Steven T. Jones reports from the Towards Carfree Cities conference.
San Francisco architect David Baker depaves.
Depaving Day opened the Towards Carfree Cities conference here in Portland yesterday. One might call it a soft opening, given today’s kickoff speakers, if not for the hard work involved. With pry bars and shovels they tore up the pre-sectioned asphalt, turning a paved lot along the Williams Avenue bike route in North Portland into the precursor of a community garden.
Why? Because “asphalt is ugly,” Cassandra Griffith with the nonprofit Depave.org told the crowd, most of whom had already signed the waivers to volunteer in the transformation. “Besides being ugly, it’s not super eco-friendly.”
Indeed, she said the soil, fruit trees, and cover crops to come will help absorb the stormwater for both that property and a few of its neighbors. This is the first project for this depaving group, a genre within the larger carfree community here in Portland, but Gritth said, “We want to do a few demonstration projects and then we want to encourage everyone to do it at home.”
One of the depaving workers who calls San Francisco “home,” architect David Baker, was bleeding from the shin but still hauling wheelbarrows full of busted pavement to the bin. “It’s a good thing to do and a great way to kickoff the conference,” he told me.
Later, he was part of the group that had lunch back at my place for the week, the White Eagle Café, Saloon, and Hotel, before taking off on an afternoon bicycle adventure that took us on a tour of more depaved spots – after tending to a bloody victim of clash between bicycling and Portland’s extensive rail system.