PORTLAND Bill Dennis wrote, "Andres Duany has said that Portland is almost as good as any Canadian city." While accurately reflecting my words, this statement is obviously insufficient to reflect my arguments on the dangers of canonizing Portland. Even so, I would not be moved to respond were it not for the insufferably sanctimonious response to this little jab. This is not to criticize Portland's achievements, but to criticize its failures, just as I criticize failures anywhere, including those of our own projects. I do this, not to fill my time, but to help those who follow from making the same mistakes. To avoid what Jane Jacobs so perfectly called, “The pseudoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success." I criticize the Portland regional plan by demonstrating that exactly the same planning policies—applied to a similar or higher standard--have also been in place in Miami-Dade County where, the flukes of demographics being different, they have not produced any sort of sustained success. Let’s begin with the executive summary: Portland’s urban boundary and the provision of light rail are evidently not tools sufficient to ensure a sustainable pattern of growth. Yet the “urban boundary” and “transit” have become a mantra that is dumbing-down the planning profession even further than usual. For what it is worth, and it’s worth a lot to me, after sustained arguments I seem to have elicited agreement from Peter Calthorpe who now says that these are "necessary but not sufficient tools." I would like to convince him to add that “no one tool is sufficient, but only one is necessary: the neighborhood structure.” The other tools, incidentally, that we agree help matters along are roadway connectivity, a unified school district, metropolitan government, and good demographics. Now lets explain all this by means of a comparison of two cities with the same planning policies, one a reputed success, and the other a failure: Portland and Miami. It is only conceptually interesting that they are on diagonal extremes of the United States, as the Pacific/Atlantic, Asian/Latin, Heat/Cold dialectic are irrelevant to the argument here presented. First, my personal experience of Portland: I repeat it in detail because some of Portland's admirers may have undergone a similar experience, leading to similar deluded conclusions. I have visited Portland five times. All of them were invitations to public speaking and so in all cases I was "handled" by my hosts and shown the many wonderful places that make it a great, livable city. I agreed that Portland was indeed great and livable and praised the city accordingly. This was pleasant to hear and thus the repeated invitations to speak. On the fifth trip however, before my engagement, I "escaped" my hosts and went out to visit the famous urban boundary on my own. And what did I find, to my surprise? That as soon as one left the urban sectors of prewar vintage (to which all my prior visits had been confined) the areas all the way out to the urban boundary were nothing but the usual sprawl that one finds is any American city, no better than in Miami. So the outcome wasn’t that different after all. In Portland, as elsewhere, most of the prewar urbanism is excellent and most of the postwar version is junk. What was evidently missing in the newer areas was the traditional neighborhood structure of mixed-use, inclusive housing and walkable streets. But can’t one say that an urban boundary is an achievement in itself? That depends on where you draw it, and from that point of view, Portland’s was not a great achievement. It was drawn 20 years "out," which is to say slack enough to include twenty years of future growth. Now, that sort of urban boundary is not too difficult to achieve, as it has the automatic backing of the hundreds of farmers and assorted speculators that become instantly and substantially wealthier by being suddenly enclosed within it. The only challenge is to inform them of that fact and then to collect their support for the new boundary. We could all make a great living if our offices were specialized in drawing urban boundaries twenty years out. And it is even easier to do the job if it is to be continuously expanded to maintain a supply of building sites, so that even the problematic fringe immediately outside the urban boundary could be mollified by a simple "wait your turn." That is the Portland boundary; correct me if I am wrong. That is the not-too-heroic story in broad strokes, but there is also a subtle and pervasive corrosion in detail that takes place as a result: scrutiny of development proposals within the urban boundary by the environmental community is thereby neutralized. How do I know this? Well, a colleague of mine experienced in the fierce contests that accompany development applications elsewhere, moved out to Portland to practice. He reported back that he had seen nothing like the developers he found in Portland--arrogant and inflexible in the extreme, utterly different from their much more malleable, beaten-up, brethren who after twenty years of encountering opposition by environmentalists are quite prepared to compromise. But not in Portland. There they are the survivors of a nearly extinct tribe that has everywhere else disappeared, the inflexible developer. The Portland developer should be interviewed for the Smithsonian oral history archives along with assorted sharecroppers and buffalo hunters. How had they survived? Only because their natural predator, the environmentalist, had been neutralized by the sense of security that the urban boundary provided; they were dancing in celebration of nature while the urbanism went to hell. A small aside: this is precisely the problem with any specialist: they concern themselves only with their prerogative, knowing nothing of the overall good. But that is the subject of another essay. Now, over to Miami to nail the argument. By most of the currently fashionable standards, Miami is a much better example of planning than Portland. Here’s the list: Miami has an urban boundary, but earlier than Portland's. It was invested in 1976 and it was drawn tight, right at the edge of development. It comes up for adjustment every two years and it is rarely expanded more than a few hundred acres through a very public process. Portland’s, incidentally, surreptitiously expanded by nearly 5000 acres during its first twenty years. And now, as urban sprawl approaches, it is immediately up for an expansion of six thousand acres. The argument can be made: has it held at all? Has it, in fact, accomplished anything other than to neutralize the environmentalist opposition and to build the Portland myth? But Miami-Dade County does not just have a superior sort of urban boundary, it also manifests a veritable checklist of fulfilled urbanist desires. Transit? Well Miami Dade has had a light rail system since 1985, with twenty stops. And this system is no mere trolley, but entirely elevated, the equivalent of the Washington subway in speed and efficiency (the same designers did it). And it is extended at the downtown by an elevated people-mover of several miles, one of only two in the country, and the most extensive by far. This high-tech transit is supplemented by a serviceable bus system to the furthest reaches of suburbia. And there is a commuter rail connection up the coast all the way to Palm Beach 85 miles away. The transit purveyors, clearly, are doing their job. Then, amazingly, there is an integrated school board. The quality of the schools is similar enough between urban and suburban areas that they are not an incentive to leave the city. Miami is not like Philadelphia, where even those who love the urban life must, upon the advent of children, abandon their beloved townhouses for the suburban school districts. Miami doesn’t have that problem; if anything, the suburban schools are the overcrowded ones. Then, astoundingly, Miami-Dade County has had metropolitan government since 1957. Yes, indeed, an enormous county is planned concurrently, its two dozen different municipalities and the unincorporated areas in unison. Portland doesn’t have that. In fact, for most American cities this is an unattainable ideal. Miami has it. And as if this weren’t wonderful enough, Dade County is under the aegis of a regional planning council that coordinates the growth of the three bordering counties. And to top it all, there is the Florida Comprehensive Planning Act of 1988, based on the principle of concurrency and providing the most draconian statewide planning discipline in the United States. So. . . why isn’t Miami Dade County the success of the nation--the Portland of the South--the El Dorado of the planning profession? Because its quality of life is bad. This is for one reason above all others: none of its multiple layers of planning promotes the neighborhood structure, and without the neighborhood structure nothing else works: not transit, not traffic, nothing. The neighborhood structure is the catalyst that pulls all else together. I would not be surprised if the planning profession disagrees with this reasoning. As the neighborhood structure is the one thing that they are not talking about. In fact, it is perhaps the one thing that it considers nostalgic, impossible, unlikely, utopian, dispensable, etc. So be it. As Jane Jacobs pointed out: “Although city planning lacks tactics for building cities that work like cities, it does possess plenty of tactics.”