcase Earth’s major biomes. Influx has several additional incredible planned projects in the Middle East.

Ireland has some of the world’s most beautiful naturally occurring tree tunnels:

Istanbul (yup, I’ve definitely checked the entire planet) is developing a stunning Parkorman walkway and “Trampolines in the Trees.” This was from a project rendering:

Designed by New York’s Dror Studios, the park will contain looping canopy trails, trampolines and hammocks, all high up in the trees!

And you knew that this section would have to include something from Japan! This is their most famous “wisteria tunnel” – and it could super easily be done anywhere in Western Oregon or Washington:

And China refuses to be outdone by anyone. This is a giant multi-level indoor-outdoor urban park proposed in Shanghai, complete with super tall living walls:

---

Night lights: such a simple and effective idea

Something as simple as stringing lights over a street instantly makes an entire block feel so festive and welcoming. Here are some ideas from the U.S.,  London and—this being 2018—Russia. 🙂

Portland used to have some of America’s most beautifully lit downtown streets. In fact, there were only two electric power transmission lines on Earth in the 1880s: a 14-mile one from Oregon City to Portland (thanks to the power of Willamette Falls!) and a 17-mile one from Cherchi, Italy to Rome. Portland’s streets were gorgeously decorated overhead from 1912 until the Depression put the last one out of business in 1937:

Back to getting inspiration from other cities:

---

Linear parks

Some of these are way too long to consider in Portland, but I wanted you to see these. I’ve explored every foot of Copenhagen’s phenomenal Superkilen Park to absorb as much as I could; it’s such an unusual park! It’s half a mile long, and it has just about every type of swing and unusual playground equipment imaginable.

Surely we could incorporate SOME aspects of Superkilen Park on the PSU campus—or, much better yet, on our downtown waterfront, where in many areas, the ONLY visible life forms are Canadian geese!

Superkilen is composed of three main areas: a red square, a black market (much more innocent-sounding to the Danes) and a green park. And it’s in by far the most diverse neighborhood in all of Denmark:

OK, just one more shot of Superkilen Park:

Moving on, finally… 🙂 Here are some major highway removal and re-envisioned viaduct projects from around the world. Portland was actually first on Earth to do this when the Harbor Freeway was replaced by Waterfront Park in 1974. It could use MAJOR updating today, though. Maybe we’ll get some inspiration from these designs.

For example, Mexico City is replacing a 10-lane highway running through downtown with a cultural corridor called Chapultepec:

And you knew I’d include a couple shots of New York’s High Line:

Long before the High Line, there was Promenade Plantee in Paris. It hasn’t had anywhere near the gentrification pressure that the High Line has experienced.

A subsection devoted solely to Seoul:

Seoul has TWO of the most amazing highway transformations on Earth. One involved removing the 4-lane elevated Cheonggyecheon highway, replacing it with a park *and* restoring the river! EVERY business owner thought that this would KILL their business, but the opposite happened; business thrived like NEVER before once the CARS were replaced by PEOPLE!!

Cheonggyecheon is very famous by now, but what few people know about it is Seoul’s gorgeous “Seoullo 7017” Skygarden, which transformed a long highway viaduct into their version of the High Line:

It’s incredible every night of the year, too. Here’s an image, courtesy of Skyscraper City:

---

Actually *celebrating* water, for once

THIS should be a NO-BRAINER in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. I will never, ever understand why we *continue* to fail to celebrate the MOST important molecule in the entire universe for sustaining life: H2O!!

Here’s a shot of Kunsthofpassage in a gorgeous neighborhood in Dresden, Germany. I’m so passionate about the need to *celebrate water* in the Pacific Northwest that my VERY FIRST blog post was devoted entire to this set of courtyards previewed below:

Below is another thing I cannot BELIEVE we don’t do more often in Portland. A guy in Seattle is quite famous for creating sidewalk art that only shows up when wet! Here’s an example in Korea. Yup, Asians continue to do up their placemaking game all the time. Pretty cool transformation, eh?!? 🙂

---

Inspirations found in Portland itself

Obviously, there are tons of examples of great placemaking found in Portland. After all, we have 300 painted intersections, ten times more than any other U.S. city. And we’re home to Mark Lakeman, founder of City Repair, where U.S. placemaking was born in many ways!

The entire final chapter of “The Happy City” was devoted to Portland’s Mark Lakeman, whose parents were instrumental in converting a parking lot into America’s greatest urban piazza: Pioneer Courthouse Square, known locally as “Portland’s Living Room.”

And here’s Pan African Festival at Pioneer Courthouse Square. It’s the only square in America that meets ALL of the major criteria for being a true European-style piazza: 1) Exact center of downtown location, 2) surrounded by high-capacity train lines, 3) brick-paved square, 4) level or slightly sunken so that it’s clearly visible and *inviting* from all directions, 5) surrounded by buildings built in at least three different centuries, 6) serving a huge diversity of purposed within a block.

Here’s how Pioneer Courthouse Square from Departure Lounge’s rooftop bar. A quiet early spring evening gives a good overall view of America’s piazza.

There are other great urban squares from which to take inspiration in Portland, such as Director Park. The common theme throughout this post (and my urban goals in general) is REMOVING CARS from as much of downtown as possible!

Just like SW Montgomery MUST soon be, Director Park looks MUCH better now than it did when it was a parking lot:

The Pearl District is full of great urban squares where cars used to be allowed. This is Jamison Square:

And of course, Portland has its 25-block-long famous park blocks that were set aside in 1852 (before New York’s Central Park was built) by some very forward-thinking planners. Portland had only been incorporated a year earlier!

The South Park Blocks go directly through the heart of the PSU campus. Yet, it all dies a block away at this block of SW Montgomery:

Again, this (below) is a block away! And literally EVERY type of transit line in Portland runs within a single block of the block above:

Again, this is *directly across the street* from the dreadful block of SW Montgomery that I’m giving everything I’ve got to make permanently car-free:

Union Way is a gorgeous arcade connecting the uber-cool Ace Hotel with Powell’s, the world’s largest bookstore. Again, it’s a totally *car-free* corridor, and it’s mid-block and covered, which makes it even more fun:

Portland even has literal car intersections that are dramatically transformed. The most famous example (and the world’s first of its type) is Share-it Square, at the corner of SE 9th & Sherrett. It was the vision of Mark Lakeman and his incredible companions at City Repair:

The intersection is repainted every year during the Village Building Convergence, which is one of my two favorite annual events, along with Portland’s own Pedalpalooza:

Sometime I really need to do a separate post about Share-it Square and “intersection repair” in Portland. There’s no way I could even being to tell the story here:

It’s Mark Lakeman! I can never, *ever* thank you enough for everything…

Here’s an aerial view of the very first iteration of Share-it Square, before dozens of gorgeous cob, mosaic and other structures were built on all four corners. This is true placemaking at its finest, right in the middle of a place where cars normally dominate.

Again, PSU and SW Montgomery, let’s transform that AWFUL block into a place for PEOPLE rather than cars. There are *many* examples in Portland to inspire us all:

---

Great visions proposed for SW Montgomery by PSU students

I was invited to PSU Professor Ellen Shoshkes’ class (where I’ve spoken several times about my ideas for a car-free Montgomery through campus) to view the final presentations for transforming this block. I loved many of their ideas! I’ll share some of their slides here:

In most of these slides, you’ll see how the block currently looks, along with ideas for transforming it in ways both large and small:

I got this “BUS” street seat idea from one of the students!

---

Singapore, where human-enhanced “nature in the city” is unparalleled

Singapore deserves its own section; the “city-state island country” is leagues beyond the rest of the world when it comes to celebrating greenery and enhancing it within the densest parts of the major metropolis. It’s also been recognized as the world’s safest and “smartest” (tech) country, among dozens of other awards.

Below is the Parkroyal, a 24-story “greenhouse condo” with *160,000 square feet* of vertical greenery!

Technically, it’s called the PARKROYAL on Pickering Hotel. It set all kinds of world firsts for gardens and sustainability:

Singapore even has a rule stating that all greenery lost at ground level must be MORE than replaced *above* ground by new construction. The Oasis Hotel replaced greenery lost on the ground ELEVEN-FOLD above ground!

And the four-tower Treehouse condo complex broke so many additional vertical garden and ecological world records that I wouldn’t know where to start. Just go to Singapore if you can and come back truly inspired:

“Lines of Life,” pictured below, will totally blow away any “high line” type of park on Earth. It will be 15 miles long (ten times the length of New York’s High Line) and feature a paved bike path, nature reserves, climbing walls, water features, eight “activity nodes,” rainforest-viewing platforms, nature boardwalks, 122 beautiful access points, and more…

Naturally (so to speak), no city has a more beautiful National Orchid Garden. This is one of the magical archways. We could totally do archways like this in the Pacific Northwest!

And naturally, their gardens have dramatic walkways both built and proposed, such as this “walk of giants” way above the ground, complete with trampolines!

There are many buildings in Singapore where all you see is greenery below you from every balcony in the building. Here’s the bases of the Oasis Hotel:

And here’s Oasis Hotel alongside its flower- and greenery-inspired neighbor towers:

Malaysia even offers visitors tons of Oregon-style treehouses in and near Singapore:

OK, this is all fine and wonderful BUT… The REAL reason I wanted to highlight Singapore was because of its #1 FREE attraction: Sky Garden!!

I’ll just share some images and let your imagination run wild as to what it Sky Garden entails in totality:

Has the movie “Avatar” run through your head yet? And the messages of “Avatar?”

I’ll end this Singapore section—and another super long blog post—with a little dash of color. This is Little India, which is super charming. Of course it is; it’s Singapore…