Erik Kvarsten ’82 Welcomes Sustainability Initiative to His City
Gresham City Manager Erik Kvarsten ’82 credits the University of Oregon with launching his career in public service. A student internship with the city of Mt. Angel, Oregon, “sealed my fate forever,” said the community service and public affairs graduate. “I feel a professional and personal debt to the university.” Now through an initiative of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts (A&AA), Kvarsten can offer current students similar real-world opportunities.
The inaugural Sustainable Cities Initiative (SCI) has selected the Gresham as its first yearlong partner in a series of classes that challenge A&AA students to propose sustainable strategies for sites around the city, 16 miles east of Portland. The Sustainable Cities Initiative synthesizes faculty research from professors and instructors, representing four departments and institutes, under a single theme and serves as a catalyst for expanded research and teaching endeavors. The curriculum, including 250 students and 14 professors, integrates architecture and landscape architectural design, planning, ecology and public policy education to encourage an understanding of sustainability issues that cuts across disciplines.
The partnership evolved from Kvarsten’s membership on the advisory council of A&AA’s Planning, Public Policy and Management Department. The Department succeeded the school of community service just after Kvarsten graduated in 1982. Kvarsten was immediately enthusiastic about the interdisciplinary approach of the initiative and its focus on sustainability.
“From my point of view, what we do as managers is create community,” he said, “and so much relates to the physical context of community. I have real confidence in the collective capacity wrestling with these vexing issues. If you cast the net broadly enough, you never know what might match up with talent. There’s a broad range of capacity in that school.”
Kvarsten said he’s proud of Gresham’s recent environmental efforts, such as a new wastewater treatment plant that is partially powered and heated from byproducts of the treatment process. The plant also has added a solar panel array. He hopes the students and faculty participating in SCI will investigate the broader implications of sustainable practices.
“Sustainability has been a rallying cry amongst local governments,” he said. “It will be valuable to have a project that speaks to the underlying values, not just one plan, but to find the red thread that runs through it.” Since SCI will ‘adopt’ a different city next year, Kvarsten said he’s already had inquiries about the program from others in the field.
Kvarsten’s relationship with the university reaches further back than his own education. Both his parents were UO graduates who welcomed the opportunity for a college education. His father, Wes Kvarsten, a landscape architecture student, later worked as one of the pioneers in Oregon’s land use planning, Kvarsten said.
“It’s in my DNA,” said Kvarsten, who is also a member of the A&AA Board of Visitors. “I have a profound feeling for the University of Oregon.”
To learn more about the UO Sustainable Cities Initiative go to sci.uoregon.edu