Portlandness

This is a book meant to explore different urban, cultural and geographical topics related to Portland. I bought this book during my first roadtrip to Portland in order to learn more about it.

I knew almost nothing about Portland, so I found this book useful. Here are some stereotypes associated with the city:

Breweries
Coffee
Environmentally conscious
Food carts
Clody weather / Rain - It turns out it’s indeed one of the cloudiest cities in the country by number of cloudy days, but not too rainy in terms of volume.
Soccer
Strip clubs - Debunked in the book. Las Vegas has more strip clubs per capita.
Veganism

The book has tons of data visualizations, which I found quite good! Here’s a more typical heatmap one:

See caption — Figure 1. Level of "portlandness". Score is computed based on measurable stereotypes associated to Portland.

This one about beers I found quite nice because the color of the bar chart actually corresponds to the color of the beer and this choice shows some correlation between color and bitterness.

I also liked this visualization depicting noise levels in different part of a stadium at different events.