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This research endeavors to fill a conceptual gap in the social science literature on gender, public space, and urban mobilities by exploring how transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience public transit. Although previous research has surveyed gender minorities about harassment and discrimination in a range of environments, little is known about the quality or content of these experiences. Drawing from 25 interviews with transgender and gender nonconforming individuals in Portland, Oregon, this article finds that gender minorities experience frequent harassment while engaging with the public transit system. We articulate the concept of transmobilites to describe the ways that transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience a form of mobility that is altered, shaped, and informed by a broader cultural system that normalizes violence and harassment towards gender minorities. We conclude that gender minorities have unequal access to safe and accessible public transportation when harassment is widespread, normalized, and when policies prohibiting discrimination remain unenforced on urban public transit.

In this article the ambivalence of public policy responses to diversity on the street are documented empirically through a detailed case study of the marginalization of youth from the downtown public spaces of Portland, Maine, USA. 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. They argue that urban revitalization initiatives must embrace diversity — 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. 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. Looking specifically at youth, I explore a relatively underexamined 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, youth have largely been ignored.

This study examines the extent to which specific social and environmental objectives have been achieved in the new urbanist community of Orenco Station (Portland, Oregon). House-level surveys were conducted in Orenco Station, as well as a traditional suburb and two long- established urban neighborhoods. Survey data reveal high levels of social interaction in the new urbanist community, as compared to the comparison neighborhoods. The analysis also reveals a higher level of walking, and an increase in the occasional use of mass transit, in the new urbanist community. However, the majority of residents in all four neighborhoods (including the new urbanist neighborhood) rely on single occupancy vehicles for their regular commute. In sum, this study shows that Orenco Station is very effective in achieving its social objectives, modestly effective in encouraging waling and the occasional use of mass transit–but not very effective in increasing primary reliance on mass transit for commuting.

The socio-legal technology of licensing is one of the primary tools governments use to manage spaces and practices deemed risky or threatening to public order. Licensing requirements thus play a crucial role in shaping routine experiences in public space as well as the trajectories of emerging forms of public life. Yet licensing laws have largely been ignored in critical urban scholarship: too often concerned with the interpretation and critique of popular practices and public spaces, the mundane operations of urban governance are often left to practitioners and policy researchers. This article demonstrates how paying closer attention to licensure can provide valuable and unexpected insights into matters of social equality, urban amenity and economic opportunity. It does so through a comparative inquiry into practices of street food vending in New York City, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Drawing on ethnographic study and interviews, the article demonstrates how licensing can be involved in the production of quite peculiar and unjust geographies of practice, but also how shifts in popular culture can force a reconsideration of taken-for- granted laws. In conclusion, it is argued that a focus on licensing offers a productive pathway for new forms of critical urban research and provides a potential point of leverage in efforts to configure better and more democratic forms of urban public life.

The objective was to investigate associations between features of the physical environment and neighborliness. Measures of the physical environment, including sidewalks, front porches, traffic-calming devices, bars on windows, and the presence of litter or graffiti, were collected using a systematic audit instrument in 10 neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon. Generalized linear regression models were created to model the odds of increasing neighborliness given access to the physical-environment factors of interest. The authors observed a greater probability of higher levels of neighborliness as the total number of positive physical-environment characteristics increased (cumulative odds ratio [95% confidence interval] = 1.69 [1.16, 2.45]) and the results were unchanged after controlling for race, self-reported health, perception of safety, years of neighborhood residence, age of house, market value of house, and proportion of homeowners in neighborhood. Modifiable features of the physical environment may be one mechanism through which people can enhance neighborliness.

Art festivals are a feature of many urban districts undergoing gentrification; they help to catalyze change by drawing a set of consumers with particular cultural interests. This article examines whether the arts produce racial exclusions by examining long-term Black and White residents’ participation in and perceptions of the monthly Last Thursday Art Walks in Portland’s gentrifying Alberta Arts District. We use surveys to measure arts participation and follow-up, in-depth interviews to understand whether long-time residents feel excluded by the arts, and if race is a factor. We find that Black residents participate less in Last Thursdays than White residents, and they often feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. We conclude that the arts-anchored symbolic economy results in racial exclusions that have little to do with differences in arts appreciation, but much to do with perceptions of people associated with the arts, and with residents’ abilities to use the arts to identify with neighborhood changes.