Talent Community Visioning

Community workshops, conceptual master plan, and site feasibility study

In 2020, a series of wildfires devastated entire communities across Oregon, displacing residents and destroying places. Following the Almeda Fire, much of the town of Talent, Oregon, was destroyed. As the community works to rebuild what was once there, Salazar Architect is providing visioning, community engagement, and master planning services. Many of the homes destroyed belong to Latinx families who work as landscapers, fruit pickers, and housekeepers. To ensure robust participation by members of the Latinx community, we held a series of workshops, all in Spanish, with English translation as necessary, in collaboration with CASA of Oregon and Coalición Fortaleza. In parallel, we engaged city residents by leading the Talent Urban Renewal Agency (TURA) Gateway master planning work that will rejuvenate the city with mixed-income ‘missing middle’ housing and community serving commercial space.

While residents of the city work to rebuild the structures they lost, the community also needs to process the traumatic experiences of the fire. In addition to the personal grief experienced as a result of the fire, the scale of the disaster resulted in collective grief experienced by the entire community. The visioning sessions that we facilitated provided a space to continue processing the experience as a community, taking action to determine a future for their town that aligns with their shared values.

The city is revisioning in the wake of the disaster. In partnership with PlaceIt!, we used a community engagement methodology that allows people to creatively share their stories through memories and aspirations through objects. We heard from the residents that they want the sense of wild-ness to carry through the next iteration of their town. They spoke of fond memories of traipsing through wild lands and want the built environment to reflect this expansiveness– they’re not looking for a rigidly planned urban built environment. We heard from parents who want safety for their children– to watch them play from the kitchen window or provide sheltered playgrounds. We saw the creativity of the community in their existing resources, such as the Talent Maker Space.

Climate change and increasing extremes in weather mean that we’ll see more destructive wildfires in the future. Through our work with Talent, we’re increasing our expertise in disaster recovery and wildfire resilience. Though large-scale interventions are necessary to stem the impending climate crisis, we’re doing our best to ensure communities are better equipped to weather extreme events in the future. Talent hopes to serve as an example of a community that rises together out of the ashes.

Based on the shared values and community priorities we learned from the community workshops, our team partnered with TURA to develop a Conceptual Master Plan for Talent, with a specific site plan for Talent Gateway, a 10+ acre area at the city center’s entry, entirely destroyed in the fire. The final plan created new areas for small businesses, added green space, provided improved circulation infrastructure to connect the redeveloped area, and highlighted opportunities to celebrate arts and culture. Throughout the plan, we integrated lessons learned to improve community resilience in the event of future disasters. 

For the Gateway Site, the design team created a series of draft options that utilized the existing roadways and produced options that prioritized either residential or commercial needs. For residential spaces, forward-thinking multigenerational housing was one of the core goals of the project. Some residents who were displaced in the Almeda fire had extended family living together, and there was a desire to have living situations that would be both affordable and flexible as families change. The design team took a variety of building typologies into consideration, including single-family, townhomes, ADUs, and stacked flats. For small businesses lost in the fire, Live / Work units would provide both housing and ground-floor commercial/office space, serving as centers for business development.

Salazar Architect is providing community engagement, site feasibility, and urban design services.

Location: Talent, Oregon
Client: City of Talent, Talent Urban Renewal Agency
Gross Site Area: 15-20 acres for the conceptual master plan, 4-5 acres for a site feasibility study at Talent Mobile Estates
Sustainability: Post-disaster recovery, post-disaster housing, wildfire resilience