Gabriella Griffin / The Mossy Log
Lewis & Clark’s annual Environment Across Boundaries Symposium turned to Portland’s Albina neighborhood this year, with a keynote speaker and panelists exploring what makes a city livable.
Now in its 29th year, the symposium, known as ENVX, ran from Sept. 28 through Oct. 2 under the theme “Livable Cities,” inspired by LC’s recent partnership with the Albina Vision Trust. The five-day event featured a keynote speaker, two panels, a film and a small-group discussion about gathering for a common cause: being better neighbors to one another.
The student co-chairs of this symposium were Haley Middendorf ’27, David Pincus ’27 and Randall Wise ’28. The three students ensured that the symposium ran smoothly by coordinating contacts and venues. They were also facilitating conversations and managing the planning committee.
Tesla Curtis ’29, studying English and environmental studies, was part of the planning committee and explained the process of choosing the theme: “Livable Cities.”
The student co-chairs wanted to incorporate LC’s partnership with the Albina Vision Trust and the city of Portland into this year’s symposium. The Albina Vision Trust is a nonprofit organization that prioritizes community by buying back land and reestablishing Black roots in Portland’s historically Black Albina neighborhood. To decide which events and panels to include in this symposium, organizers asked LC students to write a page on what they thought a livable city would look like and what it should include.
During the planning process, the organizers were in close contact with the Rev. Dennis Payne of the First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. In their conversations, Payne emphasized the importance of community and helped in brainstorming plans for the symposium’s final event — a small group discussion on Friday.
Community was a recurring theme throughout the symposium. Other prominent themes throughout the student feedback included transportation and housing. Students thought that housing should be affordable, in walkable locations with well-equipped schools, grocery stores and parks nearby.
Student organizers wanted the events to reflect the major themes of the Albina Vision Trust partnership — creating and maintaining livable communities. When Curtis described how this partnership could take shape as a symposium, she said students in listening events hosted by Jim Proctor for his ENVS 160 class so that the student organizers could attend and take notes on what is important to consider when structuring the panels and deciding what kinds of speakers they wanted to represent their theme. The students then took the notes to the planning committee, where they spent the spring “sorting through those notes and deciding what we could do, and what we couldn’t do,” Curtis said.
The first event of the symposium was a keynote presentation on Monday, Sept. 28 by Shani Adia Evans, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston. She discussed her book, “We Belong Here,” which examines how longtime Black residents of Portland’s Albina neighborhood experience gentrification. Evans began by defining race as “a system that categorizes people based on human bodies, but also on ancestry and origin.”
Evans went on to talk about the idea of livable cities in racialized spaces, saying that those racialized spaces are socially constructed and organized into an unfair hierarchy. He explained that this hierarchy is reinforced through interactions such as surveillance, microaggressions and violence.
Evans used a qualitative approach in her research, conducting interviews with 45 Black Portland residents, observing interactions in public spaces and analyzing archival documents.
She introduced the theories of white space — the assertion of white racial dominance in space — and Black placemaking, which explores the convergence of belonging, endurance and resistance.
Evans outlined possibilities for making more livable cities by first asking us to challenge ideologies that reinforce white supremacy. She noted the importance of recognizing that white people have advantages that create disadvantages for people of other races. Evans also discussed how we can transform interactions that dehumanize people and reinforce the racial hierarchy.
On Tuesday, Sept. 29, the ENVX symposium hosted a panel about housing with various speakers. They invited Randal Wyatt, an entrepreneur who launched Take Ownership PDX, a nonprofit organization that rebuilds and renovates the homes of Black families in Portland, with the help of volunteers. Other speakers who were part of the housing panel included real estate agent Bonnie Roseman, Tom Armstrong, who is the supervising planner for the Housing and Economic Planning program for the City of Portland, and Lennie Edwards, a longtime Albina resident.
Armstrong said that the city aims to improve the livability of communities by improving preexisting neighborhoods and building new tightly knit neighborhoods of townhouses and apartments near essential facilities.
“I think we’ve built close to 3,500 units in Portland. We’ve been intentional about where those units go, in what we call high opportunity neighborhoods, so close to grocery stores, close to parks, not building them all in East Portland,” he said.
Roseman added that building more livable spaces would not address the root of the problem, because white people are typically taking up these spaces, repeating the cycle of displacement for marginalized people. She told Armstrong that it will take more than what the city is planning to make housing truly accessible.
At the end of the conversation, Kim Cameron-Domínguez, assistant professor of anthropology, asked panelists what words they could share with the student population in the audience.
“You don’t have to be an expert on a topic to make an impact,” Wyatt said.
He shared the story of the beginning of his business, which he started right out of college, unaware of anything he was doing, but knowing that it was something important to him.
“Try to figure out what you care about and then fight for it,” Roseman said.
She highlighted that LC students are in a transformative period of their lives. They are finding their place in the world, tuning their voice, figuring out what matters to them and doing what they can to bring their dreams into reality.
Edwards said that community means having a common duty to people around you. Everyone holds a role and responsibility in creating and fostering community.
Cameron-Domínguez emphasized that white people have a specific role to play in fostering a comfortable and welcoming environment in the communities they are a part of.
Curtis hoped that the symposium was a good example of how communities are developed. She discussed what she hoped students would take away from the symposium.
“Because we are such a white school, to realize the very complex history of Oregon — especially for people who haven’t grown up here, it can be really easy to overlook it,” she said.
Curtis said that because this year’s symposium was focused on local issues, she hopes that ideas for the next ENVX symposium will focus on a more global scale, though no definite theme has been decided.
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