The greater Damascus Area Community Design Workshop is a response to requirements of a 1995 state law. That law requires the Portland metropolitan regional government ("Metro") to determine whether an expansion of the regional urban growth boundary ("UGB") is required in order to increase the regional supply of housing. State planning criteria identify the area around Boring and Damascus as the most logical location for a regional UGB expansion. Metro will decide whether, when and how much to expand the regional UGB during the second half of 2002.

The Workshop will turn this state mandate into an opportunity to visualize a new and better kind of urban development in the potential UGB expansion area. The design workshop addresses two particular obstacles to smarter community development.

· The absence of fully-conceived, large scale models for new community development that incorporate fair access to homes for people of all incomes as well as environmental stewardship into complete community design; and

· The preference for "greenfields" (farm and forest lands) as the site of new urban development. This project will demonstrate how complete and fair community design principles can be applied in an area of smaller, fragmented parcels.

One especially important outcome of the design workshop will be to demonstrate urban design strategies that, if implemented, can actually lead to the gradual improvement of salmon-bearing streams and their associated wildlife habitat. Rather than a piecemeal approach to mitigating the natural resource impacts of urban growth boundary expansion, the model will look toward long-term and permanent forms of protection for our natural resources.

The design workshop will provide one of the first large-scale attempts to integrate best practices for 'smart' development that is also grounded in adopted state, regional, and local policies. The participants in the project will include residents of the study area, residents from communities near to the study area, and experts and stakeholders from the area and from around the metropolitan region.

The participants will bring a variety of expertise and experience together for collaboration on the project. In the first part of the workshop, the participants will refine statements of land use planning policy already adopted by local, regional and state governments and translate them into design principles. These principles will, in turn be used to guide the work of design teams in the development of model designs for urban development in the potential UGB expansion area.

The principles and designs are meant to describe a model for urban development that:
· Uses land efficiently (in order to conserve other farm and forest lands),
· Protects and restores natural areas important to threatened salmon and other fish and wildlife, preserves clean and natural flow in area streams,
· Protects opportunities to grow food, inside and outside the UGB expansion area,
· Provides for a fair share of the region's new jobs
· Includes ample greenspaces accessible from every neighborhood
· Provides many choices among types of housing and ways to travel in every neighborhood · Preserves and creates cultural opportunities,
· Creates neighborhoods where families of all incomes can choose to live; and
· Is fair in the way it distributes the regional burdens (taxes for new roads and other improvements) and benefits (e.g. jobs, parks and schools) of growth.

The results of the project are intended to be useful to local and regional residents, local governments and Metro as they decide whether, when and how to expand the regional UGB.