The Case of Youth in Downtown Portland, Maine*

by Loretta Lees
King’s College, London

To teach tolerance - to create cosmopolitans - a city must show a substantial amount of
“anarchy’”. But if the anarchy is not to overwhelm and negate the lesson, it must be regulated
(Lofland, 1998: 243).

Pag. 1 of 3

Visions of urban renaissance

Over the last three decades schemes to attract the wealthy middle classes back to the
inner city have become central to urban redevelopment strategies. Such redevelopment
programmes depend on a form of liberal romanticism and associated beliefs about the
connections between diversity, vitality and urban space, which, according to Berman
(1983), are persistent themes in modern culture. They are driven by the belief that the
decline of once vibrant inner cities was precipitated by the post-war flight of the middle
classes to secluded suburban enclaves and that to reverse urban decline it is necessary to
entice the middle classes back to city centres so as to make them more diverse,
interesting and economically vibrant places (Beauregard, 1993; Zukin, 1998).

Accordingly urban planners, architects, and property developers have become
increasingly concerned with improving the quality of urban life and the public spaces
on which it depends (see Ellin, 1996). In their “construction” of the postmodern city,
they argue that urban revitalization initiatives must embrace diversity, both cultural and
economic, as well as functional and spatial. This diversity of different “diversities” is
often under-theorized as are the benefits of, and relationships among, social and cultural
diversity, economic diversification, mixed-use and multi-purpose zoning, political
pluralism and democratic public space. Urban scholars are now beginning to explore the
conflicts that arise over different constructions of diversity in (and of) public space
(Mitchell, 1995; Ruddick, 1996a; Lees 1998a). More typically, however, the value of
“diversity” is simply taken for granted in work ranging from Jane Jacobs’ (1961) classic
The Death and Life of Great American Cities to planning documents (Lees, 2003), and
more academic discussions of the sensual stimulation of the heterogeneous cityscape
and the democratic potential of encountering difference on the street (e.g. Sennett,
1990; Sandercock, 1998). What these different theorizations share in common is a
tendency to associate diversity with the urban and to celebrate it as the necessary
antidote to both the centripetal forces of commercialized homogeneity and the
centrifugal forces of anonymous suburban sprawl, malling and alienation.

Perhaps the most visible manifestation of these visions of urban renaissance is
gentrification. Urban geographers and sociologists have extensively debated the cultural
and economic imperatives driving residential gentrification (for a recent review see
Lees, 2000). However, urban revitalization strategies are aimed not just at attracting
middle-class gentrifiers as resident taxpayers, but also at bringing them back to urban
areas as consuming, and in that spending, visitors. Despite this, there has been less
academic discussion of the impact of building the city as an entertainment venue for the
middle classes. Eisinger (2000), for instance, notes that publicly subsidized convention
centres and sports arenas often fail to deliver the benefits promised to local residents by
civic elites and business interests. Riechl (1999) tells the story of the ousting of low-
income citizens to serve commercial interests in the reconstruction of Times Square,
while Hannigan (1998) claims the process of appropriating urban public spaces through
modes of consumption that limit access is a more general feature of what he calls the
“postmodern metropolis” (see also Davis, 1990; Sorkin, 1992).

These writings follow on from Zukin’s (1982; 1995) pioneering work on the role of
culture in postmodern and post-industrial cities. The economic fortunes of cities rest
increasingly now on cultural industries and attractions in which competitive advantage
is not derived from factor endowments and industry so much as from fashion and
identity (Scott, 2000). Cities compete by making themselves distinctive places of
consumption in which to satisfy new upscale demands for commercialized leisure,
recreation and other experiences. For Zukin and critics like her (e.g. Bassett, 1993;
Kearns and Philo, 1993; Smith, 1996), this kind of arts- and entertainment-based urban
redevelopment has often led to the virtual privatization of public space, what she terms
“domestication by cappuccino”. In addition to the sorts of overt controls over behaviour,
such as those described by Riechl (1999) in Times Square, the very atmosphere of
conspicuous consumption cultivated in such places creates certain normalizing and
exclusionary effects that tend to marginalize certain kinds of people and activities. For
instance, the widely imitated harbour redevelopments designed by the developer James
Rouse at Quincy Market in Boston, South Street Seaport in New York (see Boyer,
1992), and in Harbor Place, Baltimore (see Harvey, 2000) are organized around leisure,
shopping and eating out (Judd and Fainstein, 1999; Marshall, 2001). These commercial
establishments are carefully managed so as to attract the kind of upscale shoppers and
tourists with the disposable income necessary to enjoy the commercial facilities
designed to cater to those tastes. Though purporting to be open to all, these new public
spaces “emphasising art, culture, and consumption” are in practice socially exclusive
and “insulated from the poor and other so called “deviants”" (Squires, 1994: 89). To
focus on these urban redevelopment successes without recognizing that such a
celebration is often experienced by some at the expense of others, is to marginalize
further these “others” (ibid.: 82).

These accounts of the displacement and domestication effected by urban renaissance
initiatives suggest an underlying ambivalence about urban diversity. Ironically, efforts
to foster genuine public culture on the street often subvert that very goal, as efforts to
secure urban space stifle its celebrated diversity and vitality (Lees, 1998a: 251). It is
paradoxical that urban renaissance promotes cultural diversity at the same time as
promoting forms of conspicuous consumption and social control that limit diversity. As
Goss (1997: 80) notes, Beauregard (1993; 1995) has revealed how:

this ambivalence, which results from a combination of a dualistic system of cultural values
and a contradiction-prone capitalist economy, manifests itself in a more or less persistent
post-war narrative of ascension, degeneration, and redemption that serves to naturalize the
changing fortunes of cities.

In this article I explore this underlying ambivalence through a case study of urban
redevelopment initiatives in Portland, Maine. Like many older cities, Portland has
sought to reinvent itself in the face of declining primary and secondary industries.
Portland has fared better than most in attracting new investment and service sector
employment into the city centre. Over the last 25 years its historic “Old Port” district has
been transformed from a somewhat dilapidated area of vacant warehouses and
storefronts into a hive of commercial activity and a major visitor attraction. In
emphasizing the importance of tourism-related growth and the contribution of a historic
built environment, specialty shopping, dining and entertainment to that end, the City of
Portland has followed a common redevelopment path. Municipal officials seek to
counter suburban and ex-urban development and the ghosting of the inner city by
creating a vibrant, liveable inner city. Cultural policy and urban policy meet in the
redesign of downtown space defined by consumption, shopping and service industries:
“It is an aesthetic, marketing a certain post-industrial myth of the city” (Worpole and
Greenhalgh, 1996: 34). In Portland, however, a series of conflicts between youth and
local business interests have exposed some contradictions underlying these wider
efforts to make a revitalized street life the cornerstone of commercial and residential
redevelopment.

In exploring this particular case study I have three objectives. First, I want to
document empirically the ambivalence of public policy responses to diversity on the
street. Diversity is figured alternatively as an obstacle to, the means for, and even the
objective of urban regeneration. By documenting the ambiguity and inconsistency of
responses to diversity, I hope both to clarify the diversity of “diversity” in urban theory
and to counter the cynicism (see also Lees, 1997; 1998a) sometimes expressed in the
literature about the fate of public space and the political achievements of public
contestation over the privatization and control of public space (seen especially in Davis,
1990 and Smith, 1996; 1999). It is my contention that this ambivalence is not simply a
smokescreen for vested commercial interests, but also provides opportunities for
expressing alternative visions of what diversity and the city itself should be.

Second, by looking at a smaller city, I seek to counterbalance the emphasis given to
larger cities like New York, Los Angeles and London in the literature (cf. Lees, 1998b).
There are important questions about the degree to which the arts- and entertainment-
based forms of urban redevelopment used in those very large cities can be scaled down
to smaller ones. Indeed, it may well be that, far from providing a model for successful
urban regeneration in Portland and other mid-sized cities in New England, the much-
heralded success of Quincy Market in Boston is in some sense parasitic upon them.

Finally, by looking specifically at youth, I hope to explore a relatively under
examined aspect of inner-city diversity. While there is a relatively well-developed
literature about the contested place of low-income groups, racial minorities and the
homeless in urban redevelopment initiatives (for examples see Davis, 1990; Rutheiser,
1996; Smith, 1996; Mitchell, 1997), youth have largely been ignored (although see Lees
and Demeritt, 1998).

The article is structured as follows. After discussing my methodology and
introducing the case study site, I look in more detail at the ambivalence of urban
renaissance through a discourse analysis of diversity rhetoric in City of Portland
planning documents. Then, in the following section I explore the tensions contained
within these ambivalent ideas of diversity in the city by looking at the ways they have
been enacted and contested in the long-standing conflict between downtown business
interests and Portland youth. I conclude by considering whether such hetero-zoned
spaces can be politically useful in the formulation of a politics of difference.

Methodology

In undertaking this research into recent urban redevelopment initiatives in downtown
Portland, Maine, I used a multi-method approach. First, I examined local planning and
policy documents, press reports and “letters to the editor” in Portland newspapers
published over the last 12 years as well as census and other relevant statistics for the
city. This provided a factual background and historical context in which to situate my
interpretation of contemporary debates in the city. Second, I undertook a discourse
analysis of the redevelopment rhetoric in Portland’s planning and policy documents
focusing on the contested ideas about diversity, the public, and the city at issue therein.
Third, I conducted in-depth interviews, both in person and over the phone, with city
officials, planners and local business owners to gain insights into the different ways the
transformation of Portland was understood and contested. Given the local sensitivity of
the issues, informants were offered anonymity. Fourth, during the two summer field
seasons I spent visiting Portland in 1998 and 1999 I engaged in participant observation
of the “Old Port” district of Portland and the public spaces at issue in the debates about
Portland’s redevelopment. This included in-depth discussions with youth using those
spaces. The quotations I cite are taken from my notes of what was said (see Hoggart et
al., 2002: 281-2). And finally, as a result of newspaper coverage of this research,
coverage that pitted me against Portland’s Police Chief Michael Chitwood, I was
interviewed by WMPG - Portland’s youth radio station where again my views were
compared with those of Police Chief Chitwood and youth in Portland. This aided (and
complicated) the participatory aspect of this research (see Lees, 1999).

Urban redevelopment in Portland

Located 115 miles northeast of Boston, Portland is the largest metropolitan
area in the State of Maine and gateway to what car license plates in the
state proudly call “Vacationland”. The visitor class is an important one for Portland as it
is for the state as a whole. Tourism is Maine’s second largest industry by value and the
largest employer (Lachance, 2001). Unlike many smaller mill towns in northern New
England, Portland has seen substantial population growth, fed largely by professional
and managerial in-migrants from other cities and towns in New England but also, more
recently, by minority immigrant and refugee populations - for example, Somalis and
Sudanese make up half of the case load at the City’s Refugee and Immigrant Case
Management Services Office (Duranleau and Carignan, 2001). The population of
metropolitan Portland increased from 174,403 in 1970 to 243,537 in 2000, with most of
the increase located in the less dense portions of the city off the peninsula (US Census,
2001). Nevertheless the city remains overwhelmingly white and predominantly native
born (1).
Associated with these demographic shifts was significant economic restructuring.
Always the primate city in northern New England, Portland’s position in the regional
urban system has changed quite considerably. Once a lively maritime centre and the
winter port for Montreal, Portland’s docks, warehouses and shipyards went into decline in
the late 1800s (Babcock, 1986). Despite brief spurts of activity during the world wars,
employment in maritime industries reached its nadir in the early 1960s. As Portland’s
harbour declined, so too did the city’s light manufacturing. In their place, the city has
shifted successfully into providing back office functions for Boston-based insurance and
financial service firms (sometimes known as the Boston-ripple effect) as well as
continuing its role, now more economically significant than ever, as the financial, medical
and legal hub for the State of Maine. According to US Department of Labor (2001)
statistics, almost 9% of jobs in Portland are in finance, insurance and real estate, the
highest percentage of any locality in the state and one of the highest in New England.
That transition from a maritime and manufacturing base to a service sector one is
reflected in Portland’s built environment. The Old Port district on the slope overlooking
the waterfront was the commercial heart of the historic mercantile city.
Its oldest buildings, mostly Federal style mansions of the city’s first merchant princes,
date back to the early nineteenth century. Despite a flurry of mid-rise office
construction in the 1910-20s and again in the 1970s, the majority of Portland’s historic
low rise warehouses, office blocks, and storefronts date from the period immediately
after the 1866 Great Fire, which destroyed much of the city. This historic fabric was
preserved during the floodtide of “urban renewal” and highway construction that swept
over other portions of the city during the 1960s by Portland’s historic preservation
movement. As the first gentrifiers were putting sweat equity into the old, often
dilapidated, residential properties around the city’s historic core, the Old Port became a
counter-cultural refuge. Entrepreneurial hippies rented storefronts and set up marginal
enterprises in the Old Port, while the large department stores fled downtown for the
suburbs. In the 1970s, the Old Port developed into a lively retail centre, peppered with
bars, restaurants, and small, independently owned specialty shops, which remain its
strength today. Their commercial success helped to spur, during the 1980s, extensive
redevelopment in the Old Port and the downtown more generally for both office and
residential purposes, though further conversion of the piers along Commercial Street to
residential and office use was halted by a city campaign to “save” what still remained of
the working waterfront (2).
By the mid-1980s Portland was labelled one of the hottest real estate markets
in the United States (Real Estate Investment Journal, 1986, cited in Knopp
and Kujawa, 1993: 118). One million square feet of new downtown office space
was constructed between 1985 and 1988, increasing the total supply by almost
a third (Schlosberg, 1988: 45).
Recessions in the late 1980s and early 1990s slowed but did not entirely stop the
pace of redevelopment downtown. By the mid-1990s investment was spreading up the
slope from the Old Port and along Congress Street under the auspices of the city’s Arts
District and the philanthropic efforts of Portland native and microchip heiress Elizabeth
Noyce (3). In addition to making substantial investments in redeveloping downtown real
estate, Noyce also made large donations to the Portland Museum of Art and the Maine
Historical Society, two institutions crucial to the creation in 1995 of Portland’s Arts
District. Her generosity provided the initial seed money for the $5 million Portland
Public Market, which opened in 1998 to widespread acclaim both locally and from the
International Downtown Association, which gave it a “Downtown Achievement Merit
Award” for “its demonstration of how philanthropy, small business, and government can
create a forward-looking commercial enterprise” and contribute to “downtown
revitalization” (Portland Market, 2001). Noyce was also instrumental in persuading
the renowned Maine retailer LL Bean to locate an outlet on Congress Street in a
building once occupied by a department store that had moved to the Maine Mall in
suburban South Portland. For many in the city, the arrival of LL Bean was a symbol that
the downtown had finally turned a corner. As one older resident explained to me:

It was a big deal to go shopping downtown when I was kid. All that excitement. I remember
sitting in the car as we drove round and round looking for a place to park […] It hasn’t been
like that for years now […] All the shops have gone to the mall […] But now that they’re [LL
Bean] here it seems to be changing.

Several waves of investment later, the 50-acre Old Port is now the site of more than
500 businesses, from law firms to trendy boutiques and some of the best restaurants
north of Boston. Their presence, in turn, has helped establish the Old Port as one of the
most visited tourist attractions in the State. As the owner of one of Portland’s best hotels
explained: “The Old Port is the best asset that Maine has […] If it succeeds, the entire
state succeeds”. That claim is difficult to evaluate, not least because of the ambiguity
about what might constitute “success”. For some “success” is economic, whereas others
prefer to judge Portland’s redevelopment in terms of a more intangible sense of quality
of life, and still others see quality of life in instrumental terms as a means to attracting
inward investment. The tension between these alternate criteria is an abiding one in the
city.
Measured by consumer retail sales, which, given the mix of commercial activity in
the Old Port, is not an unreasonable economic indicator, the rate of increase within the
City of Portland has actually been lower than that in the state as a whole and in
suburban South Portland, which is also home to the Maine Mall, downtown’s chief
retail competitor (source: Maine State Planning Office, 2002).
Confronted with this somewhat disappointing result, Portland boosters
insist that the economic importance of the Old Port is not simply its
direct contributions to income and employment, but also its indirect contribution to the
city’s quality of life and thus its ability to attract and retain investment and skilled
labour in the new knowledge economy. The Old Port features prominently in the
official place marketing of the City of Portland. Created in 1992 by Portland City
Council as a Downtown Improvement District Corporation, Portland Downtown
District (PDD) is funded by an assessment on property within the boundaries of the
district and has developed a marketing strategy that promotes the Old Port to residents,
workers and visitors through advertising, public relations and special events (PDD,
1997). The idea that the Old Port is an engine of growth in the city is something of an
article of faith amongst business and civic leaders in the city, and was repeated to me in
various forms by a number of different informants.

Certainly commercial redevelopment of the Old Port helped spur residential
reoccupation of the downtown, halting a half century of population decline that has left
the older neighbourhoods of peninsular Portland with disproportionate numbers of
elderly, low income, minority, and otherwise socially marginal residents (City of
Portland 1991: 41; US Census 1990-2000). Residential gentrification in and around
the Old Port has helped to push up per capita income to near the city wide average, but
it has also exacerbated problems of income inequality and consequent social distance between
gentrifiers with high disposable incomes and other downtown residents, as indicated by
median household income figures, which are well below those of the city as a whole.
Like many other cities, the City of Portland has sought to facilitate redevelopment by
devoting public resources, not just to municipal functions, but to promoting their city as
an attractive “place to play” (Eisinger, 2000: 316-17; see also Hannigan, 1998; Judd and
Fainstein, 1999). For instance, in 1992 the City agreed to spend $1.5 million to upgrade
the city-owned Hadlock Field so as to attract a minor league baseball franchise. City
manager Robert Ganley explained at the time: “What I’ve said from the beginning is,
there are certain things that make an area a nice place to live. Baseball adds a great
piece to that puzzle” (quoted in Ford, 1992: 33). Three years later the City agreed to
create the Portland Arts District and to back local arts groups with public money, both
direct grants and property tax rebates, in the belief that they would improve quality of
life and thereby spur the redevelopment of downtown (City of Portland 1991; Herbert
Sprouse Consulting et al., 1995) (4). As Knopp and Kujawa (1993: 121) note, “central to
the reinvestment process in Portland was the city’s commodification as a place [in
which its] liveability was frequently touted as its greatest asset”.

Critics, like Eisinger (2000), argue that this kind of arts- and entertainment-led
redevelopment strategy usually pits the interests of city residents against those of a
“visitor-class” from outside the city. However, in Portland, this has not really been the
case, not least because remaking downtown Portland as an attractive place for visiting
tourists has gone hand-in-hand with rebuilding it for a resident middle class. Although
some flagship developments, like the new LL Bean outlet, are aimed largely at visitors
to the city, both tourists and day-trippers from southern Maine, the city’s new public
market caters largely to local residents, who also make up 60% of the visitors to the
major cultural institutions in the city’s Arts District (City of Portland, 1991: 37). More
importantly, Portland has not depended on the kind of mega-projects financed through
local taxpayer guaranteed bonds that are the chief object of Eisinger’s political
economy critique (5). If property taxes in the City of Portland are relatively high - and
they are - it is because of the money spent on education (38% of the 2001 budget),
health and social services (12.6%) and public safety (10.3%), not because the city has
squandered public money on bread-and-circuses to attract the visitor class, which in any
event is severely limited by state budgetary regulations (City of Portland, 2001a: 32).

Urban redevelopment in Portland has largely been market-led and dependent upon
individual entrepreneurial energy rather than large-scale government initiatives (though
it has also benefited from a favourable federal tax regime). Rather than directing the
redevelopment of downtown Portland, the City has been in the position of trying to
steer, through the planning process, and capitalize on, through its place marketing
efforts, a commercially-led and substantially grassroots process of entertainment-led
reinvestment. That dependence on the market creates other conflicts but they are not
organized spatially in terms of resident versus visitor, as Eisinger (2000) implies.
Instead, conflicts over the arts- and entertainment-led redevelopment of Portland have
reflected class, age and identity divisions within the city that have been expressed
through conflicts over competing conceptions of public space and the public good and
the most appropriate means of achieving those ends.

next page of Loretta Lees’ essay
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Loretta Lees: The Ambivalence of Diversity and the Politics of Urban Renaissance: The Case
of Youth in Downtown Portland, Maine. First published on International Journal of Urban and Regional Research - Volume 27.3 Septemeber 2003, 613-34. (c) Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing.

* Thanks to Larry Knopp whose earlier work on Portland, Maine, prompted this research. Also to David Demeritt for commenting on various drafts. This research was funded by an HSBC Holdings Research Grant from the Royal Geographical Society, UK. At various stages of completion the research has been presented to the 1999 Association of American Geographer’s Conference in Honolulu, the 1999 Geography Seminar Series at the University of Birmingham, the 2000 Institute of British Geographer’s Conference in Brighton, the 2000 Geography Seminar Series at Loughborough University and the 2001 Geography Seminar Series at Reading University. Thanks to all these audiences for their useful commentary.

(1) In 2000 the City of Portland was 91.3% white and Cumberland County as a whole remained predominantly native born - 95.7% (the data for Portland city is not yet available) (US Census, 2001).

(2) Fears about the “death” of the working harbour were first sparked by proposals in the mid-1980s to redevelop the piers along Commercial Street, which were blocked by voter initiative in 1987. Since that time the City has intervened repeatedly to support continued maritime activity in Portland’s harbour. It provided public funds to support the creation of a new fish auction and landing facility and the construction of a dry dock by the Bath Iron Works. In 1992, it approved a new plan for the waterfront including a zoning ordinance requiring all new businesses within 300 feet of the waterfront to be maritime related, which effectively killed proposals being muted at the time to build more luxury condominiums along the docks (Walker and Arnn, 1998). But what has really saved Portland’s working harbour has been the development of activities such as whale watching and pleasure cruising aimed at tourists and other visitors. Now that Bath Iron Works has not renewed its
lease on the city-owned dry dock there are proposals to create in its place parking and other visitor facilities to accommodate large cruise ships, further cementing Portland’s place as the gateway to “vacationland” (Port of Portland, 2002).

(3) Noyce’s fortune came from a divorce settlement from her husband Robert Noyce who was a coinventor of the micro-chip. She gave $75 million away to Maine charities and organizations.

(4) The City Council has recently pledged to spend 0.5% of its annual capital improvement budget to repair existing works of art and to commission new ones in an attempt to beautify the downtown (Associated Press, 10 May 2001: 5).

(5) However, county taxpayers did fund the construction of the Cumberland County Civic Center in downtown Portland, which was recently cited in a Manchester, NH debate about whether to use public bond money to build a civic centre there as part of a downtown revitalization strategy (Cousineau, 1998).

Confronting Strategies in Urban Reinvention :: The Urban Reinventors :: #1 Issue - June 07