Portland's City Portrait

A thriving city is socially just and environmentally safe

How can our city be a home to thriving people,
In a thriving place,
While respecting the wellbeing of all people,
And the health of the whole planet?

This four-part question captures the essence of the City Portrait's conceptual scope, with each part of the question providing a crucial 'lens' through which to understand what it might mean for the city to thrive.

Four lenses of Portland's City Portrait

The four parts of the question can be broken down into more specific questions:

1. What would it mean for the people of our city to thrive?
2. What would it mean for our city to thrive within its natural habitat?
3. How does our city impact the well-being of people worldwide?
4. How does our city impact the health of the whole planet?

Each of these questions requires a different methodology in order to answer it. A summary of each of the lenses is provided below, or you may view the complete Portland City Portrait including the analysis using all four lenses in PDF format:

Data sources used to create Portland's City Portrait are linked at the bottom of this page.

1. What would it mean for the people of our city to thrive?

This lens looks at the wellbeing of people in this city. It clusters wellbeing under four broad themes:

• Being healthy: with food, water, health, housing and energy
• Being enabled: with education, mobility, income, and employment
• Being connected: through community, digital connectivity, and culture
• Being empowered: through social equity, political voice, equality in diversity, and peace & justice

These dimensions are the essence of lived experience. They are also covered by the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals – relevant to every city and nation.

This lens brings together existing city targets, and recent data on city performance:

2. What would it mean for our city to thrive within its natural habitat?

This lens presents four kinds of information:

• What services nature provides and how it excels.
• How the city could mimic that and what it is already doing.
• If there are any existing city targets related to this.
• If there is any data on city performance.

This lens assesses how nature thrives in this place, and then asks how the city could start to mimic that.

3. How does our city impact the well-being of people worldwide?

This lens measures the resource consumption in the city, and asks how much pressure it puts on the planet. Resource use includes:

• Consumption-based Greenhouse Gas emissions
• Resources consumed within the city such as fuel use in cars and buses
• Resources used to produce all goods and services imported into the city such as fertilizer used to grow imported food

This lens uses an economic modelling technique called input-output analysis to estimate the pollution and resource use associated with city consumption.

Where possible, TCI refines and supplements the model results with local city data.

4. How does our city impact the health of the whole planet?

This lens focuses on the city’s impact on people worldwide through the purchase of products and services by households, businesses, public institutions, and civic organizations.

The information in this lens focuses on product supply chains that are commonly found in the city, and the consumption sectors that have the greatest environmental impact, such as food, construction, clothing and electronics.

For example, the city’s purchases support many jobs around the world, but these jobs often involve exploitative labor conditions.

Data originates from publicly available academic, governmental and civil society sources.

Data sources

TCI's City Portrait model is refined and supplemented with local city data. Data originates from publicly available academic, governmental, and civil society sources:

City Portrait data sources

Data library

An economic modelling technique called input-output analysis is used to estimate the pollution and resource use associated with city consumption.

Thank you to Paul van Schaik, Mindworks, Prof. Em. Dr. Philip J Vergragt, Prof. dr. Arnold Tukker, Dr. Christoph Rupprecht, Prof. Dr. Daniel Fischer, Deric Gruen, MPA, Prof. Em. Dr. Halina Szejnwald Brown, Dr. Jaco Quist, Manisha Anantharaman for their contribution to the development of the City Portrait methodology.