A new town is being developed outside Portland, Oregon, the goal of which is to chip away at the established boundary dividing urban and rural. This boundary is particularly pronounced in Oregon, where legally mandated urban growth boundaries (UGBs) set firm limits on the expanse of urban development into surrounding farmland and green space. If all goes according to plan in Damascus, the town will maintain active commercial farming in productive soils while less-productive tracts will sprout housing and other structures necessary in the town. There remain some questions as to whether the town will be able to legally accomplish its aims under Oregon's statewide land use regime. Proponents intend to be creative with the regulatory tools available to them, and, thus far, state regulators seem willing to at least entertain those ideas. Read more about Damascus in this article from OregonLive.com.
Aside from the legal and regulatory issues that I find interesting, the thing I want to applaud in the Damascus experiment is the idea of centering a community on the land where it exists - farmland - and fostering a lifestyle that incorporates what the land has to offer rather than subduing and altering the land to fit a lifestyle. Proponents in Damascas have visions of farmers' markets selling local produce, restuarants featuring those products, and education centers where residents can learn to cook with, use, and preserve the local items readily available to them. It would be a perfect model of the slow food movement here in the U.S., a movement that has quickly gained popularity in Oregon.
There are so many overlapping concepts embodied in the proposed development of Damascus that they are hard to segregate and pinpoint. Let me try to sum up my feelings with a few statements. Many of us spend a lifetime fighting against the land we inhabit and the habitat in which we exist. We want to grow green lawns in the desert. We want to raise crops suited to climates of far away regions. We want to do what we want where we want to do it, often without regard to the basic practicality of doing so, much less the myriad of potential consequences of that action. To an extent, the people of Damascus, Oregon, will be bucking those trends. Farming, already the predominant economic engine of the region, will continue to fill role because that is the use to which the land is suited. The products raised locally in accordance with local practices and climates will nourish the residents. As envisioned, Damascus would become a pocket of localization in a continually globalizing world. In doing so, that town would express to the world its commitment to community, to the environment, and to the general wellbeing that these concepts promote individually and in concert.
I will certainly be tracking the progress of the Damascus experiment.
Be sure to check out the OregonLive.com article, as it provides more details than I have in this post. "Bluring the Urban-Rural Line in Damascus," OregonLive.com, August 8, 2009.
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