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

February 1, 2024 Buffalo Latino Village

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, she has a lot of ideas for community change. But she has a hard time hearing and can’t see the diagrams. 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. The 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 efforts to make change within the landscape around them.

About the Authors::

James Rojas is an urban planner, community activist, educator, and artist who runs the planning, model-building, and community outreach practice Place It! He is an international expert in public engagement and has traveled around the US, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and South America, facilitating over 500 workshops, and building 100+ interactive models. His research has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Dwell, Places, and in numerous books.

John Kamp runs the landscape, urban design, and engagement practice Prairieform. He has developed innovative tools to engage people of all ages and backgrounds in both design and the natural world, with two decades of experience leading hands-on interactive workshops with James Rojas of Place It! He frequently translates the findings and outcomes of those workshops into designs for inclusive and livable streets and neighborhoods that leave room for all residents to improvise and help create a more welcoming public realm.