In just a few short weeks, the Portland State University campus will see a return to life that’s been dulled for months as the community navigated how to safely resume in-person learning in the COVID age. At the same time, PSU is celebrating 75 years as Oregon’s urban university.
Inspired by the conjunction of such important turning points, Ellen Shoshkes and Liz Hoekstra collaborated to involve PSU students in the reimagining of campus life. That work began with a summer course focused on creative placemaking by creating spaces for students and the PSU community to learn, gather and create together.
Students were tasked with developing proposals to activate one of three spaces, much like the previous work seen on Montgomery Street that created a temporary pedestrian plaza in the heart of campus. The three spaces are the Montgomery Plaza, the Oak Savanna at Southwest 10th and Montgomery Street and the former tennis courts at Southwest Broadway and Southwest College Street.
Shoshkes, adjunct associate professor of Urban Studies and Planning and director of the Urban Design Certificate, said they have approval to activate all three sites and develop the spaces with seed funding from the College of Urban & Public Affairs and the Portland Bureau of Transportation.
The student proposals for these spaces featured a wide range of uses, but mostly focused on developing multi-use opportunities that centered functionality within a sense of community and equity. The space with the most student proposals was the former tennis courts, which is currently being used as a skatepark.
“I worked with campus stakeholders for about a year to figure out what the best mid-term use would be for the PSU community and then ended up working with Jeff Schnabel, Director of the School of Architecture, and his class on getting a design together,” said Hoekstra, Senior Campus Planner in PSU’s Planning & Sustainability Office.
Before the pandemic, there was some discussion about developing skateable facilities on campus and possibly integrating that with an outdoor classroom area that would include formal and informal gathering spaces. The walkway along College Avenue, adjacent to the tennis courts space is also slated to connect to the Green Loop, a larger pedestrian pathway that will run throughout the city. Previous designs worked to integrate a section of that pathway into the site.
Skateboarders utilize The Courts | Photo by Patric Simon“When COVID happened, everything got put on hold and this group of skateboarders basically took over the space and DIY’ed it,” she said. “I think they seized it at a really good moment when campus was vacant. I think they actually put a lot of life into that area again.”
The space is currently known as The Courts and has attracted much of Portland’s skating community to the PSU campus. PSU is allowing the skatepark to operate for the next year in a pilot phase to test how well it integrates into campus life.
Laurel Priest and Blair Vallie, students in the Master of Urban and Regional Planning program, developed one of the proposals for further activating The Courts space as students return to campus. Their proposal would create a pop-up plaza during the first week of fall term with interactive art, vendors and a performance space. The proposal intends to invite traditionally marginalized groups to the space.
While Vallie and Priest work to receive approval to move forward with their proposal outside of class, they agree that learning the skills to put urban design into action — centered on involving the community members it serves — is an important opportunity, especially as the PSU navigates returning to campus.
“Placemaking creates spaces for gathering, unusual or novel forms of connecting with a space and other people, and helps to reduce social isolation, something that we’ve all struggled with during the last year and a half,” Priest said.
Hoekstra added that as a PSU employee working in campus planning, she tries to work with students as often as possible and to incorporate their projects into the urban planning work on campus.
“I think it's super important that students are actively planning and using their voices for how they want to see campus develop,” she said. “I'm really hoping that we continue to do these sort of course collaborations.”
Shoshkes said there are opportunities to continue the coordination of this creative placemaking program in fall and winter courses, an opportunity that she sees as a key feature in the planning and creating of the campus of the future.
“One result of this has been the evolution of a shared interest in exploring creative placemaking as a strategy that draws on the power of art and design to bring the diverse PSU community together in imagining and embodying new ways of using campus public spaces for joyful gathering, play, education, health, and to build community resilience,” she said.
The movement for racial justice has also informed future planning work, Hoekstra added.
“Our public spaces need to feel comfortable and safe for everyone in our community, and should represent our community as a diverse place,” Hoesktra said. “Having more ground-up placemaking projects to shape our public spaces is a good way of doing that.”