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A visit to a neighborhood's sunflower-painted street
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We were scheduled to tape a conversation with Mark Lakeman, the genius behind the non-profit group City Repair on Thursday afternoon. Daniel had worked for City Repair, so on the way to the taping he showed us one of City Repair's projects that helps reconnect people to one another and their place.

Sunnyside Plaza was an ordinary residential intersection. With help from City Repair, the neighbors worked together to paint a huge sunflower in the intersection, with leafy vines extending to the sidewalks. They've placed big flower-filled painted barrels at the street corners to slow traffic. One neighbor's front yard has a stone corner bench and fountain. An ironwork gazebo circles overhead.

Sunnyside Plaza's sunflower intersection

There's another bench down the street. Many of the nearby Victorian houses are painted in bright colors similar to the sunflower. Traffic slows as it comes through the intersection. It has become a more habitable place. People stop to talk with one another. But, Daniel noted, it takes commitment to keep up on such projects -- recoating the paint and maintaining the benches.

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City Repair: reclaiming urban spaces for people
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Mark Lakeman is an architect by training and a visionary by nature. He describes City Repair as an "all-volunteer grassroots organization helping people reclaim their urban spaces to create community-oriented places." Their work is multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional, spanning ecology, public development, economy, energy and society.

Mark noted that the city/state creates its own problems. It is inherently anti-democratic, laid out in an unnatural linear grid of streets, socially alienating. Mark says that solutions must be related to one anothe, and that the whole solution begins with civic engagement. Getting people involved working with one another to reclaim their places.

Sunnyside Plaza is one such place. Later we visited a cob building being built beside the Women's Temple, and an altar/bench commemorating a bicyclist killed by an auto. Every May City Repair hosts a building convergence, where many groups of people engage in projects like those listed above. It's not just about the projects, Mark emphasizes: it's about people coming together and building community with one another. City Repair has put together a Placemaking Handbook so that others can engage in reclaiming their urban spaces.

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Peak Oil Task Force meeting
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After our taping, we returned to downtown Portland for the Portland Peak Oil Task Force meeting. We sat in to listen in each of the four working groups: Land Use and Transportation (the largest); Food; Social; Economic Change. This citizen Task Force of twelve was appointed after passage of the Peak Oil resolution in May of 2006. Their mission is to bring recommendations to the city council in January.

The first job, of course, was organizing themselves and their approach to the task. Trying to refrain from making recommendations yet, each group was discussing what the relevant questions were. Several began identifying potential stakeholders to contact, such as key businesses, government agencies, educational institutions, and non-profit organizations. We recognized that consulting such leaders widens the outreach about energy decline, as well as gaining perspectives and ideas from those knowledgeable about their own industries.

Land Use and Transportation was discussing transportation for core needs like food, Columbia River transport, and zoning. Food discussed city incentives for gardens, rainwater catchment, preservation and distribution issues, food banks. Social discussed the health care system, the increasing numbers of poor and marginalized people, free transit passes, the already severely limited social services. Economic Change underlies everything. This task force is paving the way for many municipalities: I hope their work is broadly disseminated so others need not reinvent the wheel.

The Task Force's website is www.thecrashcourse.org. Check it out, again and again. Use them as a model.