Introduction by Mayor Keith Wilson
As a complement to Mayor Keith Wilson’s Central City Roundtable, Design Portland and Revitalize Portland Coalition are offering a deep look at how three cities are creating long-term urban regeneration and renewed vitality for their downtowns.The cities seeing the quickest recovery from the pandemic and the collapse of office and retail almost all have a version of downtown partnerships who synthesize investments from public, private, academic, and philanthropic sectors.
At their most effective, the partnerships serve as both chief operating officer for the business of a downtown and curators of the experience.
Design Portland and the Revitalize Portland Coalition are pleased to present the CEOs of the three of the best: Kourtney Garrett (Downtown Denver Partnership) , Jon Scholes (Downtown Seattle Association) and Prema Katari Gupta (Philadelphia Central City District).
08.15
Carol Coletta,Bloomberg Public Innovation Fellow and former CEO of Memphis River Parks Partnership, explores what Portland can learn from the transformation of Tom Lee Park in Memphis.
And the Downtown to the Waterfront Study
In 2025, Portland Parks & Recreation began developing an international competition to design an events facility at the Tom McCall Waterfront Park bowl.
In response, Design Portland produced a series of talks and design charrettes that ultimately led the to an expansion of the competition to the entire park, from the Steel Bridge to RiverPlace.
Our four “Downtown to the Waterfront” charrettes developed a vision for how a redesigned park could lead to profound and necessary changes to downtown. For this work, we brought Portland’s leading urban designers, architects, engineers, and other creatives together with top city officials and community members—more than 100 visionaries in all-- leveraging $40,000 in city funding into more than $600,000 in pro bono services.
Most importantly, we mapped a path to changes—some immediate, some longterm—that will help transform Portland’s downtown into a neighborhood where people can live, work, learn, play, shop, and innovate in a lovely, thriving place to be.
Learn more about the design competion here
A visualization by NC3D shows a bold change to Waterfront Park could unleash 3,500 units of new downtown housing.
03.16
Maurice Cox, former Detroit planning director, now Bloomberg professor at Harvard GSD, talks about urban innovations and comebacks, past, present and future of the Motor and Rose cities.