Dream Play Build: Hands-On Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places

The authors show urban planners and government decision makers how to foster hands-on community engagement using play and creativity for place making and community development. They describe the problems with using the spoken and written word and language as the primary medium of expression in public meetings, limiting the ideas and opinions of participants, and illustrate how hands-on sensory-based tools can foster community engagement and ideas. They outline the use of model-building workshops, pop-up models, and sensory-based site exploration for community engagement, including how and when to use them, for what objectives, the materials and time needed, and how to record feedback and ideas, also providing an example case for one community. Rojas, an urban planner, community activist, educator, and artist, and Kamp, who runs a landscape, urban design, and engagement practice, lead hands-on interactive workshops. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
People love their communities and want them to become safer, healthier, more prosperous places. But the standard approach to public meetings somehow makes everyone miserable. Conversations that should be inspiring can become shouting matches. So what would it look like to facilitate truly meaningful discussions? What if they could be fun For twenty years, James Rojas and John Kamp have been using art, creative expression, and storytelling to shake up the classic community meeting. In Dream Play Build, they share their insights into building common ground and inviting active participation among diverse groups. Their approach, “Place It!,” draws on three methods: the interactive model-building workshop, the pop-up, and site exploration using our senses. Inspirational and fun, this book celebrates the value of engaging with the dreams we have for our communities.
The room is dim, the chairs are in perfectly lined rows. The city planner puts up a color-coded diagram of the street improvement project, dreading the inevitable angry responses. Jana loves her community and is glad to be able to attend the evening meeting, and she has a lot of ideas for community change. But she has a hard time hearing, and can’t see the diagrams clearly. She leaves early. It’s time to imagine a different type of community engagement – one that inspires connection, creativity, and fun. People love their communities and want them to become safer, healthier, more prosperous places. But the standard approach to public meetings somehow makes everyone miserable. Conversations that should be inspiring can become shouting matches. So what would it look like to facilitate truly meaningful discussions between citizens and planners? What if they could be fun For twenty years, James Rojas and John Kamp have been looking to art, creative expression, and storytelling to shake up the classic community meeting. In Dream Play Build, they share their insights into building common ground and inviting active participation among diverse groups. Their approach, “Place It!,” draws on three methods: the interactive model-building workshop, the pop-up, and site exploration using our senses. Using our hands to build and create is central to what makes us human, helping spark ideas without relying on words to communicate. Deceptively playful, this method is remarkably effective at teasing out community dreams and desires from hands-on activities. Dream Play Build offers wisdom distilled from workshops held around the world, and a deep dive into the transformational approach and results from the South Colton community in southern California. While much of the process was developed through in-person meetings, the book also translates the experience to online engagement--how to make people remember their connections beyond the computer screen. Inspirational and fun, Dream Play Build celebrates the value of engaging with the dreams we have for our communities. Readers will find themselves weaving these artful, playful lessons and methods into their own efforts for making change within the landscape around them.