“Grow where you’re planted,” is a famous saying of the traditional Hopi people. It’s what placemaker Mark Lakeman has done. Mark has spent most of his life planted in Portland, Oregon, where in 1996 he began growing the City Repair Project. 

Through City Repair, communities of volunteers have built over 300 sustainable works in Portland, making places that connect people to each other and their city. City Repair shows a way to reclaim and repopulate public space to help make cities sustainable in the long run. 

Mark’s placemaking is a result of good parenting. I smile when I say that, but it’s true: his father, architect Richard Lakeman, founded the urban design division of Portland’s planning department and helped create Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square. His mother, too, concentrated on design and public space. Architecture professor Sandra Davis Lakeman is famous for her investigations of natural light and the Italian piazza.  

American cities west of the Ohio River were planned by the Continental Congress’ National Land Ordinance of 1785, which organized most of America into a Roman colonial grid. As Americans we have the right to free assembly. But our gridded American cities have fewer public spaces than cities in any other developed country. We have the right to assemble but no place to do it; streets and intersections but no piazzas, plazas, or gathering spaces. In Portland, or Phoenix near where I live, the grid extends as far as you can see. But it’s about cars and separation – not places people can belong to. 

Mark Lakeman is reclaiming street intersections. City Repair has painted them over, planted around them, and even de-paved them, taking up asphalt and replacing it with pavers or bricks. Create a really beautiful place and people will slow down to be part of it. What has followed at these intersections is bulletin boards, meeting places, pop-up tea houses. Here is character, lovability and work that is sustaining to a community. 

In too many locales if you try to organize a community gathering place officials will point out, “That’s public space, no one can use that.” It happened at Lakeman’s first project.  300 projects later, placemaking has proven to be at the core of sustainability.

below: neighbors and community gather annually to repaint Sunnyside Piazza

Published in SOTOKOTO Japanese Magazine, November 2014

Sotokoto is a popular Japanese lifestyle magazine that offers tips on leading a comfortable and fashionable life to those who follow the “Lifestyle Of Health And Sustainability” (LOHAS). The goal of this lifestyle is balancing the coexistence of individual comfort with the sustainability of the entire society.

The target readers of Sotokoto are people who are city-dwellers, respecting the positive aspects of traditional culture while also seeking enrichment through a modern lifestyle of health and sustainability. It is also an in-­flight magazine of Japanese Airlines.

We are pleased to represent one such model lifestyle here in Portland. Mark Lakeman’s community activism and work with the City Repair Project are examples of reviving traditional values through reclaiming the public commons in our contemporary urban grid.