What If? The Emerald Canal

Emerald Canal model between Oak & Pearl to the Amazon channel (image source: pages.uoregon.edu/diethelm/CanalImages.html)
 

During my University of Oregon days, I became aware of a visionary plan to create an eleven-block-long canal through the heart of Eugene that would connect the eastern end of the old Millrace that courses along the backside of the fraternity and sorority houses north of 11th Avenue to the concrete drainage channel extension of Amazon Creek at 17th and Oak. This plan proposed, in the words of its champions, “a rich, local blend of historic millrace and San Antonio Riverwalk.” If realized, the project, which they dubbed “The Emerald Canal,” would be a 35’–40’ wide waterway with broad promenades on both sides meandering beneath native trees within an urban garden.
 
A related but formally separate proposal from the same era envisioned restoring the Millrace’s own downtown dead end near Ferry Street as the anchor for a new riverside district.(1) 
 
I thought the Emerald Canal concept was brilliant. Portions of the Millrace as it existed were navigable by canoe. How great would it be if my friends and I could row further through the city, perhaps pulling ashore along the way at a canal-side café for lattes? How much would such a linear water park and urban village add to Eugene’s identity and sense of place? I found the prospect of the project being realized someday incredibly attractive.
 
Chief among the plan’s proponents was Jerry Diethelm, now Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture & Community Service at the University of Oregon and both a registered architect and a registered landscape architect. The Emerald Canal was his decades-long personal campaign. Its origin story dates back to a 1977 graduate studio he taught called “The Amazon Corridor.” Community interest soon led to the formation in 1982 of a joint City of Eugene/Lane County Emerald Canal Feasibility Task Force, chaired by state senator Margie Hendriksen, with Jerry serving as the principal planning consultant. The task force studied the project for six months and determined it was feasible. The estimated cost back then to make it a reality? $22 million.(2) 
 
After I returned to settle in Eugene in 1988, I was excited to read further news about the Emerald Canal concept. Jerry continued to build the case for the project through the mid-1990s, teaching new design studios around the concept and conducting a series of associated planning studies for the City of Eugene and EWEB, which featured a restored millrace and a Millrace Park at the river confluence. Along with Charlie Porter and Jerry Rust, he formed the Emerald Waterways Citizens Committee, Inc. They had two large, elaborate models built to show around town, garnering support for the project. The wealthy Gloria Teichert became an enthusiastic patron, primed to invest in a water-related project after helping bankroll water-conservation work in Africa. With her backing, the committee rented a storefront space on West Broadway to show off their Emerald Canal models.(3) Then, in what Jerry called his favorite near-miss, Teichert and her brother fell seriously ill and moved to Canada, and the funding vanished with them.

 

Reversing the Canal for Amazon flood release (image source: pages.uoregon.edu/diethelm/reversible.html)

The pitch for the Emerald Canal was never just aesthetic; it promised hydrological benefits as a small but critical link in a regional water circuit: Willamette into the Millrace, through the Emerald Canal to the Amazon, past the Fairgrounds to Fern Ridge Lake, over the dam into the Long Tom River, and back into the Willamette north of Monroe. This circuit would be important for area farming, wetland habitat, and recreational boating access to Fern Ridge. The relatively short in-town connection would create a very large waterway system with benefits for the community everywhere along its course. That’s a testament to how comprehensive Jerry’s vision was.

 
The flood-control argument was the most concrete of the bunch, and probably the one that came closest to actually unlocking money. During a major flood in the Amazon Basin, when an overwhelmed Amazon Creek would back up into the city, a reversible Emerald Canal could carry the excess directly to the Willamette. Engineers at the time argued it was a cheaper fix than building dams upstream.(4) That argument has since been overtaken by events. Since the 1990s, the Amazon Basin’s flood-storage problem has largely been addressed a different way, through the West Eugene Wetlands Plan and the ongoing naturalization of sections of Amazon Creek, including the stretch between 19th and 24th avenues. The federal dollars that might once have built a canal went to restoring wetlands instead.
 
During the years that followed the initial bloom of public enthusiasm, Jerry wrote several pieces for The Register-Guard and Eugene Weekly about the concept. Undaunted but increasingly wry, these included a jab at the City of Eugene, calling it the “Home of the Historic Eugene Millrace Cover-Up,” and later, sardonically ranking the Emerald Canal and Millrace restoration as “No. 8” on the city’s perpetual to-do list.
 
Jerry’s doggedness has gone unrewarded. The Emerald Waterways Citizens Committee is no more, and there’s no next-generation advocate to reopen the conversation. In 2026, he is the plan’s sole institutional memory.
 
The disappointing part of this story, besides the fact that the Emerald Canal is not a reality today, is what it says about ambition and its limitations in Eugene. I want to believe that imaginative, farsighted people can, with popular support, still make dreams come true. That this is increasingly difficult goes without saying. Regardless, I can lament the shrinking of our ambitions while still retaining hope that realizing them remains possible.
 
Chicago architect Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) famously said the following about visionary ideas:

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood, and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”(5)

Burnham wished to inspire large-scale civic planning and bold thinking. This was more attainable in his day than it is now. The reality is that grand visions and big projects aren’t financed the Burnham way anymore, through a single civic will imposing itself on private land. The post-war urban renewal era caused real damage, including here in Eugene. That era’s legacy fueled the apparatus of environmental review, historic preservation law, mandatory public comment, and eminent domain restrictions. This apparatus is necessary, but it has handcuffed those community leaders who have harbored ambitious dreams.

San Antonio's Riverwalk (image source: Library of Congress - public domain)

 

The city can still build big things, but typically only on ground it already controls, with private-sector partners. The Downtown Riverfront development is the case in point. That site was a vacant industrial brownfield: one owner, EWEB, and no other properties to buy out. The Emerald Canal, by contrast, would have run through built-up urban fabric. Digging an open waterway through eleven or twelve blocks of the West University neighborhood would have meant acquiring dozens of parcels, relocating infrastructure, and disrupting a part of town that’s only gotten denser and more expensive since Jerry first proposed the project nearly fifty years ago. Lacking an overwhelming public mandate, the city can no longer draw a diagram through occupied city blocks and proclaim eminent domain. And, tellingly, the Downtown Riverfront’s own master plan, for all its ambition, includes no reopened millrace, no daylighted canal, no flowing water at all beyond the river’s own edge.  
 
Money was and is always an issue, too. The Emerald Canal’s funding path largely depended on passage of a countywide general obligation bond measure, which never occurred. Tax-increment financing wasn’t an option, either, since much of the proposed route lay outside the Downtown Urban Renewal District.
 
The one piece of Jerry’s vision still alive today is the University of Oregon’s own millrace restoration, a concept plan for a bio-habitat-focused Millrace Natural Area, with implementation still in the planning and incremental restoration stage rather than full construction. It’s a worthy project on its own terms. It is also, unmistakably, the shrunken remnant of something much larger: campus-bound, ecological rather than civic, with no ambition to reconnect to downtown at all.
 
Eugene once had the imagination for a project like the Emerald Canal but lacked the means. Today, it is a case study that reads less like a missed chance than a measure of how far Eugene’s civic capacities have contracted. Jerry’s idea was sound, its benefits clear, and his advocacy persisted for nearly fifty years. The problem is that the machinery that might once have carried a project of its scale no longer exists here. My “what if” isn’t a prompt for nostalgia so much as a note on the distance between the Eugene some could imagine and the Eugene that could never build it.

(1) The Emerald Canal plan proper ran from the Millrace’s blunted end near 10th and Ferry to Amazon Creek at 17th and Oak. The separate Millrace Park / lower-Millrace restoration idea, tied to the mid-1990s Ferry Street Corridor and South Bank planning process, would have daylighted the Millrace down to the Willamette on EWEB-owned land, the same parcel now redeveloped as Eugene’s Downtown Riverfront district.

(2) Figure and task force account per Jerry's own 1998 Register-Guard commentary, “Millrace for the Millennium.” Accounting for inflation alone, $22 million is about $70 million today. This understates the current reality, as urban construction and right-of-way costs in a dense, developed corridor have outpaced general inflation for decades. A 2026 estimate that prices in property acquisition would probably run into hundreds of millions.

(3) Sourced to Jerry's own retelling in “Emerald Canal Diary,” Eugene Weekly, June 30, 2005 (reprinted June 27, 2013).

(4) The hydrology was run by LCOG and confirmed by the Army Corps of Engineers at the time, per Jerry's own account.

(5) The quote’s own provenance is shakier than its fame suggests. It first appeared in print nine years after Burnham’s death, in a 1921 biography, with no citation, and historians long suspected an associate had assembled it from letters and speeches rather than recorded it verbatim. A 1910 Chicago newspaper account of a Burnham speech, unearthed in 2019, closes with nearly the same words, which is generally taken as confirming he really did say something close to this.  

The Suburban Dream and the Civic Ledger

 

Salinas_mcMansion.jpg: Brendelderivative work: NVO, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

Mark Zweig posted something on LinkedIn recently that brought a familiar tension back into view: the mismatch between the suburban dream many people still hold and the fiscal realities cities face in trying to support it.

He opened with a jab we've all heard before: architects sneering at “McMansions,” from the vantage point of homes that reflect their own tastes—mid‑century, Victorian, bungalow, or something they designed themselves—many of them with small closets and electrical systems that show their age at inconvenient moments.

My wife and I know this condition well. Our 1,000‑square‑foot house on 34th Avenue was built in 1952, and until last year our electrical system did exactly what he describes. We finally upgraded it as part of a deferred maintenance project, but for decades we lived with the quirks and compromises of an older home. Our neighborhood is an early, modest version of suburbia: small houses on small lots, built when 34th Avenue was near Eugene’s southern edge. Today, miles of similar neighborhoods extend farther south, but the underlying pattern remains low‑density, single‑family, and residential.

That’s important context. I don’t live in a McMansion, but I do live within the development pattern that has shaped this debate. I understand the appeal of space, privacy, and a quiet street. It’s part of my daily life.

Mark’s larger point is straightforward. Millions of people love the suburban ideal: the cul‑de‑sac, the walk‑in closet, the bonus room, the fenced yard, the predictable streets where children can ride their bikes. These preferences aren’t moral failings. They're simply human. They’ve been reinforced for generations by culture, mortgage financing, transportation investments, and zoning codes that made this version of the American Dream seem both normal and attainable.

The dream itself has become more varied in recent years. Housing costs, changing demographics, and shifting priorities have broadened what many people want from a neighborhood. Even so, Mark’s post reminds us of an enduring cultural truth: people value space, privacy, comfort, and a measure of separation from the activity around them.

The civic ledger tells a different story. 

This is where Joe Minicozzi’s work becomes relevant. Joe, founder of Urban3, has spent years showing how patterns of development affect a city's long-term finances. Back in 2015, I wrote about his presentation for the Making Great Cities series, where he showed that compact downtown parcels typically generate dramatically more tax revenue per acre than low‑density suburban development while requiring proportionally less infrastructure to serve them. 

His work reveals something that isn’t obvious when we’re choosing where to live: every development pattern is also an entry in a city’s balance sheet. Streets, water lines, sewer systems, parks, and public services all carry long‑term costs, and those costs don’t necessarily align with our personal preferences. That’s the tension. 

People want space, privacy, and comfort. 

Cities need development patterns they can afford to maintain.

Neither truth invalidates the other. In fact, the debate becomes more productive once we acknowledge that both are legitimate. 

Architects often find themselves caught in the middle, criticized as elitists for questioning suburban expansion while recognizing the fiscal realities cities eventually confront. Yet the real issue isn’t architectural taste. Whether we prefer walk‑in closets or walkable neighborhoods tells us very little about what a city can afford over the long run. 

Perhaps that’s the lesson hiding beneath this familiar debate. We naturally evaluate housing choices at the scale of our own lives. Do we need the extra bedroom, the larger yard, the quieter street? Cities must evaluate those same choices at another scale entirely, where thousands of individual decisions accumulate into miles of pavement, acres of infrastructure, and decades of public obligations. 

The suburban dream and the civic ledger are not opposing visions. They are two ways of seeing the same landscape—one at the scale of individual lives, the other at the scale of the community that sustains them. The challenge isn't choosing between them. It's learning to see through both lenses at once. 

College Hill Cottages Tour and Housing Discussion

At the invitation of the City of Eugene, I joined roughly thirty participants on June 11 for a tour of the College Hill Cottages, followed by dinner and a discussion at Tsunami Books. The evening was part of the City’s ongoing Urban Growth Strategies work and its central question: how can Eugene provide affordable, attainable, and accessible housing over the next twenty years? 

The tour was led by Dylan Lamar of Cultivate, the architect‑developer behind the project. The College Hill Cottages occupy a standard residential lot at 45 W 27th Avenue, but the design intent is unusually focused. Cultivate describes the project as “workforce‑affordable homeownership in a walkable neighborhood”—six compact, zero‑energy‑ready cottages arranged around a south‑facing courtyard. Each one‑bedroom home offers about 800 square feet of living space, with a well‑organized first floor, exposed timbers, a vaulted upper‑level bedroom, an office nook, and a full‑height loft that can flex as a studio or additional sleeping space. 

View of the cluster from the street (my photo).

The cottages are individually owned, with recent pricing around $380,000 per unit. There is no off‑street parking, a deliberate choice supported by Eugene’s middle‑housing code, which does not require parking for cottage clusters. The absence of driveways and garages allows the courtyard to become the defining feature of the site: landscaped and intended for casual social connection, whether through outdoor dining or tending garden beds alongside neighbors. 

Dylan also addressed the tradeoffs inherent in the cottage‑cluster typology. Because Oregon House Bill 2001 defines cottage clusters as groupings of detached dwellings, shared walls are not permitted. The resulting high surface‑area‑to‑volume ratio is less efficient than townhouses, but Cultivate compensates with building‑science rigor: airtight 2x8 walls, operable cedar shutters for solar control, heat-pump space and water heating, and solar‑ready metal roofs. The homes are certified “Zero Energy Ready” by the U.S. Department of Energy. 

One of the cottages (my photo).

After the site visit, we reconvened at Tsunami Books for dinner (provided by Subo Sushi Burritos and El Super Burrito) and a conversation with City staff. The discussion centered on Eugene’s projected need for nearly 26,000 new homes over the next twenty years, as identified in the 2026 Oregon Housing Needs Analysis. Meeting that target would require producing roughly 1,600 dwellings per year—a 70 percent increase over current output. 

City staff outlined the first set of actions heading to Council as “Adoption Package #1,” a group of time‑sensitive land‑use code amendments. These include new development standards for micro‑village housing and single‑room occupancies (SROs), both of which would be permitted in all zones that allow housing. The package also proposes updates to middle‑housing and land‑division standards to reduce cost and complexity, improve clarity during plan review, and align local code with recent state legislation and the State’s Model Housing Code for Large Cities. 

Kitchen (my photo).

The College Hill Cottages served as a useful case study for how one form of middle housing is currently being implemented. Cottage clusters are allowed throughout Eugene’s residential zones but come with strict dimensional and design requirements: minimum lot sizes, limits on building footprints and heights, mandatory shared courtyards, and the requirement that all units be fully detached. The intent is to preserve small‑scale massing and maintain the appearance of individual homes, even as density increases. 

The evening offered a grounded look at how policy, design, and community expectations intersect. Eugene’s housing needs are substantial, and the City is moving quickly to align its code with state requirements while encouraging a broader mix of housing types. The College Hill Cottages illustrate one path forward—small in scale, community‑oriented, and designed to fit within the fabric of established neighborhoods.

San Diego

San Diego (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Roland A. Franklin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

I’m in San Diego this week(1), a city I’ve only previously skirted rather than truly visited. Back in the mid‑1980s, when my wife and I lived in Los Angeles, we made a couple of weekend trips south through here on our way to Ensenada and Rosarito Beach. This is the first occasion I’ve spent any real time in San Diego itself. 

I visited the Salk Institute on Friday, Louis Kahn’s research campus in La Jolla overlooking the Pacific. I’ve known it mostly through photographs, drawings, and decades of architectural reading. Seeing it in person clarified aspects that images only suggest. The proportions, the material discipline, and the way the courtyard aligns with the horizon all register more precisely in real life. It is a building that rewards slow looking. I’ll write a separate post about the Salk, and possibly more about San Diego, once I’m back home. 

The rest of my time has been spent moving around the city on foot and by transit. I’ve been taking in districts shaped by coastal geography, postwar expansion, and the substantial military presence that has influenced land use and employment patterns across the region. Mid‑century research campuses occupy the mesas above La Jolla, while older streetcar‑era neighborhoods such as North Park, South Park, Hillcrest, Mission Hills, Golden Hill, and University Heights extend inland. Large waterfront redevelopment projects stand next to long‑established naval facilities. Dense pockets of urban fabric give way quickly to open views and steep topography. 

San Diego’s particular mix of institutions, climate, and terrain gives it a character distinct from other West Coast cities. The conditions here are not directly transferable to a place like Eugene, but they echo patterns familiar to cities shaped by long‑term civic forces. Infrastructure, geography, and institutional anchors shape a region’s identity over generations. I’m grateful for the opportunity to spend a few days here, studying a place I once only passed through. 

(1)   I chose to visit San Diego now rather than during the AIA 2026 Conference on Architecture & Design in June. During my trips to the 2018 and 2022 conferences in New York and Chicago, I found I preferred spending my time exploring the cities rather than attending the educational sessions. I also no longer need the CEUs. Visiting now avoids the crowds associated with the conference and other busy periods on the calendar.

A Shift in the Civic Landscape

The former Wells Fargo building in downtown Eugene (Google Streetview).

The County’s recent purchase from Eugene School District 4J of the former Wells Fargo building at 99 E. Broadway marks a significant pivot. It signals the end of Lane County’s plan to site a new courthouse on the former Eugene City Hall block and the beginning of a more incremental approach to meeting the needs of the courts, the Sheriff’s Office, and the District Attorney. It also raises a larger question: what becomes of the City Hall block now that its intended purpose has evaporated?

Before considering that question, it’s worth recalling why the County pursued a new courthouse in the first place. The existing building (designed by the firm of Wilmsen & Endicott and completed in 1959) is a structure stretched far beyond its intended capacity. By the time the County undertook a scoping study in 2018–2019, several issues had become impossible to ignore.(1) The most pressing was security and circulation. Modern courthouses rely on three fully separated circulation systems: public, private (judges and staff), and secure (in‑custody defendants). The current building cannot provide this separation. Judges, jurors, victims, witnesses, attorneys, and in-custody defendants routinely cross paths in public corridors, compromising safety and dignity every day.

The structure and building systems also lag contemporary expectations. Mechanical, electrical, and life‑safety components have reached the end of their useful life. The building cannot support modern technology loads, accessibility standards, or seismic requirements. Courtrooms remain undersized and inflexible, unable to accommodate modern jury boxes, ADA-compliant circulation, or the spatial needs of today’s legal practice. Support spaces fall short. And the courthouse cannot expand. Streets and the Public Service Building hem it in, leaving no flexibility for comprehensive modernization.

The Oregon Judicial Department documented these issues, the presiding judge echoed them, and the 2018–2019 scoping process confirmed them. The accompanying conceptual design attempted to address these deficiencies comprehensively and propose a courthouse that met contemporary standards for safety, functionality, and civic presence. Voters rejected the bond measure, state funding disappeared, and the project stalled. The underlying needs remain.

With the failure of the bond measure and the loss of state funding, the County had little choice but to change course. Instead of pursuing a single, transformative project, it has now shifted toward a three-building strategy: 1) keep the existing courthouse; 2) expand justice‑system functions into the Public Service Building; and 3) move other operations into the Wells Fargo building.

Blocking diagram of one of the 2018 Lane County Justice Center development scenarios (Robertson/Sherwood/Architects w/DLR Group).

The Wells Fargo building is not a courthouse-ready structure. It lacks the floor-to-floor heights, structural grid, circulation patterns, and security zoning that modern courthouses require. But it can relieve pressure. By moving a mix of administrative and selected justice‑system functions into the building, including portions of the District Attorney’s Office or the Sheriff’s Office, the County frees space in the Public Service Building for the functions that most directly support the courthouse next door. The Wells Fargo building is a way to buy time and improve conditions without taking on the cost or political risk of a massive new construction project.(2)

The County says it will fund the early phases of this three‑building strategy with existing capital reserves and general‑fund allocations. These will inevitably be modest, phased investments rather than a single large capital outlay. The County will proceed without waiting for new revenue sources.

Given that funding approach, it is reasonable to ask whether selling the former City Hall block could help pay for later improvements. The short answer is yes in principle, but not in a way that changes the County’s immediate capital picture. The block holds real market value, but Eugene’s land economics remain modest. Even a full‑block sale would likely generate only a few million dollars, helpful but not transformative.

Once the County completes the Wells Fargo move, reconfigures the PSB, and outlines a long-term renovation plan for the courthouse, the narrative becomes cleaner: the block no longer serves a justice function and can return to productive private use. The most plausible scenario is that the County eventually sells or ground‑leases the block, and that the proceeds support later phases of courthouse renovation rather than the immediate work that will likely start soon.

The implications of this shift extend beyond courthouse logistics. They also reshape the civic geography of downtown Eugene. The three‑building strategy, in an unintended way, brings the County back into alignment with the city’s earliest civic geometry. When Eugene’s early trustees platted the Park Blocks in the 1850s, they imagined them as the civic heart of the town, framed by public institutions and anchored by the courthouse. That geometry has persisted for more than a century and a half. By choosing to retain the courthouse on its current site rather than construct a new facility on the former City Hall block, the County has, perhaps unwittingly, honored that original civic logic. The Park Blocks remain the symbolic center of the justice system, and the courthouse remains essentially where the founders placed the original building. With that continuity intact, the City Hall block no longer carries any inherited obligation to remain civic land.

Civic uses evolve. Land use is not a sacred inheritance. The City’s move into the former EWEB headquarters, a far better outcome than any of the City Hall schemes pursued over the past two decades, effectively freed the block from its symbolic burden. Today, the County has no program for the site, no funding to develop it, and no political narrative that would support a new civic building there. In that context, private redevelopment offers the most responsible path forward.

Google Earth view of the existing courthouse (left), Lane County Public Services Building (center), and the former City Hall block, now a parking lot owned by the County (right).

A dense mixed-use project, whether housing, hotel, retail, or office, would not reshape the Park Blocks directly. But it would repair a missing piece of the streetscape along 8th Avenue, which the City once envisioned as a “Great Street.” Today, that sequence runs from the Park Blocks to the courthouse and Public Service Building, and then simply stops. Filling the old City Hall block with active, inhabited uses would stitch the urban fabric back together. In place of a void, there could be a more continuous, coherent civic corridor. Dense mixed-use redevelopment would bring residents, visitors, and daily activity to a part of downtown that has long felt underbuilt and unresolved. In that sense, private development would strengthen the district more effectively than any modest civic use the County could plausibly afford.

Lane County’s new three‑building strategy reflects fiscal reality and political constraints. Once fully implemented, it will improve conditions for the courts, the Sheriff, and the District Attorney, even if it falls short of the comprehensive solution envisioned in 2019. The County now owes the public a clear articulation of its long-term intentions, not just for the courthouse and the Public Service Building but for the former City Hall block. Downtown Eugene deserves decisions grounded in reality rather than nostalgia. It also deserves a plan that recognizes that even modest, well-considered choices can strengthen the civic core. If the County provides that clarity, this pivot, while less ambitious than many of us once hoped for, can still move the civic district in a constructive direction.

(1) My former firm, Robertson/Sherwood/Architects, with the assistance of DLR Group’s Justice+Civic studio, prepared the study.

(2) For readers who want the underlying numbers, recent reporting in the Register‑Guard and Lookout Eugene‑Springfield covers the purchase price, building size, and early renovation estimates.

The Sub-Critical City

A system held below its critical slope: grains settle quietly, avalanches rare. Eugene’s growth boundary has shaped a city that resists sudden cascades.

Cities often drift toward what complexity science calls the critical slope, where countless small choices accumulate into patterns of sudden avalanches—some minor, some transformative. Eugene has resisted that drift, making it a useful case for thinking about self‑organized criticality in urban form. 

I first encountered the idea of self‑organized criticality in 2008, in discussions of emergent urbanism and systems thinking under the tutelage of Alder Fuller. A recent Veritasium video on power laws reignited my interest and prompted me to consider how these ideas apply to Eugene’s development. 

Self‑organized criticality describes the way certain systems—sandpiles, forests, stock markets, earthquakes—drift toward a balance point where tiny disturbances can produce anything from nothing to catastrophe. At that balance point, the size of events follows a power‑law distribution: countless small events, far fewer medium ones, and a rare but inevitable handful of giants. These “heavy tails” mark a critical system. The same mathematical signatures appear across wildly different domains, a phenomenon physicists call universality. Cities belong to that list, and Eugene’s exception makes the concept especially revealing. 

No large city grows in a vacuum. All face shaping by topography, zoning, land prices, infrastructure budgets, and political decisions. Yet worldwide, power‑law patterns appear with remarkable consistency: in street lengths, traffic congestion, building heights, rates of innovation, even the spacing of coffee shops. The driver lies not in the absence of rules, but in the presence of millions of small, local, decentralized choices: where to build a house, extend a road, or open a business. Those choices act like grains of sand dropped onto a pile. Over time, cities tune themselves toward a threshold slope, even if aspects of that slope are far from perfectly free. 

Eugene’s growth has been pressed by constraints tighter than those shaping many other cities. The Willamette and McKenzie rivers, the Coburg Hills, and Spencer Butte already form a natural bowl. Oregon’s statewide land‑use program, enacted in 1973, was the first of its kind in the nation. It required every city to draw an urban growth boundary, a bold experiment in curbing sprawl and preserving farmland. Typically, a city’s boundary expands in response to population growth; in Eugene, such expansions have been small and infrequent. From the air, the city still shows a discernible edge: roofs and streetlights give way to fields and oak savanna more abruptly than in most American cities of comparable size and wealth, though ragged in places. 

A walk from the downtown grid toward the South Hills reveals streets that begin to branch and loop like tributaries. Cul‑de‑sacs and winding lanes mark a departure into branching patterns that resemble fractals. One accident on the Beltline at rush hour can paralyze half the city. Housing prices jump in ways that feel disproportionate to the trigger. Even in sub‑critical systems, small avalanches still occur. 

Explosive rings of subdivisions and sudden satellite towns have been kept at bay, leaving Eugene’s sandpile noticeably flatter than most cities of comparable size and wealth. In the language of complexity science, the city qualifies as sub‑critical: orderly, green, bikeable, and still livable. Most other cities, even with their own zoning codes, greenbelts, and natural barriers, live closer to the slope that complexity science describes. 

Eugene's urban growth boundary.

Whether such restraint proves beneficial remains uncertain. The gains are clear: farmland and wetlands preserved, infrastructure costs contained, weekend rides across town that still feel relaxed. Most residents value these outcomes and would not trade them for the unchecked suburban expansion visible in other regions. 

The concerns are less visible. Critical systems acquire remarkable properties—rapid adaptation, outsized creativity—precisely because they tolerate extremes. When a city holds back more forcefully than most, it intervenes in a process that has proved robust at finding its own balance. In Eugene, the muted tails stand out in housing: supply has lagged demand, and affordability has eroded more sharply than in cities that allowed broader expansion. 

Complexity science offers no prescription; it only reminds us that every path carries its own heavy‑tailed consequence. One set of consequences is visible now: open fields west of Bertelsen Road, a skyline that ends where the hills begin. Another set may lie ahead: reduced adaptability, economic stagnation, or exclusion dressed up as preservation. 

The urban growth boundary undergoes periodic review, and the same public process that set it can still adjust it. Eugene has not become locked into permanent sub‑criticality, only into a prolonged and unusually deliberate constraint as the region decides what it values more: the known benefits of containment or the unknown potentials that most cities, despite their own rules, still manage to reach. 

Eugene’s growth boundary has kept the city flatter than the slope that complexity science describes. Whether this restraint preserves resilience or erodes adaptability remains uncertain. Self‑organized criticality only reminds us that even deliberate interventions cannot escape heavy‑tailed consequences.

Why the North Butterfly Lot Defies Precedent

Bird's eye context image from the City of Eugene's North Butterfly Lot RFQ.

Back in April, I wrote about the North Butterfly Lot as a rare opportunity—a civic blank slate nestled between Eugene’s Park Blocks and the Farmers Market Pavilion. At the time, the City had yet to issue its formal RFQ. I questioned whether the site’s potential would inspire architectural ambition or simply get absorbed into the churn of economic expediency. 

Now, with four proposals submitted, the moment calls for renewed scrutiny. 

The City’s Urban Renewal Agency outlined four primary goals for the site:

1. High-density + Mixed-use Development
2. Active Ground Floor
3. Connectivity
4. Sense of Place + High-quality Architecture

Rather than request design concepts, the RFQ asked each proposer to submit a concise vision statement describing how they intend to address these goals. That approach makes sense for a qualification phase. Still, it places the burden of evaluation on the strength of each team’s stated intent—not on architectural merit, but on the credibility of their promise. 

This makes the next phase essential. Once the City selects a development team, it must ensure that the design process translates vision into built form with integrity. That will require clear expectations and consistent oversight. 

Below are architectural strategies that could help fulfill the site’s potential: 

1. High-Density + Mixed-Use Development

• Use vertical massing to support density but consider how the building’s proportions contribute to the surrounding urban fabric—not just its height.
• Combine housing with active ground-floor uses, offering a mix of unit types to support demographic diversity.
• Choose whether to articulate or unify the building’s form based on its role and context. A monolithic expression may be appropriate if it conveys clarity, civic presence, or material integrity. Conversely, articulation may help modulate scale or respond to adjacent conditions. Neither strategy is inherently better; each must be evaluated on its own merits. 

Note: Designers often use upper-level setbacks to mitigate shadow impacts or reduce perceived bulk. In this case, the building’s orientation and context suggest minimal shadowing relative to the adjacent public open spaces—the Farmers Market Plaza and Park Blocks. Shadows will fall primarily on the 7th Avenue sidewalk, which is less sensitive in terms of civic use. Therefore, setbacks should not be assumed. Their inclusion should respond to broader urban design goals—such as scale transition, visual relief, or usable outdoor terraces—not serve as a default gesture. 

2. Active Ground Floor

• Provide sidewalk setbacks and covered edges to support informal gathering and weather protection.
• Use transparent façades and operable glazing to soften the boundary between interior and exterior.
• Program ground-level uses that complement the Farmers Market Pavilion, such as food vendors, community retail, or flexible event space. 

Note: While activation matters, the site’s position at the head of the Park Blocks invites more than just activity; it calls for architectural punctuation. In my April post, I proposed a public-oriented backdrop: a stage framed by a sleek, modern arch for outdoor performances, paired with support facilities and a café, with commercial spaces behind facing 7th Avenue. That concept aimed to buffer traffic noise, enclose the north end, and complement the park’s openness—an approach aligned with the Park Blocks’ legacy as a communal hub. 

The current RFQ anticipates a predominantly multi-family development, and that reality must be acknowledged. Still, the question remains: how might a residential building express civic intent without relying on traditional institutional typologies? A library would be redundant; the Farmers Market Pavilion already provides indoor event space. Perhaps the answer lies not in program alone, but in architectural presence—a building that frames the Park Blocks with clarity, invites public life at its edges, and signals its role through proportion, material, and spatial generosity. That kind of presence need not be rare. It should be expected—especially in a setting as symbolically charged as this one. 

3. Connectivity

• Align pedestrian pathways with existing desire lines between downtown and the Riverfront.
• Introduce through-block passages or mid-block courtyards to encourage permeability.
• Incorporate wayfinding and lighting strategies that support safe, intuitive movement across the site. 

Note: The North Butterfly Lot fronts the Park Blocks and Farmers Market Pavilion to the south, while its northern edge faces 7th Avenue—a busy arterial with limited pedestrian appeal. A future development may understandably orient away from this edge. Still, some degree of engagement is warranted. Treating 7th Avenue as a service corridor risks reinforcing the disconnect between downtown and the Market District and Downtown Riverfront. Transparent façades, layered landscape buffers, secondary entries, and integrated lighting could soften the edge and contribute to urban legibility. Even modest gestures can signal that the building acknowledges its full urban context. 

4. Sense of Place + High-quality Architecture

• Frame the Park Blocks with massing that responds to their scale and rhythm. 
• Select materials that resonate with Eugene’s architectural and cultural context. When thoughtfully applied, building materials can reflect the region’s climate, craft traditions, and ecological sensibilities. 
• Design façades with depth—sunshades, balconies, and layered fenestration—to avoid flatness and promote visual interest. 
• Incorporate civic gestures that go beyond amenities. A monumentally scaled sculpture, clock tower, or interpretive installation could serve as a symbolic anchor—one that reflects Eugene’s identity, history, or aspirations. Whether freestanding or integrated with the building, such an element should be designed to invite reflection, engagement, and public ownership. Its placement and form should reinforce the spatial logic of the Park Blocks and contribute to the site’s civic presence. 

These strategies do not cover every possibility, but they offer a framework for translating vision into architecture. The City has outlined clear goals for the site: high-density mixed-use, an active ground floor, stronger connections to the Market District and Riverfront, and architecture that frames the Park Blocks. Those expectations should guide not only the choice of a development team, but also the oversight that follows. 

By Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries - http://digital.lib.uh.edu/u?/p15195coll18,33, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17311032

The architectural response will matter. This site deserves one that reflects its civic potential. It doesn’t fit neatly into familiar categories. The site is not a conventional development parcel. Its location, scale, and symbolic weight make it unusually complex. That complexity deserves attention, not simplification. The North Butterfly Lot may not have a perfect precedent, but that’s precisely what makes it valuable. It is a unicorn. It invites a response that feels specific, intentional, and worthy of its place in the city. 

As the City prepares to select a development team, it should also lay the groundwork for meaningful community involvement in shaping what comes next.

Edges, Episodes, and Expectations

Drone shot over the completed Downtown Riverfront Park Plaza (photo from the City of Eugene. All other photos by me unless noted otherwise).

This weekend marked the grand opening of Eugene’s Downtown Riverfront Park Plaza, a civic milestone years in the making. I attended the festivities on Saturday, eager to see how this new public space performs under the weight of real use.

The plaza is the latest installment in Eugene’s broader riverfront redevelopment—a transformation of the former EWEB utility yard into a three-acre park that reconnects the city with the Willamette River. Portland-based landscape architecture firm Walker Macy designed the project, which has earned multiple accolades: the 2022 Oregon ASLA Honor Award and People’s Choice Award, the 2023 ORPA Design & Construction Award, and recognition from AIA Eugene. Clearly, others saw promise in its layered narrative, sculptural landforms, and potential to serve as a civic anchor.

Walker Macy's rendering of the Downtown Riverfront Park Plaza in the context of the built-out neighborhood development. Only the Heartwood (top building in the image) is in place now; the other buildings are pending. 

My takeaway? It’s too early to assess the plaza’s success. Its ultimate character depends on the completion of the surrounding development. The planned restaurant pavilion and multi-family housing blocks (in addition to the already occupied Heartwood) are essential to framing the space and giving it definition. Without them, the plaza feels more like a clearing or pathway than a square.

The plaza doesn’t immediately read as a space intended for large public gatherings. Unlike traditional urban squares, which rely on clear geometries and proportional relationships to foster collective experience, this plaza feels episodic. The elements—adventure playground, splash pad, works of art—are engaging but discrete. The shiny metallic Riverfront Plaza Pavilion that terminates 5th Avenue stands apart compositionally and lacks integration with the nominal plaza. Likewise, the proposed Across the Bridge commemorative fountain, which will honor Eugene’s displaced Black community, is planned for a site north of City Hall along the riverfront path—far removed from the plaza. Its presence would have physically and symbolically bolstered the space’s significance as a civic marker of place and history.

The primary plaza area.

Interactive sprayground.

Adventure playground.

Integrated interpretive pavement display.

Untitled sculpture by Volkan Alkanoglu.

The bottom line: there’s no central focus, nor is the plaza configured to frame grand civic rituals or celebrations. I could ask people in the know whether the intent was for the space to serve in this capacity, but I haven’t yet. Perhaps I should.

If the City did envision this plaza as a major public assembly space, it’s worth examining how it compares to notable precedents. Robert F. Gatje’s book Great Public Squares offers a useful lens. Consider Venice’s Campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which Gatje includes for its compelling spatial dynamics. One end of the square opens directly onto the Rio dei Mendicanti, yet the space maintains a strong sense of enclosure thanks to the surrounding architecture—the basilica, the Scuola Grande di San Marco, and the Colleoni statue. It accommodates both movement and gathering, with a clear civic identity.

Campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice (photo by Abxbay - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27901807)

Closer to home, Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square provides a contemporary counterpoint. Designed in the early 1980s by Willard Martin and his team, the square occupies a full city block and is framed by transit corridors, retail, and civic buildings. Its open-air design and amphitheater-like steps invite both casual use and large-scale events, earning it the nickname “Portland’s living room.” It’s a space that gathers, not just entertains.

Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland (photo by Cacophony - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2335737)

These examples underscore the importance of proportion, edge definition, and narrative coherence in successful public squares. Eugene’s Downtown Riverfront Park Plaza, by contrast, feels more like a collage than a composition. That may reflect a different ethos—one rooted in play and informality—but if the goal is to create a civic heart, the design must do more than amuse. It must hold.

Of course, it’s possible that the City and Walker Macy intended the design’s episodic nature, that the plaza was never meant to function as a traditional civic square. In contemporary landscape architecture, fragmentation and informality often reflect a desire to accommodate diverse uses and avoid prescriptive spatial narratives. If that’s the case, then comparing the plaza to historic European squares or even Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square may not be entirely fair. Still, if the term “plaza” carries civic expectations, it’s worth asking if the design fulfills them.

The City’s intent for the space is unclear. “Plaza” may simply be a convenient label for what is, in practice, a hardscape node within a larger park system. If so, I should adjust my expectations for its civic role accordingly. In time, the surrounding development may lend the space greater definition and purpose. For now, it remains an incomplete element—its long-term significance still to be determined.