Center And Edge

An article from the Oregonian (via) confirms that you can't really have compact urban development without a sprawling auto-centric retail strip nearby. The center needs the edges:

The Pearl District may be fashionable and North Mississippi Avenue extremely cool, but 82nd Avenue is necessary. This corridor of asphalt, car lots and old-world politics keeps Portland honest. I'll admit it's not beautiful. It doesn't have the hottest clubs or gallery-hopping First Thursday crowds. But 82nd Avenue from Sandy Boulevard south to the Clackamas County line does things no city can do without.

First, the street reminds us that our economy still requires things. Words and ideas may be the stock in trade of college professors and the creative class, but cities need places to find used travel trailers, scout out discount appliances and hunt down new sound systems installed in beat-up Toyotas.

Suburban strips like 82nd Avenue offer the kind of contrast and vitality once far more common in now-gentrifying city centers. For instance, they have become the default port of entry for many recent arrivals to the States:

Portland's real Chinatown is growing around 82nd, not in Old Town, where the Portland Development Commission's streetscape project hopes curb extensions and exotic trees will substitute for a lively, growing community.

Numbers confirm the impressions rolling past our windshields. According to the 2000 census, Multnomah County has 18 census tracts (out of nearly 200) where at least 20 percent of the residents are foreign-born. Half of these tracts border 82nd Avenue.

These are the neighborhoods where you might hear Russian, Vietnamese and Spanish spoken on one block, Chinese and Ukrainian on another, Spanish again if you're toward the north end of the avenue or Romanian if you're farther south.

As Margaret Crawford pointed out in a fascinating book that she edited several years ago, seemingly banal strips like 82nd Avenue yield these unexpected complexities: programmatic, social, cultural. There's simply no time for self-conscious urbanity in these kinds of places, nor the kind of experiential thrill one may associate with the Las Vegas Strip, arguably one of the most influential main drags anywhere.

Related, since commercial strips make architects think of Venturi: an interesting discussion with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, marking 35 years since Learning from Las Vegas was published. Below, 82nd Avenue. (via)