2024 SKILLS SYMPOSIUM: Dream Play Build: Hands-on and sensory-based community engagement for meaningful and equitable plans, spaces, and places

Dream Play Build: Hands-on and sensory-based community engagement for meaningful and equitable plans, spaces, and places

In this training, participants will learn about and actually experience methods of community engagement that involve using the hands and senses. The training will ground these particular methods in the psychology of working with the hands and senses, introduce the various methods trainers John Kamp and Rojas use in their work, and show how the methods can level the playing field an engage diverse and historically underserved audiences in planning, design, public health, and more. To reinforce what is learned, participants will be led through four interactive activities: two model-building activities, and two sensory-based walking activities.

Learning Objectives: 

Participants should leave the training with - A firm grounding in the psychology of working with your hands and senses - An understanding of the limitations of talk- and language-based forms of community engagement - An understanding of how working with the hands and senses fundamentally changes outcomes in community engagement processes - The knowledge, confidence, and skills to lead your own interactive model-building workshops - The knowledge, confidence, and skills to lead build your own pop-up model and lead your own pop-up events -A grounding in the psychology behind concepts of a sensing state and how this state influences creativity - An understanding of what contexts and settings the walking tour can be used in, and for what goals - The ability to see how the method could be woven in to their own work - The confidence to craft and lead their own sensory-based walking tours and site explorations - Inspiration for coming up with your own hands-on and sensory-based methods of engaging the diverse audiences you work with

Professional Certification/Credits

• This course is eligible for APA - AICP Continuing Education Credit 

Trainers: James Rojas and John Kamp

James Rojas is an urban planner, community activist, educator, and artist who runs the planning, model-building, and community-outreach practice Place It!. Through Place It!, he has developed an interdisciplinary, community-healing, visioning, and outreach process that uses storytelling, objects, art-production, and play to help improve the urban-planning outreach process. He is now an international expert in public engagement and has traveled around the US, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and South America, facilitating over 500 workshops, and building over 100 interactive models. His research has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Dwell, Places, and in numerous books. Relevant areas of expertise include using model-building as a means of community and planning outreach; working with underserved, disadvantaged communities and bringing overlooked voices to the planning discussion; making the physical form of cities relevant to broad audiences; and understanding how immigrants—especially Latino immigrants—see and understand urban and suburban space in the US and why they oftentimes reshape those forms in the ways that they do. He is the co-author of Dream Play Build: Hands-on Community Engagement for Enduring Space and Places, out now on Island Press.

John Kamp is an urban and landscape designer, licensed landscape contractor (C-27 #307917), and facilitator who runs the landscape, design, and engagement practice Prairieform. Through Prairieform, he has developed innovative tools to engage people of all ages and backgrounds in urban and landscape design, transportation, walkability, climate change, and water conservation. Frequently collaborating with Rojas, and building off of his 15 years of experience in landscape and urban design/build, he is able to translate findings from Place It!'s community-engagement workshops and trainings 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. He is the co-author of the new book Dream Play Build: Hands-on Community Engagement for Enduring Space and Places, out now on Island Press. Building off of 15 years of experience in engaging diverse audiences through their hands and senses in planning and design, the book offers a look at how people of all ages and backgrounds can incorporate these methods into their own efforts to effect change in their neighborhoods and cities.