Field States

Transit is a fundamental part of urban transformation, and it's exciting to see this as a starting point for place-based design. “We believe that the new approach to a vibrant neighborhood has to be radically mixed use and that it needs an anchor in something like manufacturing... which is the solid economic base on which you can build a well-balanced, vibrant neighborhood." "It’s about telling a story of place that’s grounded in our past but also a roadmap for our future." – Matthew Claudel in Site Selection Magazine by Gary Daughters

Thank you, CIV:LAB team! Our session was all about proving that collaboration matters. Thank you for being great thought partners – we're excited to carry the work forward together.

In May, our Matthew Claudel sat down to discuss emergent design and managing complexity on the Shaping Chaos podcast. In host Fábio Santos’ words, “Matthew offers a thought-provoking discussion on how cities learn and evolve, with useful lessons for anyone interested in design, urban planning, or creativity.” https://lnkd.in/gbTNb3aB

I know we're all ready for the weekend, but if you want one last story to read this week, make it this one. Elias Stahl and Matthew Claudel showed me around 333 NW 5th Avenue yesterday, which is the first building of the $125M Made in Old Town sustainable footwear and apparel hub to go under contract. What these two + OLD TOWN COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION are aiming to do for the neighborhood could be revolutionary. Super excited to see what comes next!

Eric Liedtke, Adidas’ former Brand President, and Noel Kinder, Nike’s former Chief Sustainability Officer, are joining the stewardship committee of Made in Old Town, our $125M urban design and strategy project focused on building a sustainable footwear and apparel manufacturing innovation campus in Old Town, Portland. #MadeInOldTown Paywalled link: https://lnkd.in/gWR5fbqF

Do people live where they work? There’s a growing spatial disconnect between where productivity and living happen, at both ends of an increasingly polarized (American) economy—and that’s a problem. During BLOXHUB's innovation workshop, we collaborated with the City of Kirkland to explore bold solutions.

The U.S. home base for brands like Nike, Adidas and Columbia Sportswear may soon become the epicenter of American footwear manufacturing. Portland, Oregon lawmakers last month approved phase-one funding for a $125-million effort aimed at building out a green manufacturing campus for shoes and apparel. The Made in Old Town development project will revitalize 10 buildings and four city blocks at the center of a once-vibrant manufacturing district, with the goal of creating a mecca for innovation and onshoring. At the heart of the effort is HILOS, a software and manufacturing platform (which first debuted as a women’s footwear label) that allows brands and independent designers to make 3D-printed shoes on demand. Founder and CEO Elias Stahl has run the business out of Portland’s Old Town neighborhood since it launched in 2019, occupying a historic brick building that once housed Povey Brothers Art Glass Works, which made stained glass for churches, homes and other buildings across the American West during the early 1900s. Stahl cherishes the area’s rich history and believes that Old Town (which fell into decrepitude in part because of the flight of U.S. manufacturing to offshore locales) serves as the perfect backdrop for the city’s renaissance. Thanks also to Field States, University of Oregon and Sen. Elizabeth Steiner for contributing to this story. #footwear #onshoring #reshoring #manufacturing #production #madeintheusa #portland #oregon #madeinoldtown #uofo #hilos #3dprinting #technology

How do you apply your values in deciding which projects to take on, pursue, or say no to? Once we've spent time discussing, debating, and articulating our goals… we should enable them to guide our work! In a previous article, we introduced the Responsible Project Portfolio. Now, part 2 details the criteria we’re using to evaluate each potential project and opportunity. Do you use a system like this? We’d love to hear about your process and learn with you—please reach out!

“We’ll take big bets for the public good.” The phrase caught our attention. We were at Cornell Tech’s 2024 HealthNext Summit in New York, and Susan Coller Monarez was describing the role of ARPA-H. It’s a sticky idea, and especially powerful coming from the Deputy Director of a federal government agency. ARPA-H makes “pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies and broadly applicable platforms, capabilities, resources, and solutions with the potential to transform important areas of medicine and health that cannot readily be accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity. ARPA-H solutions aim to benefit everyone.” They select projects that aren’t easily commercialized, acting as a first-position, long-game investor without a profit extraction motive. The returns on their investments are impact, especially for marginalized stakeholder groups. Grantees can leverage risk-tolerant funds to raise more place-based, outcomes-oriented investment (like social impact bonds). It’s a great example of what government can do with public dollars: funding the ecosystem for transformative work that is otherwise unlikely to emerge. At Field States, we focus on place, so we couldn’t help but wonder… what if we had an ARPA-x* for cities? Downtowns already struggling with the “urban doom loop” are about to get hit with a wave of building foreclosures as pre-Covid leases expire. Now is the moment to write a new chapter in the book of cities—questioning everything from zoning, to rent, to transportation. We need to explore new models, pushing the boundaries of who uses downtowns, for what, and who benefits. In short, we have to reimagine cities: https://lnkd.in/gtZuqVDv We believe a better future requires outcomes-oriented investment in transformative projects. Projects as much about social as built infrastructure, that benefit populations deprioritized by recent decades of urban design and development, with effects that ripple out to support constellations of small businesses and inspire new projects in their wake. Conventional financing’s expectation of returns make these projects difficult to launch. Enter ARPA-x for cities! Making pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies, new patterns of urban development, capabilities and resources with the potential to transform urban cores and their social infrastructure in ways traditional commercial developments won’t. Its solutions would aim to benefit everyone. Like ARPA-H, funding would be first-position, risk-tolerant, long-game—and it would have massive social implications, reversing the doom loop and changing how we think about urban futures. ——— Can you imagine (or do you already see) this happening where you live? Also: since 'C' is taken by Climate, what letter do you think ARPA-x for cities should use? #ARPAforCities

"The cost of planning is often greater than the cost of just trying" I learned this from Matthew Claudel on a soon-to-be-published episode of the Shaping Chaos podcast. Often, the process makes things more difficult than just doing it, showing it to people, rinse and repeat.