The community goals for Salem’s streetscapes were to provide continuity in a diverse environment, celebrate the local landscape, brighten downtown, integrate wayfinding and art, and establish and support social spaces. We established these goals in a visioning exercise, came back to them often, and worked to achieve them through a year of intensive, rewarding public engagement and design.

Our team’s solution to provide continuity was to develop scalable streetscape designs that could be applied to diverse sidewalk widths and uses while providing a consistent palette of materials to tie the downtown environment together.

We worked closely with City of Salem forestry and maintenance staff to write planting requirements that could support a healthy tree canopy, adaptive landscape, and meet the public’s goal to celebrate their location in the lush Willamette River Valley.

We integrated thoughtful lighting, historic interpretation, and art opportunities - especially at Salem’s unique alley entrances - and worked through designs to supported important and vulnerable sidewalk users such as children, families, and the elderly.

To establish the critical social spaces Salemites desired while meeting our project constraints to stay within existing sidewalk dimensions, we found underutilized bump-outs and excess asphalt in inefficient parking striping to convert opportunistically into social seating, community information sharing, art, and historic interpretation areas. In some instances we looked at parking utilization and suggested temporary or permanent conversion of spaces into social gathering or green space as a future project.

The Salem Streetscape Plan was unanimously approved by the Urban Renewal Agency and work is underway. The full plan is available here.