October Event

This month the Greater LA Chapter is trying something new and offering a training session! Come and bring your colleagues!

Authentic and meaningful community engagement for under-represented communities should begin with a healing process which recognizes their daily struggles. Healing allows underrepresented communities to take a holistic approach, or a deeper level of thinking, that restores the social, mental, physical and environmental aspects of their community. Only through confronting the inequities in our society that pertain to gender roles, sexual orientation, income, age, immigration status, and ethnic identity can we uncover knowledge, create a voice, and encourage self-determination in these communities.

The Place IT! workshop will train participants how to heal community through an innovative outreach process. The session will begin with a understanding the methodology, followed by an immersive, hands-on activities, and finally a lessons learned. The workshop begins with tapping into participant’s emotions through their personal memories. Residents use visual, spatial, and emotional language of the city through storytelling, objects, art-making and “play” to investigate the urban environment. Storytelling allows participants to convey emotion and talk about the city in their language that maps, charts and other forms of graphic data can’t communicate. Objects allow participants to think beyond words to explore infinite possibilities through the visual, spatial and emotional landscape. Objects also allow participants a broader set of communication options. Art Making lets participants envision, investigate, construct, and reflect on their communities. By using their hands and creative talents, participants are in a positive frame of mind to explore the sometime painful reality of their lives. Play helps participants to relax in a public setting, conduct inquiries, experiment, and have fun. The Place It workshop helps participants with skills in critical thinking, creative problem solving, collaboration, and civic literacy which will increase there likelihood that they will be engage in the planning process in the future.

Participants can expect to walk away having learned about:

• Humanizing the Process: Everyone is an urban planner and it’s our job to create a safe space for participants to reveal, respect, and translate their knowledge and experiences into the city building process.
• Attachment to Place: Humans attached themselves to people, places and objects to survive and create empathy. Personal experience, memory and narratives are intangible but no-less-integral elements of a city building.
• Power of Using Objects: Objects expose rich details of places through their shape, color, and texture that words overlook. Objects quickly transfer that rich visual and tangible spatial knowledge of places into plans, designs, and developments.
• Communication Options. Cities have their own nonverbal spatial, visual, and emotional language. Having participants build solutions with objects makes them comfortable, increases their communication options beyond words, and allows them to be creative in finding solutions.
• Collaboration. Working together is the most important part of the outreach process and people have to realize that there are no right, wrong ideas, rather how our ideas impact each other and our environment.

Our host for this event, Placeworks, is all about places and how they work—geographically, environmentally, functionally, aesthetically, and culturally—but they are also passionate about how they work collaboratively with their clients. theirs is a holistic approach. They celebrate personal passion and ownership while encouraging integrity, creativity, and innovative thinking. They bring people together from diverse practice areas, offering best-of-all-worlds capability and connectivity. Just as each place we work on is distinctly different, so is their thinking.

They start with a vision to design a great community—with a thoughtful approach to creating healthier and more sustainable environments, neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. They emphasize processes, relationships and communications, while synthesizing dimensions, details and constraints into actionable plans, using environmental scans, community design and other diagnostic and planning tools.