Dream Play Build

Hands-On Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places

James Rojas, John Kamp

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781642831504
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

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.

Chapter 1

Forget What You Know about Engagement

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE in your neighborhood? What do you want to see in your park? What do you want to see on your street? These are questions that, on the surface, seem inclusive, democratic, and generous. And they are some of the most common ways that towns, cities, and consulting firms—and even community groups—conduct public engagement: hold a visioning session; listen to what people want to see in their neighborhood; record what is said; and weave the feedback into a community plan, an overlay, or some variation thereof. We’ve done our due diligence, listened to the community; now it is public record, and the neighborhood can change and improve in ways that truly reflect the wishes of its residents.

Tapping into local, on-the-ground neighborhood knowledge is at the core of effective and forward-thinking urban planning and design, landscape design, architecture, and the efforts of everyday residents to better their neighborhoods and communities, as you uncover insights that no outsider, however astute, could on their own; yet merely asking people what they want to see does not always generate the kinds of meaningful feedback that can paint a nuanced and layered picture of the community or of the neighborhood’s knowledge and aspirations. In fact, when we are asked point-blank what we want, we oftentimes default to something that contains very little in the way of aspiration or nuance, and instead we focus on perceived threats or immediate needs—the most common being more parking, less traffic, and no density.

Laying a Foundation

The problems of community engagement and the limited outcomes it tends to generate are all too familiar to anyone who has been on either the planning or the public side of the process. Planners get annoyed by the near pitch-perfect predictability of the public’s responses (i.e., “More parking! Less traffic! No density!”), while citizens frequently feel as though they are simply not being heard and that whatever input they managed to give never revealed itself in the final plan, development, park, design overlay. While it is tempting to write off community engagement as therefore hopeless, we know from our own work in engaging people with their hands and senses that community engagement can indeed lead to truly creative ideas and a constructively empowered public.

Much of the shift in making community engagement actually worthwhile starts with a solid understanding of the psychology behind modes of engagement and how the medium of engagement directly influences the relative creativity, usefulness, and visionary nature of the outcomes. There are psychological reasons why the most well-thought-out presentation and well-crafted questions will most likely fail to generate useful and creative feedback. There are also psychological reasons why simply shifting ideas from a survey over to Post-it notes on a wall, or packaging them into something crisp and bright for social media, will also likely fail to deliver on creative outcomes and a public who sees their ideas meaningfully reflected in the final planning project at hand.

With this in mind, we invite you to set aside what you know about engagement and public participation and come back to square one, in the same way that we did some years ago when we both clearly knew that what we were doing in our respective planning arenas with community engagement wasn’t working. First, we’ll lay a foundation of the psychology of survival and creativity, and how creativity really cannot flourish if the participants’ concerns, whether they acknowledge them consciously or not, center on simply surviving. Then we’ll explore how and why modes of engagement whose primary medium is language—both written and spoken—can hamper expansive ways of thinking. And we’ll look at what needs to be in place to fuel people’s imaginations within the setting of community meetings and other forums of engagement.

Change Is Coming in the Form of a Cake. What Kind of Frosting Do You Want?

Rarely is community engagement conducted independently of a proposed project or plan. More often than not, by the time a consulting team or crew of planning staff arrives on a neighborhood’s doorstep to solicit input, there is already a project in the pipeline. To many residents, this can feel like soliciting feedback on the decoration for a cake that has already been baked—a cake people may not have wanted in the first place. As a result, this approach, however articulately presented and well packaged by consultants or planning staff, can come across as patronizing and disingenuous.

To planning staff, as well as design and consulting teams, the public’s negative reaction can be surprising and frustrating—even annoying. Many assume that community engagement in whatever form is a service that is fundamentally good and fundamentally productive: “We’re asking you what you think. So what’s the problem?”

However, Rebecca Karp, CEO and founding principal of Karp Strategies, who uses model-building and other creative media in her everyday community-engagement work, offers up a perspective that can shed light on why residents can be so angered by the prebaked-cake approach. “Engagement is largely an activity that is taking from people,” said Karp. “You are asking them for their time to tell you what’s gone wrong”—or what they do or don’t like about a project. Thus, if the very medium of the engagement itself suggests that a project or plan is really going to go ahead with or without their input, people can feel like they’ve taken time out of their busy lives for nothing, or, worse, that they are powerless in the face of change.

This feeling of powerlessness and frustration is particularly acute for long-disadvantaged communities like the ones Alli Celebron-Brown works with. President and CEO of the McColl Center for Art + Innovation in Charlotte, North Carolina, Celebron-Brown is at the front lines of a neighborhood experiencing rapid change in a city that consistently ranks at the bottom among US cities for potential upward mobility of its residents.¹ “You never want people to share and not be heard,” she says. However, when there have been years of not just unsound planning decisions but also redlining, and “essentially doing away with neighborhoods because there were people of color living there,” being heard is just the tip of the iceberg. There can be extremely low public trust vis-à-vis the planning process, and the pre-baked-cake approach can only compound that lack of trust.

In an attempt to assuage neighborhood concerns, many planners and designers try to help residents see a bigger picture and understand the City’s motivations. To these ends, community engagement meetings on a specific impending planning or building project are frequently prefaced by an educational presentation about a technical aspect of planning or design: zoning, floor-area ratios (FAR), height limits, zero-lot-line buildings, and other fundamentals of urban design and creating inviting public spaces. The reasoning is that if planners and design professionals can broaden the minds—and, by extension, the responses—of participants, they can get public buy-in on the project. For example, if people better understand how street-width-to-building-height ratios affect the walkability of a neighborhood, they will understand that the upcoming project, while tall, would improve everyone’s quality of life.

While well intentioned and well thought out, these presentations assume that the limited and predictable outcomes of the community engagement, and the continuing lack of public trust, are a result of a lack of information. However, if the community engagement is conducted in a way that merely solicits feedback on a project that is already going to happen regardless of input, residents will invariably feel patronized and likely be unreceptive to the broader, more philosophical discussion of how the project will contribute to the strengthening of the urban fabric as a whole.

Community Engagement as a Form of Both Exclusion and Competition

Whether it be in the style of an open-format, visioning-style meeting, or soliciting feedback on a particular project or plan, oftentimes only those with the time to spare will show up at a public meeting in the first place. In this way, what appears as a democratic process can, by its very nature, be acutely self-selecting and exclusive.

“The people [in San Francisco] who are accessing opportunities to engage are generally already very privileged,” says Robin Abad Ocubillo, senior planner with the City of San Francisco, “and that generally correlates to an older demographic that has the time: people who might no longer have to worry about children or young children, and people who have free evenings, or even the ability to come to a hearing during the middle of the day.” Abad Ocubillo’s observations also perfectly square with those of Miroo Desai, senior planner for the City of Emeryville, California: “In my experience,” she explains, those who attend public meetings “are older—almost all retired.” And, she added, they tend to be predominantly White.

A landmark study on the demographics of those who attend and speak at public meetings revealed that public-meeting-goers “are more likely to be older, male, longtime residents, voters in local elections, and homeowners.”² Further, these attendees are oftentimes present precisely to oppose development. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Desai notes that residents rarely attend public meetings to oppose or challenge new office space or, in the case of Emeryville, one of the numerous biotech hubs and centers that have been built or created there. Rather, they show up to challenge new housing and mixed-use retail/residential projects.

Complicating matters further is what takes place once the meetings begin: not everyone will speak. It’s a phenomenon that, upon first glance, can not only be puzzling—as in the case of James’s account of running community meetings in East Los Angeles on a multimillion-dollar rail-line extension and attendees saying nothing—but also misleading: we predictably but wrongly conclude that those who had opinions spoke, while those who remained silent or didn’t show up had no opinions at all.

However, it takes a particular kind of person who is ready and willing to speak in front of a crowd and before a panel, board, or committee. “I’m terrified of public speaking” is a commonplace sentiment. In fact, Patricia Munoz, a licensed family therapist in Los Angeles who uses art and tactile-based activities as a way to engage her clients, notes that of the biggest fears her clients and patients have, public speaking is number one. “Most of us are not born with those skills or are naturally born public speakers,” says Muñoz. “It takes a lot of courage and a lot of practice to be good at it. So most people don’t do it, even if they want to.” And yet, embedded within the statement “I’m terrified of public speaking” is something deeper: a perceived cultural expectation that everyone should be good at and comfortable with public speaking. The truth of the matter is that some people will probably never be comfortable with or adept at public speaking. Variations in both learning and communication styles abound among us: some people are more visual learners and communicators; some prefer speaking their minds within a smaller group or even a one-on-one setting. Some express themselves through art; some express themselves through physical activity, including team sports, or even watching sports. The fact remains that expression is a relative term and phenomenon that takes many forms, depending on the individual. And that individual’s cultural background, where they have grown up, their economic status, among other factors, can play a significant role in shaping their comfort level vis-à-vis different modes of expression.

When it comes to expression within the public meeting setting in particular, an extra layer of complexity exists: the presence or perceived presence of conflict and disagreement. In an era when cities are growing and changing at rapid rates, residents can have particularly strong concerns over and opinions about what their urban future should look like. Invariably, these concerns and opinions can translate into heated debates, disagreements, and sometimes even acute anger. This dynamic can end up excluding all but the most emboldened and those unafraid of conflict. Openly disagreeing with a neighbor and the possibility of retribution from that neighbor can be deal-breakers for many, and thus these individuals will choose to simply remain quiet. So, what appears on the surface as a fair and democratic process—the public meeting where people are free to speak their minds—can inadvertently end up being an exercise in competition, might, and, by extension, exclusion.

Rethinking Talking

Precisely in response to the limitations and drawbacks of conventional community engagement, there have been numerous efforts in recent years to rethink public outreach across the country. We have seen the rise of the Post-it note in public meetings and on boards as a way of both visually recording and prioritizing residents’ ideas; we’ve seen the rise of stickers as a way of giving everyday residents a means of ranking proposed planning ideas. We’ve also seen a rise in virtual forms of participation: online surveys, apps, and start-ups that seek to be one-stop shops for facilitating a range of information-gathering and measuring results. These companies offer services that cities and municipalities can contract out in order to conduct their engagement and outreach if their planning staff is too busy with other work.

While these attempts to create more meaningful and effective modes of community engagement are welcome alternatives, they fall short on one key point: they still rely heavily on the word, both written and spoken. While language indeed offers up rich opportunities for expression—in essays, literature, poetry, for example—when it serves as the primary medium of expression within community engagement, it tends to be a limiting factor in terms of both who speaks and what is said.

Psychologists who weave art therapy into their practices understand this phenomenon well: what emerges from talking versus using one’s hands is oftentimes quite different. Says Munoz of working with some of her younger patients in her family therapy practice, “You will ask them, ‘How’s school going?’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh fine, oh good.’ And I’ll ask, ‘Is anything going on?’ ‘No, nothing’s going on.’” But then, Munoz will have the young people use objects to play out a scene from their day, or draw a picture, and it becomes clear through the placement of the objects, the story accompanying them, or the scenes depicted within the drawings, that everything isn’t just fine, and a lot has happened that day, some of which can be quite negative.

Munoz notes an important distinction we are often not aware of: what we are thinking versus what we are feeling. While we experience these two modes of being simultaneously, what we are thinking can frequently not square up with what we are feeling. And the medium we use to express ourselves can play a key role in which experience—thinking or feeling—is brought to the fore. When we use talking alone to express ourselves, we are using a very particular part of our brains, one that is not known for its creativity. “The talking brain is, loosely speaking, the prefrontal cortex,” says San Francisco–based psychotherapist Roché Wadehra, who also uses art making and non-talk-based modes of expression in her practice. “It’s the decision making, the higher functions, the executive functions [that] they are all focused on there, and developmentally, that’s also the part that starts coming online much later on as we develop verbal skills.” While the prefrontal cortex is there to protect us, regulating us out of flights of fancy that could, quite bluntly, lead to harm or death, that very regulatory force is also the one that can sway us away from creativity, imagination, and an expansiveness in our thinking. This is especially so as we transition into our late twenties, at which point the prefrontal cortex has generally fully formed; the executive office of the brain and its predilections for survival begin to take center stage, and the creative mind so characteristic of children and young people oftentimes fades into the background.

As Muñoz points out, what we are doing when we are using our talking brain is in part focusing on perceived immediate needs and survival. And if your trip to the community meeting—or your day in general—involves sitting in traffic, looking for parking, and dealing with crowds, your talking mind will translate those experiences into both threats and basic needs for survival. “And unless those things are tackled and taken care of, most of us cannot be creative and cannot think outside the box, because most of us are just thinking about survival,” said Munoz. And so, despite the expertly crafted presentation by city planners on walkable streets, we will continue to fixate on something as humdrum as parking, or rightly focus on past wrongs we feel the city has committed. Wadehra also adds that in times of great change, this kind of frozen-state fixation on perceived needs for survival is even more amplified. “There’s just so much change happening so fast that it’s a lot for people to deal with,” she says of our current age. Fight, flight, or freeze/collapse are our natural responses to that extreme change. For those who have traveled more, lived abroad, and experienced other cultures, the significant demographic changes the country has experienced in the past thirty years may seem less of a threat; for those who have not, it can feel as though threats are all around them. “Someone who has never been out of a particular radius their entire life—it’s really hard for them to encounter that kind of globalization,” said Wadehra. This sense of being assaulted or in the line of threats from all sides can then hamper any efforts to encourage residents to be more creative in their thinking about their neighborhoods and cities.

Stepping Out of Survival Mode

Getting all of us to a place where we can emerge from survival mode and start to entertain more creative ideas starts, at its core, with creating a space of comfort and ease so that we are open to giving the talking brain a break. “You have to feel safe enough—not completely safe, but safe enough—to be able to play and to get to that state of exploration and curiosity and connection,” says Wadehra. In the context of the community meeting or forum, creating this sense of safety can be difficult if the sole focus is on planning and development projects (and, by extension, possible neighborhood change) in the pipeline. Compounding this difficulty is the common insistence on adhering to a strict meeting format that is typically some variation on this theme: introduce staff, introduce project, solicit feedback, end meeting. This format simply does not allow for creating the physical and figurative space in which to be at ease and then be creative.

Fostering the sens...