About Us

The Urban Greenspaces Institute was founded by Executive Director, Mike Houck in 1999. The Institute is the only non-profit organization in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region that works exclusively on urban parks, trails, and greenspace issues.

The Case for Urban Greenspaces
Henry David Thoreau’s aphorism, “In wildness is the preservation of the world” has driven our country’s conservation agenda for over century. The emphasis has been, first and foremost, the protection of wilderness, pristine habitats, forest, and agricultural lands in the rural landscape. While these efforts are laudable and essential, If we hope to continue protecting rural resource lands into the 21st Century one critical strategy will be creating more livable cities and metropolitan regions. Therefore, we adopted as our motto a new corollary to Thoreau’s mantra: “In Livable Cities is Preservation of the Wild.”

Furthermore, it will be by creating livable urban communities that we will build public support for compact cities. The quid pro quo for higher density, compact cities, however, is better protection and, where necessary, restoration of a vibrant urban green infrastructure of healthy streams, fish and wildlife habitat, parks, and recreational trails where the vast majority of our population lives—in our cities. The Institute collaborates with other nonprofit organizations, government agencies, businesses, architects and landscape architects, and others to achieve its mission.

The Institute’s Executive Director brings more than twenty-five years of experience in issues related to urban parks, trails and Greenspaces and our board of directors and advisory board both contribute to the Institute’s mission as well.

"The belief that the city is an entity apart from nature and even antithetical to it has dominated the way in which the city is perceived and continues to affect how it is built. The city, the suburbs, and the countryside must be viewed as a single, evolving system within nature."

-- Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden, Urban Nature and Human Design, 1984