City Limits: Walking Portland's Boundary

Oates walks the legally-imposed and shifting Urban Growth Boundary of Portland (Oregon), talks with the folks he meets (both living and dead), allows a number of them to speak their respective pieces, mulls it all over and considers how planning, in general, and constraint, specifically, play out in the lives of this city and its inhabitants. I enjoyed especially Oates' conjuring of Italo Calvino, his thoughts about Class, and his views from The Edge in this extended meditation on constraint. It set me wondering if a land use system (and its public faces) can be both flexible and predictable? Both wise and legal? Both wise and electable? Most of all, I wondered whether we'll ever learn one of the primary lessons Oates derived from his sojourn, "We are connected, and pretending otherwise - following those pied pipers of individualism and libertarianism and privatization - will be ruinous."